"Cities are like women - they only give themselves to their conquerors", writes Ernst Junger in occupied Paris in 1944. His countrymen and the charmed circle of collaborators were, he writes disgustedly, like gargoyles, feasting in the midst of starvation, as the sign of power when others grow hungry.
Thursday evening saw me disturbing with my coughs and sneezes the other two dozen dedicated souls who turned out for the showing of "Ernst Junger in Paris: An Occpuation Diary".
Junger seems to be seldom read in English, so apart from his obituary in The Economist and Thomas Nevin's biography, I've never seen any mention of him. He seems tobe much more prominent in France though, where the documentary was made by the TF1 TV channel in 1986, adapted from the diary which had been published in French years before. Junger was at the centre of the ceremonies marking the 75th anniversary of the battle at Verdun, which claimed over a million French and German lives, hosted in a showcase of Franco-German reconciliation by Helmut Kohl.and Francios Mitterand, as an exemplar of the veterans of World War One.
In many ways, this was ironic, as he had made his reputation with his memoirs of his time as an infantry officer in the trenches. As one of a new breed of fit, lightly-armed and mobile shock troops who relied on surprise and tactics, he led the way past the mechanistic and static operations of the war. As the bravest of thes stormtroopers, as these troops were named by the German army, his memoirs were an inspiration to the Nazi cult of the frontline comrade, the frontkampfer. Nevertheless. he comes to his life in Paris as a writer, cosmopolitan and an opponent of the regime. One of his first actions, he relates, was to install safes to keep the Wehrmacht's dcuments out of the hands of the Gestapo, a harbinger of the struggle that culminated in the bloodbath after the July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler and the dismantling of the conservative traditions of the officer corps that followed it, including the compulsory use of the Hitler salute.
The film shows the newsreels produced by the Vichy government, with Petain, Laval and others strutting through the haberdashery of their propaganda - bouquets in the shape of the Vichy militia's double-headed fasces - ceremonies for workers going to work in German industry and even a lecture by an intellectual pedantically seeking to give the exact meaning, definitional and spiritual, of collaboration. We also see cheeses, potatoes being offloaded for Paris, and the increasing damage and disruption to the home front caused by war and bombing, epitomised by the spinning of dogs' hair for clothing.
Amongst this, we hear Junger's diary entries in chronogical order. He seeks out the artists and intellectuals like Cocteau. Over wine one evening, after coming to Picasso's apartment, he agrees with the artist that both of them could negotiate an end to the war, were they ever to be given such a commission. In a rough smock, Picasso seemed to him a sorcerer.
Germany, under the control of a genration of men that Junger writes might have been made from iron and leather and hatched from animal sperm in factories, has no interest in such a deal. Instead. travelling through Germany, he sees the results in the destruction of his childhood haunts in Hanover.
Eventually, with the Allied advance, comes the time for leave-taking, with his barber wishing him well "until all this is over".
The diary, as it might for others, have been Junger's death warrant, but shows a rare and intimate humanity in circumstances that we overfed and bored moderns cannot imagine.
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