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Assignment to Armageddon: Ernst Jünger and Curzio Malaparte on the Russian Front, 1941–43
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2008
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Close contemporaries, heroes of the Great War for which they volunteered in their teens, both becoming officers when they were barely twenty, then gravely wounded and decorated for outstanding valor, Ernst Jünger (1895– ) and Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957) spent the period of “l'entre deux guerres” in roughly the same circumstances. Malaparte began as a combat observer with the Italian legation in Poland where he saw Trotsky's army lay siege to Warsaw in 1920, Jünger as a Reichswehr officer moving between Hanover and Berlin during the deep unrest of the immediate postwar years; both men at this time wrote books based on their war experiences which excited attention, Jünger's memoir, In Stahlgewittern (1920), and Malaparte's polemic account of the retreat from Caporetto, La Rivolta dei santi maledetti (1921); the Italian became an early and militant Fascist, no stranger to the hooliganism of Mussolini's squadristi; the German a national bolshevist, militarist, and a friend of such street fighters as Ernst von Salomon and Otto Strasser. Jünger like Malaparte was, for a time, a journalist, and his editing of the weekly Standarte, with its strong nationalist ideology, found its parallel in Malaparte's editorship of the radical Fascist Conquisto dello stato.
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References
I wish to thank my wife, Catherine Evans, for her invaluable help in the final preparation of this paper.
1. For the biographical sketches which follow, we have used, for Malaparte: “L'Autore e la guerra,” the note affixed to the “Nota bibliografica” in Malaparte, Curzio, L'Europa vivente, ed. Falqui, Enrico (Florence, 1961), pp. 639–41Google Scholar; “Autobiografia di Curzio Malaparte,” pts. 1 and 2, ed. Togliatti, Palmiro, Rinascita, Summer and Fall 1957, PP. 373–78, 457–79Google Scholar; and Susmel, Dullo, “Documenti inediti sul periodo fascista, I: Malaparte sfida Nenni a duello,” Il Giornale d'Italia, 06 2–3, 1970, p. 3Google Scholar. For Jünger, Des Coudres, Hans Peter, Bibliographie der Werke Ernst Jüngers, “Zeittafel” (Stuttgart, 1970), pp. 78–83.Google Scholar
2. Published in 1947.
3. For Heinrich von Stülpnagel, see Weiniger, Heinrich, “Zur Vorgeschichte des 20. Juli 1944: Heinrich von Stülpnagel,” Sammlung 4 (1949): 475–92Google Scholar. Heinrich replaced von Stülpnagel, Otto as Militärbefehlshaber (military governor) of France on 02 17, 1942.Google Scholar
4. For the main outlines of the Russian campaign, we have used: Clark, Alan, Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941–45 (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; Carrell, Paul, Hitler Moves East, 1941–1943 (Boston and Toronto, 1965)Google Scholar; Young, Peter and Natkiel, Richard, Atlas of the Second World War (New York, 1974)Google Scholar; Wuorinen, John H., ed., Finland and World War II, 1939–1944 (New York, 1948)Google Scholar; Lundin, C. Leonard, Finland in the Second World War (Bloomington, Ind., 1957)Google Scholar; and Jacobsen, Hans-Adolf and Dollinger, Hans, Der Zweite Weltkrieg in Bildern und Dokumenten, 2 vols. (Munich, 1963).Google Scholar
5. Carrell, Hitler, p. 21.
6. Clark, Barbarossa, p. 44.
7. Pellegrini, Lino, “Le Guerre di Malaparte,” Storia illustrata 192 (11 1973): 58.Google Scholar
8. Malaparte, Curzio, Il Volga nasce in Europa (hereafter VE), ed. Falqui, Enrico (Florence, 1965)Google Scholar. The first edition appeared in August of 1943 but, according to Malaparte, was sequestered by the German authorities a month later. VE p. 12.
The chronicle runs in time from the 18th of June, 1941 (just prior, that is, to the German invasion) to sometime in September of that same year and bears the title of “Russia Perché.” Each chapter, unnumbered, bearing a title, with places and datelines, is of a length approximately equal to that of the others, thus repeating unchanged the format of the newspaper story. Without any apparent reason, there is a displacement in the exact chronology of the account, the sequences for the middle portion reading Cornolenca, 14 luglio; Soroca sul Dniester, 4 agosto; Davanti a Moghilev sul Dniester, 18 luglio; Soroca sul Dniester, 6 agosto—an aberrant arrangement still preserved in the 1965 edition edited by Malaparte's friend, Enrico Falqui.
9. Carrell, Hitler, pp. 116ff.
10. Malaparte, VE, p. 6.
11. Pellegrini, “Le Guerre,” p. 61.
12. VE, p. 6.
13. Pellegrini, “Le Guerre,” pp. 61–62.
14. Ibid., p. 65.
15. “I remained in Finland for two years, up to the time of Mussolini's arrest. On the 27th of July 1943, I returned to Italy to take on my responsibilities in the struggle against the Germans which I considered inevitable and imminent.” VE, p. 6. See Pellegrini, “Le Guerre,” pp. 63–64. All translations are mine.
16. Jünger, Ernst, “Das erste Pariser Tagebuch (Erstausgabe 1949),” pt. 1 of Strahlungen, in Werke, 2, Tagebücher II (Stuttgart, [1962]), p. 416.Google Scholar
17. Des Coudres, “Zeittafel,” p. 83.
18. Clark, Barbarossa, p. 307.
19. Hoffman, Peter, Hitler's Personal Security (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), p. 149.Google Scholar
20. Ibid., pp. 151–54; Clark, Barbarossa, pp. 306–11.
21. Hoffmann, Hitler's Personal Security, p. 150; Clark, Barbarossa, p. 308.
22. Hoffmann, Hitler's Personal Security, p. 151.
23. Jünger, “Das erste Pariser Tagebuch,” pp. 423–24.
24. Young and Natkiel, Atlas, p. 194.
25. See Kern, Erich, Dance of Death (New York, 1951), p. 123.Google Scholar
26. In Werke, 2: 429–517 (hereafter KA). The Aufzeichnungen first appeared in 1949.
27. E.g., KA, p. 443.
28. Conversation of July 15, 1942. Cited in Clark, Barbarossa, p. 209.
29. Young and Natkiel, Atlas, p. 200.
30. KA, p. 516.
31. “Behind the façade of Gosplan statistics, there extends not Asia but another Europe: the other Europe.” VE, p. 9.
32. VE, pp. 311–19. Cf. Jünger's visit to a Russian cemetery at Woroschilowsk, “the most desolate I have ever seen. The absence of names is conspicuous.” KA, p. 450.
33. “I am filled with disgust at the sight of the uniforms, the epaulettes, the medals, the weapons whose display I have always loved. The old knighthood is dead; wars are now led by technicians. Man has thus arrived at that state depicted in Dostoievski's Raskolnikov. He looks upon his own kind as vermin. It is for this very reason that he must be on his guard not to descend to the insect world. He as well as his victims can be summed up in the profound adage: ‘That is what you are.’ “KA, p. 493.
34. “Specialists in the field of issuing orders and, like the second best on the assembly line, transferable and replaceable.” KA, p. 477. For a photograph of Jünger in the Caucasus with General Rupp, see Jacobsen, and Dollinger, , Der Zweite Weltkrieg, 2: 138.Google Scholar
35. “The varieties of disruption have become more intolerable since the days when Luther hurled his inkwell at a bumble-bee.” KA, p. 488.
36. “I'm mad about you, my brown Madonna. … The soldiers howl with joy. … The brutal voice of the loudspeaker … accompanies the hum of the motors, the clatter of the machine guns, the racket of the cartridge belts.” VE, p. 60.
37. “These hands have not yet forgotten the feel of woodworking, though they have already become accustomed to steel.” KA, p. 460.
38. “The passion for precision work with motors … has replaced the love for horses among the Soviet Mongolian youth.” VE, p. 86.
39. “Has the gruesome thrust of technical abstraction penetrated deep into the innermost part of the individual, deep into the fruity substance?” KA, p. 460. Curiously, a variant of Jünger's metaphor was used by Himmler who, arguing for the extermination of the Ukrainian intelligentsia, explained that “like skimmed fat at the top of a pot of bouillon, there was a thin layer on the surface of the Ukrainian people; do away with it, and the leaderless mass will become an obedient and helpless herd.” Taubert, Eberhard, “Die deutsche Ostpolitik,” cited in Dallin, Alexander, German Rule in Russia 1941–1945 (New York, 1957), p. 127.Google Scholar
40. “The shimmer does not emanate from an active light-source, but shines like the moon from a source once removed. It is precisely for this reason that we are made aware of the sun which produces such happiness.” KA, p. 445.
41. “We feel all that abstraction has done to make this earth barren, and how it would flower forth under the sun of a beneficent and fatherly force.” KA, p. 454.
42. KA, p. 454. Cf. p. 444.
43. “There was something medieval about it, as though having scarely emerged from the earth.” KA, p. 489.
44. “Strange war. The grey steel of the armored columns skims the delicate wave of grain, skims the villages … skims the fragile houses made of straw plastered together by mortar: skims them without touching them. It seems a miracle, and yet it is simply the result of a technology carried to perfection, of a scientific method of warfare.” VE, p. 61.
45. “Then in the valley of the Pschisch River and my resumption of the ‘subtle search.’ … The study of insects has taken up a good deal of time in my life—but it must be seen as a limbering-up exercise, in which one becomes adept at the finest discriminations.… After forty years I read the ‘text’ of the back of a wing like a Chinese who knows one hundred thousand ideograms.” KA, p. 487.
46. “I caught the glimmer of ‘That is what you are.’ For years now … no such influence has touched me.” KA, p. 455.
47. “The boldest, loftiest thoughts coupled with all the awesome terror of brute force. In such places the structure of the world is laid out.” KA, p. 501.
48. “The sun … timidly illumines the armored plating of the tanks. A pale, downy rose arises from the grey slabs of steel. At the head of the column the heavy armed wagons are tinted with pink reflections, and throw off delicate, bright flashes of light.” VE, p. 82.
49. “Under the sibilant arc of the Stukas, the mobile columns of armored cars seem like subtle penciled lines on the immense green slate of the Moldavian plain.” VE, p. 24.
50. “Like the steel disk of a mechanical saw which cuts into and disappears in the trunk of a tree, so the sun slowly penetrated the hard crust of ice and disappeared shrieking. Enormous shavings of the whitest vapor arose on the horizon.” VE, p. 188.
51. “And dust and rain, dust and mud, tomorrow the streets will be clean, the immense fields of sunflowers will screech in the arid and hot wind: then the mud will return, and this is Russia, this is the Russia of the Tsars, the Holy Russia of the Tsars, and this is also the USSR, dust and rain, dust and mud, and this is the Russian war, the eternal Russian war, the war of Russia in 1941. Nothing we can do about it, nothing we can do about it.” VE, p. 178.
52. VE, pp. 320–27.
53. VE, pp. 216–18.
54. VE, p. 240.
55. VE, pp. 263–64. See Billington, James H., The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York, 1966), plates and commentary following p. 291.Google Scholar
56. KA, p. 484. For a photograph of the kind of funicular (Drahtseilbahn) used by Jünger in the Caucasian winter of 1942, see Jacobsen, and Dollinger, , Der Zweite Weltkrieg, 2: 284.Google Scholar
57. “… as lazy currents in water foretell the as yet unseen but impending flood.” KA, p. 504. Branches flecked with snow stand out with magical effect against the dark forest background. “How strange,” Jünger writes, “that a scarcely perceptible change of place … can produce such marvelous sensations. There is in all of this something of the hopes we have for life—and for death.” KA, p. 478.
58. “Imprinted in the ice, stamped in the transparent crystal, there appeared under the soles of my shoes a row of human faces remarkably beautiful. A row of glass-like masks. (Like a byzantine icon.) Which kept looking at me, focusing on me. The lips were fine, consumptive, the hair long, the noses refined, the eyes large and exceedingly clear. What appeared to me in the ribbon of ice was a marvelous image filled with a sweet and moving pathos. It was like the delicate and living shadow of men who had disappeared into the mystery of the lake.” VE, pp. 308–9. Surely there is a reminiscence here of the faces of the treacherous buried in ice in the ninth circle of Dante's, Inferno, 34, 11–12Google Scholar: “… là dove l'ombre tutte eran coperte,/e trasparìen come festuca in vetro (there where the shades were all covered,/and shone like straws in glass).”
59. “The sun already warm shone through those faces, and the reflections of the sun in the water … rebounded on high, enkindled as it were a fire of light around the pallid, transparent foreheads.” VE, p. 309.
60. “From the top of the Raphael I twice saw, in the direction of Saint-Germain, enormous clouds of smoke following upon explosions, while bomber groups flew off at a great height. … The second time, while the sun was setting, I held in my hand a glass of Burgundy with strawberries swimming in it. The city, with its towers and cupolas reddened by the sunset, stretched out in all its impressive beauty like the chalice of a flower flown over to be mortally fructified. Everything was a spectacle, a pure display of power intensified and sublimated by suffering.” In “Das zweite Pariser Tagebuch (Erstausgabe 1949),” Strahlungen, pt. 2, in Werke, 3, Tagebücher III (Stuttgart, [1963]), pp. 280–81Google Scholar. Readers of Proust will recall a passage very much alike in which there occurs an esthetic sublimation of the horrors of war. In Le Temps retrouvé, Robert Saint-Loup and the narrator watch fascinated an aerial combat from a balcony on a Paris evening. The time is World War I: “Je lui parlait de la beauté des avions qui montaient dans la nuit (I spoke of the beauty of the airplanes climbing up into the night),” etc. A la Recherche du temps perdu, 3, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1927; 1954), p. 758.Google Scholar
61. KA, p. 482.
62. Pellegrini, “Le Guerre,” p. 56; VE, pp. 156–67.
63. Published, respectively, in 1967 (an earlier edition covering the years 1953–55 appeared in 1955) and 1957.
64. KA, p. 432.
65. “You are a man of visual powers.” Jünger, Friedrich-Georg, “Auf meine Brüder,” Jahresring 60/61, Beiträge zur deutschen Literatur und Kunst der Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 1960), p. 10.Google Scholar
66. “As to my Journal: the rapid, brief notations are often dry, like tea leaves; the revision is the boiling water which releases their fragrance.” KA, p. 499.