Stories and Hourglasses in Ernst Jünger’s Castle

It was clear that every object in those so thoughtfully arranged rooms clearly owed its presence to the place it had occupied over the course of a long existence. When I told him that it seemed to me his house was modelled on Goethe’s home, his face briefly shed its mask of polite impassivity to reveal a fleeting hint of satisfaction.

Even the garden, which he tended himself, reflected his personality: amongst the plants lay a scattering of tiny fossils, there to remind us that we are but a tiny part of an immemorial past. The only sinister shadow in that stone self-portrait was a letter from the man he had codenamed ‘Kniebolo’: Adolf Hitler. The dictator respected Junger’s character, even though he had always rejected his offers, and had saved him from persecution by his henchmen. In the home of that war hero, his helmet – pierced by a bullet during the Battle of the Somme – stood out in a display cabinet. His argument was interesting, but difficult to agree with: ‘The war between the Germans and the British is like the Peloponnesian War, in which Sparta and Athens destroyed one another. These nations have destroyed Europe together.’ Speaking of the atrocities of Nazism – which he regarded as a vulgar version of conservatism – he had sighed: ‘I thought the Prussian officer’s code of honour would be enough to wage war!’

Despite his heavy felt slippers, Junger looked elegant in his light blue tweed jacket. Noticing the grace with which he held his cigarette between his fingers, I steered the conversation towards one of his fine novels, *A Dangerous Encounter*, whose protagonist is clearly inspired by a great Parisian dandy, Boni de Castellane. At that point, the storyteller had prevailed over the imperturbable witness to the tragedy of history. ‘I stayed at the château where he lived with Florence Gould. We’d become friends. One evening we were returning from Paris; almost everyone else had already left. We were alone and had had a few drinks. Florence insisted: ‘Ernst, you absolutely must stay!’ I was to stay with the richest woman in Paris; it would have been great fun, but that’s not my line of work.” I knew that Junger had frequented the brilliant, uninhibited salon of the charming millionaire and that he had met various women during his stay in Paris whilst the city was under occupation. But I also knew that he could not have known Boni de Castellane – who died in 1932 – without ever having lived with the wealthy American woman. Perhaps the starting point was the fact that the surname of the dandy’s millionaire ex-wife was the same as Florence’s. Perhaps Junger was already thinking of another novel that he would never go on to write.

Recalling Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, an ally of the Germans who took his own life at the end of the war after refusing to betray his past, he had remarked: ‘I’m sorry he killed himself. It wasn’t necessary. He had so many friends on the other side too… It’s always the best who pay the price.”

It was only much later that I realised that that invisible wind which wafted through Junger’s well-heated rooms was a wind that seemed to have vanished outside: History. ‘I have tried to draw up a map to help me find my way in a world that is becoming increasingly indecipherable, which is hardly surprising at the turn of a millennium, when the values of the past are fading whilst new ones have not yet emerged.’