Ernst Jünger was one of twentieth-century Germany’s most important—and most controversial—writers. Decorated for bravery in World War I and the author of the acclaimed western front memoir Storm of Steel, he frankly depicted war’s horrors even as he extolled its glories. As a Wehrmacht captain during World War II, Jünger faithfully kept a journal in occupied Paris and continued to write on the eastern front and in Germany until its defeat—writings that are of major historical and literary significance.

Jünger’s Paris journals document his Francophile excitement, romantic affairs, and fascination with botany and entomology, alongside mystical and religious ruminations and trenchant observations on the occupation and the politics of collaboration. While working as a mail censor, he led the privileged life of an officer, encountering artists such as Céline, Cocteau, Braque, and Picasso. His notes from the Caucasus depict the chaos after Stalingrad and atrocities on the eastern front. Upon returning to Paris, Jünger observed the French resistance and was close to the German military conspirators who plotted to assassinate Hitler in 1944. After fleeing France, he reunited with his family as Germany’s capitulation approached. Both participant and commentator, close to the horrors of history but often distancing himself from them, Jünger turned his life and experiences into a work of art. These wartime journals appear here in English for the first time, giving fresh insights into the quandaries of the twentieth century from the keen pen of a paradoxical observer.

"These diaries are not only a remarkable document of the time, but bring us close to a strange but highly original person, always capable of a fresh response to the natural world, the atmosphere of Paris, and the hideous events that force themselves on his knowledge. Many of Jünger’s texts have an inhuman chill; these diaries reveal his humanity." - Times Literary Supplement

"For English-speaking readers who do not know his work, A German Officer in Occupied Paris shows the many sides of this complex, elusive writer." - Financial Times

"Through these journals, we see Jünger consorting with resistors and collaborators, intellectuals and artists, drinking champagne, dining in sumptuous restaurants, and accompanying other officers to nightclubs, where naked women perform. Wandering around the city, he combs through antiquarian bookshops, stops in at galleries, discusses literature with friends, and acutely observes plants and flowers change with the seasons. He recounts in detail his dreams, nightmares, and musings on war. . . . A unique historical testimony." - Kirkus Reviews

"Politically ambiguous and polymathic, Jünger led a remarkable and long life (he died at the age of 102 in 1998) as a soldier, writer and philosopher. "I suffer from a hyperacute sense of observation," he said, not as a boast, but by way of admitting to a weakness. The foibles of the Nazis, the deathwatch beetles he collected, the facial tics of liars, the flick of a Parisian woman's hair as she bought a hat, the physical contortions of an executed deserter: all these came under the magnifying glass in his war journals, kept from 1941-45. Their publication in English, fluently translated, is a remarkable moment, presenting a model of how to navigate an age of extremism." - The Times of London

"Expertly translated into English by Thomas and Abby Hansen . . . with an excellent biographical-critical foreword by Elliot Y. Neaman." - The Washington Post

"[Jünger's] writings and insights have long earned him sage status in Germany. This, the first publication in English of his diaries from 1941–45, heightens his complexity but also makes him a more rounded figure." - The Spectator

"A German Officer in Occupied Paris is a remarkable slice of World War II, and makes for fascinating reading." - The Complete Review

"Jünger is an eloquent and informative witness to artistic life in occupied France, deportations, the burgeoning French Resistance and the conspirators against Hitler as well as the utter chaos after Stalingrad. This edition also includes extensive notes and a full glossary of all the people mentioned in the text." - Times Higher Education

"Jünger’s war diaries, translated here with damning clarity by Thomas and Abby Hansen, are a fascinating, refined and disturbing record of the moral disasters of Nazism and collaboration." - Wall Street Journal

"With the publication of these extraordinary, sometimes hallucinatory diaries. English speakers have the chance to read one of the great witnesses to 20th-century Europe’s catastrophe." - New Statesman

"A highly decorated German veteran of the First World War, Jünger (1895-1998) spent much of the Second as an officer stationed in Paris, where his journal is an almost daily record of the views and impressions of a well-read literary figure, entomologist, and cultural critic, now available for the first time in English. . . . Elliot Neaman is to be thanked for a comprehensive Foreword, as are Thomas Hansen and Abby Hansen for their translation of a most enigmatic set of Journals, and Columbia University Press for publishing them. They have made accessible the work of a cultured and literary person in service to a brutal regime." - H-Diplo

"In Paris, Jünger tried to confront absolute horror with his chevalieresque idea of style, and the experiment is absorbing to observe, in its short-circuits and moments of illumination and ultimate burnout." - New York Review of Books

"Named a 2019 book of the year." - Times Literary Supplement

"However uneven or bizarre some of the entries, the overall structure of the journals — free-flowing, chaotic, and kaleidoscopic — works. Together they act as a mirror reflecting a world where the center had not held." - The New Criterion