The French Who Fought for Hitler: Memories from the Outcasts, and: The Devil’s Captain: Ernst Jünger in Nazi Paris, 1941–1944 (review)

Both of these studies focus on individuals who made what are now considered to be poor moral choices during World War II. Using Ernst Jünger’s personal writing, Mitchell explores the life and experiences of this well-known German literary figure during the occupation of France, seeking above all to understand why Jünger chose to go along with the Nazi regime despite serious misgivings about Adolf Hitler and his “projects.” Carrard, for his part, investigates memoirs written by Frenchmen who joined the German army, developing a typology of what he calls “outcast memory”: the memory of those who fought not just on the losing side, but also on what was, for most of their countrymen, also the wrong side.

The Devil’s Captain follows Jünger after 1940, as he shuttles between his patient wife Greta and a series of amorous liaisons in the French capital. In the spring of 1941, Jünger joined the commando staff of the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich as a censor and “a kind of cultural attaché” (19). Jünger’s published diary of this time, upon which The Devil’s Captain is mainly based, details the life of an admired literary figure and member of the social elite more than a military bureaucrat per se. It shows Jünger eating at the finest restaurants, visiting historical and cultural sites, and hobnobbing with the occupation’s highest authorities and their French sympathizers. A brief interlude on the Russian front in 1942–1943, which Jünger unsurprisingly experienced as “the diametric opposite of his gilded life in Paris” (39), was followed by a return to Paris, which seemed little changed. Throughout, Mitchell summarizes Jünger’s frequent dreams and philosophical musings, which revolved around themes such as the automation of modern European society, religion, and “the growing domination of centralized power” (33).

As a literary biography centered on a key segment of Jünger’s life, The Devil’s Captain succeeds. Scholars seeking additional insight into the occupation of France, however, may not be completely satisfied. There is considerable detail about what Jünger did, where he went and when, and his various relationships with women—but without a solid case being made for their greater historical importance. A detailed summary of Jünger’s diaries may be justified on the grounds that the diaries themselves are fascinating, and it is true that Jünger’s writing reveals the occupied French capital as if viewed through what Mitchell aptly calls “the lens of a microscope rather than a telescope” (6). The trouble with a microscope, however, is that the observer views only one small area. He or she remains unaware of that area’s context, and the ways the immediate subject matter interacts with the larger whole. While tracing the occupation’s impact on Jünger, the reader of The Devil’s Captain is left wondering what impact (if any) Jünger had on the occupation.

Mitchell might have linked Jünger’s personal experiences more directly with his official role in the occupation. It is clear that much of Jünger’s job consisted of cultivating important French cultural figures, but his employment surely had other aspects. In contrast to Jünger the writer, traveler, and “man-about-town,” Jünger the bureaucrat gets little attention. In particular, Mitchell might have offered more extensive analysis of Jünger’s controversial Denkschrift about the so-called hostage crisis that led to Otto von Stülpnagel’s resignation. This document, rediscovered in 2003, rekindled debates about Jünger’s role as observer, and about Otto von Stülpnagel’s position on the execution of French prisoners in reprisal for...