Ernst Jüngers Kreigestagebuch

This is a gem of a resource. It is a diary written by a young German soldier who was in World War I, 1914-1918. A diary written at the time is so much more useful than an account given later coloured by all that the person concerned has experienced in the meantime.    

Jüngers simply tells of everyday occurrences. Some excerpts are longer than others. And he doesn’t write every single day.  In the earlier accounts, there is a lot of pea soup “Erbsensuppe”.

434 of the 656 pages are diary entries. The other material is equally important and interesting. There are then about 160 pages of notes and further explanations about some of the entries. A summary of Jünger’s time in the war follows. Some other titles are suggested and finally come the publisher’s acknowledgements.  

The diary entries are beautifully simple and matter-of-fact. “ich ließ mich im Schlafe nicht stőren” ( I didn’t allow my sleep to be disturbed) he writes of his first night in the trenches on 3 January 1915.

On 4 January we read “Dann kracht es wieder an 4, 5 versheidenen Orten. Nachher rauche ich mit Peipeke meine Cigarette und wir glauben hinten auf dem Felde einen Franzosen zu sehen.” (Then it bangs again, four of five times in different places. Afterwards I smoke a cigarette with Priepke and we think we see a Frenchman on the field, at the back.)

I am so glad I can read German. This book will be such a useful tool in helping me to understand what Ernst Lehrs went through in the Great War.    

              

To the trenches

Here we go with the imagination. I’m thinking about the cold and damp. The lice and trench foot. Constant hunger. Constant fear. The trauma of seeing comrades killed. The adrenalin rush as they go over the top.  But also the live and let live policy. The Christmas truce. The thought that just sixty metres away there were men just like themselves, with the same concerns about their daily lives and the lives they’d left behind but fighting for the other side.   

I’ve had to include some of Leo’s First World War scenes. They offer some explanation about why he is the way he is in the early 1920s. About why he is disappointed with the world and why he seeks something more spiritual. Can I make Clara understand? Did she ever know what her son went through - even though she eventually goes through something even worse? I have to constantly paint her as a glass half-full type of person.

I’m including three extracts from Leo’s diary, a letter to Clara and a reaction from her.

And I need to do some more research. Probably in the area of repeated experience. I’d like to enrol for a trench experience but preferably one where you feel the cold, the mud under your feet and the fear.  How can we recreate the fear?

We’ve recently had an MA day at the university where I teach. Several of our creative writing students were clear about the symbiotic relationship between fact and fiction in biographical writing. They were a little less clear on the necessity for writers to submerge themselves in repeatable experiences and to understand their characters settings completely.  Might my reflection on that process here help them?