This is a strange book. Its title alludes to Carl Zuckmayer's The Devil's General but the book's declared aim is to explain to an anglophone public why Jünger was “so different” from Zuckmayer's General Harras—suggesting an analogy in the title, only to justify that selection in the first paragraph of the preface on the basis of that fact that the implied comparison does not obtain, is a peculiar strategy indeed (p. vii). The preface further informs us that the brief study is a spin-off of the author's previous monograph on Nazi Paris in which, it seems, there was no adequate place to treat the fascinating Jünger, whose two volumes of Pariser Tagebücher represent to Mitchell “one of the richest, albeit most confounding records of daily life” in the French capital then (p. vii).

The problem with this elegantly produced, well-written, fully documented (if exhorbitantly priced) study is that, having read it, the reader has won scant insight into what made Jünger tick. Mitchell's explanation that he was an Einzelgänger only goes part of the way because it treats the rich diaries as documentation by a historical player who was both chronicler and participant, and not as literary works requiring analysis. So we know, for example, what Jünger read: on one list alone we find such diverse authors as Erasmus, Thornton Wilder, Herodotus, Spengler, André Gide, and Léon Bloy, but we don't get a clue about what he got out of his reading or what we can understand or explain on that basis. Similarly, we know all about the impressive list of French intellectuals, including Cocteau, Picasso, Céline, Bonnard, Valéry, Paulhan, Braque, Drieu la Rochelle, Sascha Guitry, Arletty, and a host of others but we don't have the slightest idea of what transpired when they met. The implication is: nothing; they simply served to embellish the life of a highly decorated Nazi aesthete bon vivant more or less in the way that the copious amounts of champagne and burgundy, not to mention the numerous women, that he consumed did. Furthermore, Mitchell relates throughout the book that Jünger was in close contact with Carl Schmitt, whom he highly esteemed and who, like another acquaintance, Martin Heidegger, visited him in Paris in his de facto capacity as liaison to French intellectuals (he was officially assigned to military censorship) but, frustratingly, we get not the slightest idea of what was discussed on these occasions. Moreover, the book abounds in references to places and addresses in Paris that have to be obscure to any reader on less than intimate terms with the city (including some frequent visitors to the city, such as this reviewer) for want of maps in the book.

Like his friends Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, Jünger is one of those German intellectuals whose genuine but nevertheless less-than-firm claims to intellectual stature are linked to a decided, but decidedly curious, support for National Socialism (Gottfried Benn would complete the foursome were it not for his more solid credentials as an author and his clear rejection of Nazism). They fascinate many of us precisely because their alleged achievements and their personal peculiarities are inextricably linked such that evaluating them “objectively” (whatever that might mean) requires establishing a conceptual link between the specific cultural enterprises in which they had been involved and their “life and times” [as, for example, Jan-Werner Müller has provided in the case of Carl Schmitt's postwar political theology—see my review of his A Dangerous Mind in Central European History 38 (2005): 500–502]. In Jünger's case it means carefully scrutinizing his rhetoric, i.e., the relationship between style and idea in his writings as J. P. Stern did in his penetrating (if controversial) study Ernst Jünger: A Writer of Our Time some sixty years ago (unmentioned here) that demonstrated how Buffon's principle le style c'est l'homme même holds in Jünger's case. If we are to assess Jünger's Paris journals and what they tell us about him, we need to know how they were written every bit as much as the message they contain. Their elaborate development from notebook entries to rough draft diaries, then into proper journals and finally their publication in Strahlungen (the ideal subject for an electronic edition) require close analysis (which such an edition facilitates) if we are to grasp exactly how he shaped and skewed his picture of Nazi Paris. In a sense The Devil's Captain puts the cart before the horse by failing to pose the question of how Jünger “filtered” his admittedly highly stylized picture of Paris in the journals. This is particularly important with respect to Jünger because his reality, the narcissistic Einzelgänger's true world, seems to have played itself out principally in his imagination (as his fascination with his dreams would appear to indicate), the most fascinating case in point being his relationship to Kniébolo (short for knebelender Diabolus) as Hitler is designated in the journals. How exactly did these printed passages come into existence? What considerations confer their final form on them? These sorts of questions have to be posed to get to the basis of Jünger's self-presentation and ultimately assess the relationship between chronicle and documentation in the journals.

The discussion of Kniébolo, like that of Jünger's ambiguity with respect to the dramatic episode around the ill-fated officers' putsch of July 20, 1944, (high points in Mitchell's narrative) and his equally clear distaste for Nazi antisemitism are clear evidence of the ambiguities surrounding his relationship to Nazism. These points are clearly and graphically illustrated in Mitchell's eloquent narrative, which is certainly a good read and certainly contains much material for further reflection on the part of scholars, despite its peculiarities. Perhaps the simplest (not necessarily the kindest) way to sum up The Devil's Captain is to paraphrase Karl Kraus: it is an effort that deserves a better cause.