BOOKS
343
FROM UNDER THE LID
Auf den Marmorklippen ("On the Marble Cliffs").
By
Ernst Junger. Han–
seatische Verlagsanstalt (Hamburg). 1940
One of the leading spokesmen of the disillusioned middle-class youth
who played so great a part in Hitler's victory over the Weimar Republic
was Ernst Junger. As a young officer, he had found comradeship and a
social ideal in the trenches of the last war. Returning to the confusion and
sordidness of postwar Germany, Junger, like many another ex-soldier,
idealized war, martial heroism, soldierly discipline. His books bore such
titles as
Figluing as an Inner Experience
and
Storm of Steel: an Officer's
Diary.
In his book,
The Worker
(
1932), he wrote: "We are proud to
confess we were 'bad citizens'." And: "The great achievements of 'Prog·
ress' lack contact with primal forces.... In war, however, human beings
become 'noble beasts of prey'."
Soldatentum,
the official journal of mili–
tary psychology, called Junger in 1938 "the perfect type of modern war·
rior," whose style is "the quintessence of contemporary martial spirit."
Junger's stirring phrases, his romantic transfiguration of war, these had
taken root in the spirits of many .of the young Nazi soldiers who fought
with such fanatic bravery in France in 1940.
Years ago, Junger expressed the hope that among other soldierly
virtues of the Third Reich there would arise "the employment of a precise,
unambiguous language, a mathematically factual !tyle." His hopes have
not materialized, to say the least.
If
this could not be achieved, however,
then he predicted that censorship would be useless, that
it
would, in fact,
merely encourage "the subtilization and malice of the individualistic
style." As though to demonstrate personally this last observation, Junger
published last year a strange romantic novel called "On the Marble Cliffs,"
which is a bitter satire on Nazism in thinly veiled allegorical terms-and
which has had a remarkable popular success in Germany.
In
Auf den Marmorklippen,
the reader is transplanted into a world
of fable, in which names and geographical features of every region and
every age, legend and history, the real and the unreal are all mixed to–
gether. Primitive and civilized peoples live side by side, army generals
and demons sit at the same table. As in the works of the German
Roman~
ties, an agitated dream atmosphere dominates the book. The strange
names remind you of the Klingsohr fable in Novalis'
Heinrich von Ofter–
dingen.
High above the marble cliffs live two friends, former army officers,
who came here after a lost war. Below lies the Burgundian countryside–
cities and well-tilled fields. In back of the cliffs there live a wild shepherd
people, rude in their ways, but hospitable to strangers. Debtors threat·
ened with prison, young lovers, half-pay officers take refuge with them,
and also literati who in their disillusionment with civilization imitate the
ahepherds' songs. (The reader may remember that people such as these
made up Hitler's party.)
