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They asked me if I did not find Americans changed. I said no what
could they change to, just tQ become more American.... But all the same
yes that is what they have changed to, they have become more American
all American, and the G.l. Joes show it and know it, God bless them.
MARJ ORIE FARBER
NIGHTMARE AND FLIGHT
THE DEVIL's SHARE.
By
Denis de Rougemont. Translated from the
French
by
Haakon Chevalier. Pantheon Books.
$2.50.
A
MONG RECENT
publications, I know of very few that come so close
to the experiences of modern man. Whoever wants to catch a
glimpse of the post-war, post-fascism state of mind of Europe's intel–
lectuals should not miss reading
The Devil's
Share-carefully, patiently
and (meaning no offense) with charity. The shortcomings of author
and book are obvious, glaring to an irritating degree. They confuse the
reader as they have confused the author. But the point is that thi s con–
fusion is the direct result of experiences to which the author bears witness
and from which he aoes not try to escape. Such experience as well as
confusion will be common to all who survive and refuse to return to
the deceptive security of those "keys to history" that pretended to
explain everything, all trends and tendencies, and that actually could
not reveal any single real event. Rougemont is speaking of the "night–
mare of reality" before which our intellectual weapons have failed so
miserably; and if he is confused, it is because in a desperate iJ.Uempt not
to be confronted with this nightmare in spiritual nakedness, he picks up
from the great and beautiful arsenal of time-honored figures and images
anything that seems to correspond or to interpret the new shocks that
rock the old foundations .
The reality is that "the Nazis are men like ourselves"; the nightmare.
is that they have shown, have proven beyond doubt what man is capable
of. In other words, the problem of evil will be the fundamental question
of post-war intellectual life in Europe-as death became the fundamental
problem after the last war. Rougemont knows that ascribing all evils
and evil as such to any social order or to society as such is "a flight from
reality." But instead of facing the music of man's genuine capacity for
evil and analysing the nature of man, he in turn ventures into a flight
from reality and writes on the nature of the Devil, thereby, despite all
dialectics, evading the responsibility of man for his deeds.
The flight from reality, incidentally, is not a flight to theology, as
the title and repeated quotations from the Bible suggest. It is a flight
into literature, and occasionally very bad literature. There are not only
little parables in which the author imitates Nietzsche at his worst–
like "Woman beats man"-or essays on modern human behavior which
