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PARTISAN REVIEW
dividualized type obscene (and it is obscene), we have since e..x–
perienced this obscenity in reality and not only in books.
On the other hand, we cannot go to the lengths of Juenger's
apologists, who claim that he simply drew a picture of the future
without taking sides. For the fact is that Juenger has made clear his
own participation: "We witness the peoples at work and we greet
this work wherever it is being accomplished.... To have a part there–
in, that is the task we are waiting for."
And again:
Practically the individual has to take part in rearmament-whether he
sees in it preparation for devastation and fall, or perceives, on those hill–
tops where the crosses are storm-beaten and the palaces in ruins, that
unrest which usually precedes the erection of new standards.
Nor is it any defense to point out that he never joined the Nazi
party despite repeated overtures made to
him.
The Nazis with their
blood-and-soil slogans, their primitive racist theory, seemed to him
to belong still to the "liberal" era of ideologies. His allegiance was
to the men who moved behind the
fa~de
of the movement and
were preparing, before Hitler crushed them on July 30, 1934, the
"second revolution" against the "conservative" Nazis.
1
Juenger is too complex and many-sided a personality to be
pigeon-holed among the definite Nazi types. The prophet of anti–
individualism, he nevertheless maintained jealously his aloofness and
preoccupation with the inner self. This double-sidedness often makes
it very difficult to discover which, among the successive layers of
meaning, is his real one.
The Adventurous Heart,
for example, which
contains some of the most violent anti-individualistic passages, also
contains sentences like this:
It is impossible today to concern oneself with Germany in society; one
has to do it in loneliness like a man who cuts paths through the jungle with
his bushknife and keeps going only in the hope that somewhere else in
.
the jungle another man is also at work.
The same Juenger who scoffs at romanticism and exalts the beauties
of
st~el
and modern technology can also write pieces on nature that
are among the finest in modern German literature. His essay on
language,
Praise of Vowels,
ranks high among all the essays on the
German language. There is the Juenger who can record visions and
dreams in a style reminiscent of Kafka:
((Three conditions can give
the key to all experience: intoxication, sleep, and death";
the Juenger
whose journeys through the Balearic Islands, France, and Dalmatia
contain very beautiful descriptive passages; Juenger who studies with
I.
Cf. Rauschning,
The Revolution of Nihilism;
also, Erich Kahler,
Man
the Measure,
particularly the pages that deal with Juenger and German nihilism.
