ERNST JUENGER
459
fascination the life of plants and beetles, who collects and contem–
plates stones and crystals; Juenger the aesthete, the amateur in
German mysticism, connoisseur of French literature; etc. etc.
It is no wonder this man remained an outsider in the ranks of
the extreme Right, which could count him among its own only with
a feeling of uneasiness.
Yet when we have said
all
this, we have scarcely absolved Juenger
of his share of responsibility: he was revered by the younger genera–
tion of Nazis, and his influence on the future leaders of the SS was
certainly more powerful than that of the cloudy Rosenberg and the
hysterical Goebbels.
If
he himself was not among the practitioners of
violence, he nevertheless gave voice to the ideas under which this
violence was prepared.
III
In 1934, one year after Hitler's rise to power, the poet George
Friedrich Juenger, brother of Ernst and sympathetic to his thinking,
published a poem,
The Poppy,
which was immediately understood as
an attack on the regime. It circulated in Germany in thousands of
handwritten copies. Ernst Juenger himself said little during these
years. In
Leaves and Stones
(
1934 )-which otherwise develops the
extreme consequences of the philosophy of the earlier books- hostile
remarks about the regime seem to be found here and there: "The
lesser race can be recognized by its attempt to depreciate others in
comparison with itself.... It is the insignificant figures that come
to the top with the finest movements of the world spirit." Other–
wise,
the books published in this
period-African Plays,
and a new,
entirely rewritten edition of the
Adventurous Heart-have
little truck
with political events, expressing mostly the private Juenger: early ex–
periences in Africa, dreams, impressions. Repdled, apparently, by
the Nazi movement, Juenger was still too close to attack it. He
seems to have taken the Nazi revolution as another
destiny,
like war.
Though he felt scorn for the mediocrities who had installed them–
selves upon the ruins of the Weimar Republic, he was still linked with
them too closely to oppose them openly.
So
it was something of a
sensation in Germany when, a few days after the outbreak of the
war, Juenger's new book-a romantic novel,
On the Marble Cliffs
2
-appeared, signifying an unmistakable break not only with the re–
gime but, even more, with all that Juenger had stood for in the past.
High on the marble cliffs, a mythical landscape on the edge of
2. This novel will shortly appear in English under the New Directions imprint.
