456
PARTISAN REVIEW
In a society dominated by the law of armament free investigation be–
comes impossible, because like a blind man it would open all the doors
of a room without distinction, when in fact only the doors of power
should be kept open. From that moment when it is ascertained what
things must and what things must not be known, free inquiry becomes
superfluous.
In place of "individual freedom" we shall have the glory of "ser–
vice," which is but another name for domination, since "domina–
tion and service are one and the same thing." Morality becomes a
luxury that is absorbed by technology.
Everything in this icy landscape must be adapted to the
things
of cold steeL The organic must fuse with the mechanical, the
thing–
ification
of man be pushed to its extreme, and the world of the
workers become functional and naked. Juenger is contemptuous of
the romantic illusions of
blood-and-soil
ideologies, of racist phrases,
and of a revolution that erects Brown Houses with the grotesque
attributes of what was once a classical style. The only exciting beauty
is bare steel, and any decoration, any departure from functionalism,
must be repudiated. What smacks of comfort is a liberal bourgeois
residue. The
worker
type
stands naked and has no traffic with com–
fort. He is "a combination of high organizational capacity and
complete color-blindness toward values, of faith without content and
of discipline without justification."
II
A few years ago we ' might have rejected this prophecy as the
product of a diseased mind, but by this time we have experienced
Juenger's vision as historic fact- in Russia as well as Germany; and
on the identification of these two we may also find his early words
prophetic:
Today the similarity between left and right becomes obvious and even
the dream of freedom withers away in the iron grasp of necessity. This is
a grandiose and horrid drama-these movements of ever more uniform
masses caught in the mesh of the times. Forms of compulsion are at work
here that are stronger than torture : they are so strong that men greet
them with fervor. Behind each exit marked with the sign of happiness lurk
pain and death. It is necessary to enter this arena well-armed.
In the totalitarian world that is still coming to be under our eyes, we
witness this color-blindness toward values and this utter cynicism to–
ward the whole Western tradition, as the armies of depersonalized
robots descend like a plague of mechanical grasshoppers over the
lands inhabited by
individuals.
Juenger wrote these books in Germany during the years be–
tween two world wars. It is no coincidence that they appeared in the
same period as Heidegger's philosophy. In the writings of both men
