ERNST JUENGER
457
are crystallized the experiences and the resentment of a lost genera–
tion that had witnessed the breakdown of values in war, revolution,
inflation, and chronic unemployment-extreme situations in which
established norms of thinking and behaving seemed futile and even
harmful. During the War many young men had found, if not ful–
fillment, at least a mission that made sense; after their return they
found a peace that seemed only a deceit and a fraud. They grew
skeptical of the "eternal truths" that were still offered them. In the
face of the desperate mediocrity of an order not worth living for, a
nihilistic rejection seems the only possible answer: perhaps through its
total negation a new meaning might be wrung from this world in
shambles.
«We shall never understand why we are born into this life.
All our so-called goals can only be pretexts. It matters only that we
exist."
These words of Juenger might have been written by Heidegger.
But
if
men
had failed each other, perhaps
material
would not
fail, anonymous mass formations, precise mathematical laws, the
secure hardness of steel, might afford protection to the individuals who
had been stripped of their value. In this desolate landscape no lost
illusions could be recaptured, but there would remain the hope of
rejuvenation through the discovery of a new
authenticity
beneath the
shattered surface of traditional values. The young men for whom
Juenger was an intellectual father became revolutionaries without a
program-"We must learn to march without banners"-blind men
marching away from themselves toward anonymity and hardness. Out
of this atmosphere of futility Juenger envisioned a world of
absurd
necessities, where man is lost in the fog of endless columns of gray
helmets and black boots, rubbish heaps of dead bodies and rows of gray
graves. The fog thickens, in the grayness nothing remains discernible,
man is lost in nothingness. Amid the monotonous drumming of foot–
steps, rolling of tanks, and rumbling of wheels, where only the pound–
ing of his heart reminds him of his own existence, man has but two
alternatives: With Juenger, he can choose to lose himself in the fog
and make his heartbeats one with the rumbling machines, and so
face death fearlessly since his death has ceased to be his own; or,
with Heidegger, man may listen to these heartbeats that reveal to
him his own existence, which this foggy nothingness cannot deny,
and which is redeemed from the all-embracing grayness by the somber
blackness of a death that is his own.
Juenger has had the courage to explore his world to its limits,
and it is senseless of us to withdraw in horror from his picture.
If
socialists found his view of war and the advent of the new de-in-
