BERLIN LETTER
pressing. The single constructive work done by younger men is the recent
Diktat der Menschenverachtung,
an historical documentation of SS
murder-medicine by several Heidelberg doctors, and a humane and
bitter book.
Of the writers with reputation who remained in Germany in the
so-called "inner emigration" and did no.t compromise themselves too
seriously with the Third Reich-Thomas Mann suggested a dozen names
for readmission to the P.E.N.-very few appear to be active in cultural
life. Erich Kaestner has busied himself with literary journalism in
Munich. Ernst Wiechert, who spent some time in Buchenwald, has
written two novels, well-intentioned but dull things and interesting only
because of their sentimental mysticism. Ernst Glaeser has reissued his
thin anti-Nazi novel o£1936,
Der L etzte ,(ivilist
(written in Switzerland),
but has made no attempt to square his career with the vicious Wehr–
macht newspaper which he edited during the war years. Erik Reger is
the leading editor of the Berlin
Tagesspiegel,
and is possibly the only
publicist in Germany who is capable of style and insight; his newspaper
is really one of the finest in Europe (add the
Times
and
Guardian
in
England,
Combat
in Paris,
Neue Zurcher ,(eitung
in Switzerland) and
one of the most courageous (he and his paper would be liquidated the
very first night the Russians retook control of Berlin). Karl Jaspers in
Heidelberg has written several little tracts for the times, good liberal
propaganda in behalf of democracy and against Nazism; but there will
only be something substantial to discuss when he completes his ambitious
three-volume philosophical work,
Von der Wahrheit.
For the time being
he has come into a certain notoriety on the other side of the Rhine as
one of the existentialist fathers; disciples of Sartre have translated his
books into French and have even published a full-length biography.
The two most celebrated names on the German scene remain
Martin Heidegger and Ernst Juenger. Both live in seclusion, Heidegger
in Freiburg, Juenger near Hanover, and both are on the Allied blacklist.
Both have their desks high with manuscripts, none of which will find its
way to publication until the total ban on their works is removed. And
both men have been elsewhere widely reprinted and honored, especially
in France and Switzerland, during this period of their German disgrace.
Heidegger was a Nazi party member and in 1933 assisted in the cultural
purge, even to the elimination of his old philosophical colleague Husser!,
who was a Jew. By 1935, a tired, disillusioned Heidegger had withdrawn
from politics. He published almost nothing aside from slight literary
essays. During the war, according to his students, he definitely stood in
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