PARTISAN REVIEW
opposition to the regime. The French authorities were, to be sure, pre–
pared to forgive and forget, a policy of compromise which has stood
them in good stead in organizing a brilliant cultural program in their
areas of Germany. But there was, first, strong opposition from Communists
in France, for whom Heidegger is another German to be beaten, and
also a fine example of "decadent reactionary mysticism" which should
remain on the index under any circumstances. And there was, too, the
influence of the Catholic Church both in France and Germany; the man
who had denied God had better be left alone and powerless in his Black
Forest ski-hut. Today Heidegger remains
verboten,
and with him his
new manuscripts, including a second volume of his famous
Sein und Zeit,
a work on Nietzsche and nihilism, a study of Greek philosophy, papers
on logos and ontology, and a dozen other things.
The case of Juenger is somewhat different. Although he was never
in the party, his ideological collaboration with the fascist movement was
for a great many years substantial and intimate. He was the [t>hilosopher
of national-chauvinism, the poet of militarism. In the mid-twenties Hitler
often thanked him for the "fanatical clarity" of his pen. Works like
Feuer und Blut
typified his worship of purifying violence and his mysti–
cism of war. Typical sentences:
"Wir konnen gar nicht national, ja
nationalistisch genug sein." "]eder anders Fuhlende muss mit dem
Brandmal des Ketzers behaftet und ausgerottet werden ."
But then a
curious thirg happened during the Third Reich. Ernst Juenger, noble
soldier of the revolution, apparently, to all intents and purposes,
deserted the cause. I doubt whether at that time, and perhaps even
today, a real change of spiritual values took place. I think it was
essentially the psychic recognition that the dangerous life could only be
had now in defiance of the law. Juenger's novel, of 1939,
Auf den
Marmorklippen,
an account of the destruction of civilization by a bar–
baric Oberfi:irster, was a veiled but unmistakeable anti-Nazi creation. His
mid-war pamphlet,
D~r
Friede,
which he wrote secretly in Paris and
which has only had a clandestine circulation, was an attempt to formulate
independent non-Hitlerian war aims. He seemed to find scope for his
"adventurous heart" with the anti-Hitler opposition; it was not unim–
portant that in Paris he learned to admire Andre Malraux above all
other French intellectuals. In the summer of 1944, when the famous
20 July putsch occurred,
J.
broke with General Stuelpnagel in whose
Hotel Majestic headquarters he was a staff-officer : the General, a fel–
low conspirator, could not see his way through to the wholesale assas–
sination of the SS which J uenger had suggested--Juenger whose writings
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