BERLIN LETTER
had schooled several generations of fanatical fascist youth! Later that
year his son was killed in action on Italian
Marmorklippen,
and this too
has worked on Juenger's mystical mind.
It
is difficult to state today where
J. stands spiritually or intellectually. He, too, has been busily working;
and has prepared a volume from his diaries, a new study on language,
and is revising his earlier sociology of
Der Arbeiter.
At any rate Juenger
seems to stand today as "a good European." How much is pose? And
how much is grounded on inner conviction and ideas? I have the im–
pression that most of the chauvinism and fanaticism is gone from his
national feeling. But he is still obsessed by the imagery of violence (he
recently read Melville's "Benito Cereno" and thought "the whole of
our history is there!") and the mystique of war has remained, although
with a new twist. The essence of the
Fronterlebnis,
he wrote in his mid–
war pan-European pamphlet, is the secret respect and mutual love which
grows among all soldiers. This new front-ethos should be the guaranty
of the good peace. War was the great common achievement of mankind,
and it can logically only be followed by the common achievement of a
great peace. Theoretically, this was non-Hitlerian; heresy from the doc–
trine
of
German supremacy in a European slave order; shameless ap–
peasement of the enemy. Practically, it was ridiculous-think,
if
you
please, of the fraternization betwen the maquis and the SS, the partisans
and the Gestapo, the GI and the Wehrmacht
Landser!
But for Juenger
it was a private bridge of transition-from hate to love, from adventure
and danger to peace and quiet, from Germany to Europe, from the
Movement to the .Church. The Vatican, indeed, has been supporting
the clandestine circulation of the pamphlet, and the Catholic interna–
tional may yet rescue him from the shadows of his political excommuni–
cation.
The picture I have sketched of the German literary scene is un–
pleasant and unattractive, but the grimmest details have yet to be added.
The era of Goebbels and his
Reichskulturkammer
is gone, the old en–
slavement of art and culture has passed away. But the writer in Germany
is not a free man, nor has cultural life been liberated from the vestigial
forms of totalitarian control which here as elsewhere in Europe are vi–
ciously eating away at the independence of the spirit. That there is not
yet full freedom in Germany is explained away as a tactical temporary
necessity. But nowhere are the
principles
of cultural freedom recognized,
or even given lip-service. Books and writers are forbidden, and no one
bothers to inquire by what
right
(apart from the naked, stupid right of
conquerors) the traditional civil liberties of publishers and authors in
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