PARTrSAN REVIEW
What kind of opposition to the Nazi experience do
On the Marble
Cliffs
and the war diaries actually represent? To be sure, there is a
critique of the evils which followed in the wake of the Nazi victory:
personal insecurity, atomization of society, espionage, denunciations,
terror, concentration camps. These evils can
be
found on the allegorical,
medieval canvas if the reader looks for them. But none of the "evils"
are ever depicted in their concrete form. The reader is "told" that such
and such a thing of evil dimensions is happening in the fairyland of
the Marble Cliffs; he never "sees" the evil in the pages of the book.
The allegory assumes, as it were, the form of an old legend illustrating
in some abstract form human weakness, disorder, and evil-thus remov–
ing it safely from the concrete human situation in which the reader
lives and participates, so that the reader loses the sense of individual
responsibility for the evil by which he is surrounded in his daily life.
Moreover, what are the forces of goodness and progress which fall
victim to the machinations and violence of the High-Forester: on the
one hand, anonymous peasants and shepherds, with no one performing
(or capable of performing) a deed "noble" enough to be recorded;
on the other hand, the figure of the great Chief Belovar, a peculiar
mixture of ancient warlord and a modern von Mackensen. Belovar is
the only representative of
active
resistance to the regime of the High–
Forester-a strange representative of the forces which actually went
to the concentration camps for their resistance to the Nazis.
Finally, what of the world of the two brother-heroes? Their palimp–
sests and herbariums are presumably meant to be a symbol for a new
type of "humanism"; but if so, then this is a world to which anything
genuinely human is alien. A life reaching the highest degree of humanity
in collecting obscure flowers and deciphering ancient manuscripts (this
is also the leitmotiv of the war diaries) may be an enviable existence
when the world around us goes up in flames; but if there ever was a
convenient alibi for one's own responsibility for and one's share in the
general collapse, this is it with a vengeance. The masses are doomed;
and nothing and nobody can help them. A new elite-the two Juenger
brothers and the clerical brother Lampros-discover their allegiance to
tradition and humanity, not through any concrete identification with
human suffering or human aspirations for happiness, but in keeping
a record of the doom of another civilization and preserving the eternal
values distilled from a collection of flowers, stones, and ancient parch–
ments. Again this fits into the Juenger "tradition." Never capable of
creating a human character or situation which might serve as a focus
for a work of imaginative prose, Juenger has always treated human
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