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PARTISAN REVIEW
of limbo where the dead who are still remembered by the living sojourn
until they have been completely forgotten and must then be deported
to other regions where they are annihilated.
The City Beyond the River
is not likely to appeal to American readers who would tend to see in it
a mere imitation of
The Castle
and
The Trial.
But Kasack has actually
imitated the life which he has experienced in the Nazi totalitarian
state and its concentration-camps and which Kafka only foresaw. The
useless tasks of the dead, in his novel, are the forced labor which had
to be invented to keep the inmates of concentration-camps busy; the
elaborate political and social organization of Kasack's city represents
the kind of S-S State that Eugen Kogon described factually in his
book on the concentration camps; and the dead who are no longer
remembered by any living friends or relatives are annihilated just as
were the millions of J ews who, under the Nazi regime, did not have
powerful enough "Aryan" friends to guarantee them survival in the
"privileged" concentration-camp of Theresienstadt, to which only those
Jews were sent about whose fate prominent non-Jews might be con–
cerned.
Die Stadt hinter dem Strom
is thus the most terrifying and frank
artistic testimony of the years of Nazi terror that German readers have
yet had a chance to read. It has not been a popular book.
Ernst Juenger's new novel,
Heliopolis,
is also an allegory of the
Nazi state, but unconsciously still permeated with many notions that,
though harmless in themselves, can fit dangerously well within the pat–
terns of a totalitarian ideology, whereas the ideas of Kasack are all
unequivocally humane. The real nature of Juenger's resistance to
Nazism becomes, in
Heliopolis
and in the new volume of war-diaries,
Strahlungen,
at last as clear as anything so strangely ambivalent can be.
Parts of the diaries that Juenger has been keeping for many years had
already been published before 1945.
Garten und Strassen
thus recorded,
among other things, the author's observations during the German in–
vasion of France in 1940, and
Atlantische Fahrt,
published in Switzer–
land after the war, his impressions of a brief trip to Brazil where he
seems to have observed plants and insects with meticulous curiosity but
to have devoted no attention to the human population of the land and
its various social, economic and cultural patterns. Juenger's diaries have
now been, for some years, the object of a cult, similar to that of Gide's
Journal
some years ago in France, among an "elite" of German in–
tellectuals, though Juenger distinguishes himself from Gide by avoiding,
it seems, the devices of reason in favor of those of intuition and the
problems of morals or ethics in favor of those of aesthetics. He thus
devotes more time and care, in general, to preciously worded des-
