LETTER FROM GERMANY
385
criptions of flowers or butterflies or the texture of a snake's skin, once
even describing a Portuguese man-of-war much as OliverWendell Holmes
might have done, and constantly returns to certain romantic-mystical
theories of philology which would attribute universal meanings, in all
languages, to phonetic phenomena, such as the vowel-sounds, as ex–
pressions of human moods or emotions. In these philological con–
siderations, Juenger never seems, however, to be aware of the phonetic
changes that occur, in all languages, through the centuries; wilfully,
he neglects all the science of nineteenth-century phonologists and mor–
phologists, basing his new science of language on the assumption that
semantics and phonology are more or less identical, that the sounds of
words do not change and remain faithful to their meanings. Nor is this
the only obscurantist or anti-scientific feature of Juenger's thought.
His diaries record his dreams and those of his friends, but in a manner
that leads a more sophisticated reader to. believe that the author's super–
ego must work very efficiently as a censor at the task of preventing any of
the id from appearing in the records of these dreams. Juenger thus
dreams constantly of snakes, but it never occurs to him to seek any
Freudian meaning in these apparitions: he ponders only their allegorical
or prophetic meanings.
Juenger's anti-scientific traditionalism is perhaps most evident
in his recurrent critiques of Darwinian evolutionism, to which he prefers
the older nominalistic theories of Lamarck, according to which the
species of the natural sciences exist only as categories under which man
can classify individual specimens which seem to him to share enough
characteristics. This Lamarckianism does not, however, prevent Juenger
from frequently having recourse, when he deals with human beings, to
theories of race which he would reject as an entomologist: in
Heliopoli.i,
for instance, he attributes to his imaginary Parsee "race" a hereditary gift
for languages and for philology.
All these antiquarian eccentricities of Juenger's thought would
scarcely deserve detailed discussion, were it not that they are already
influencing a considerable group of younger German writers. Juenger's
Lamarckianism is moreover shared by the old philosopher Hans Blueher
who, in his recently published
Die Achse der Natur,
a system of general
philosophy as a "doctrine of the pure happenings of nature," regresses
similarly to earlier scientific beliefs and, as Juenger too, seems to honor
Hamann, the eighteenth-century "Magician of the North," more than
Kant.
Strahlungen,
the diaries of Juenger's war-years as an officer sta–
tioned mostly in occupied Paris but also, for a while, in Southern
