38b
PARTISAN REVIEW
Russia, has already sold over thirty thousand copies in Germany and
thus become the best-seller of post-war German literature. His last
successful book published in Germany had been
On the Marble Cliffs,
which had soon been forbidden by the Nazi censorship. Like Sartre's
Les Mouches
and Moravia's
La Mascherata, On the Marble Cliffs
had
necessarily been ambiguous: it had to be approved by censors in order
to reach the readers who would then recognize it as a critique of the
political order that those censors served.
Strahlungen,
though written as
a diary under the same totalitarian order, is more explicit but still very
cautious and full of elaborate pseudonyms whenever Juenger discusses
political figures such as Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler or their opponents,
such as Canaris or Goerdeler, who participated in the unsuccessful 1944
attempt on Hitler's life.
Heliopolis,
apparently written since 1945, is
quite outspoken and unambiguous in its criticism, but now reveals the
fundamentally ambivalent
natu~e
of Juenger's political and social at–
titudes.
Though he clearly expresses, for instance, his horror of the Nazi
persecutions and exterminations, both in his diaries and in his novel,
Juenger still seems to believe that Jews constitute a distinct and
separate "race." Though he repeatedly protests against totalitarian dic–
tatorship in art and science, he seems to object not so much to the
concept of dictatorship as to the fact that "the wrong people," an
ignominious gang of evil, corrupt and blood-thirsty Nihilists, wielded
this power in Nazi Germany. Juenger is indeed no " democrat," which
does not necessarily make him a fascist or a fiend. He is, however, a
conscious traditionalist and conservative
in
politics and describes him–
self, on several occasions in
Strahlungen,
as a Guelf, a follower of the
old Hannoverian regionalist party which, under Windhorst, once op–
posed Bismarck's imperialist Prussian centralization and proposed, in
its stead, a decentralized federation of all German-speaking states such as
the Holy Roman Empire had once set out to be, till dynastic and reli–
gious strife had obscured this purpose.
Politically, Juenger's two new books expound some of the ideas oi
the conservative anti-nazi elite which, in 1944, came to an agreement
with some leftist elements in order to organize the tragically unsuc–
cessful attempt on Hitler's life. These ideas were, however, so very
confused that the plotters never managed to agree on the kind of poli–
tical order that they would establish in Germany if their attempt proved
successful.
It
is interesting to note that Juenger's diaries record also
various approaches made to him by close friends who were involved in
these plottings, and especially that Juenger rejected their invitations to
