LETTER FROM GERMANY
387
participate actively and was aware both of their ideological confusion
and of their almost inevitable failure. Today, many of Juenger's critics
accuse
him
of being a fascist because his political dialectic does not seem
to admit the existence of a "people" but opposes a "chivalrous" ',lite of
cultured officers, statesmen, administrators, artists and scientists to a
"mob" that must be ruled without being flattered. But these critics fail
to consider whether the German "people" has yet been able to convince
its many victims and enemies that it is no longer the "mob" that was
so long content to let itself be flattered by Nazi demagogues.
Like many other sincere and decent conservatives who wish no
man any harm, Juenger unfortunately draws much of his following
from among those extremists who might easily pervert all his humane
and humanistic ideas in order to establish again the kind of dictator–
ship that he hated and reviled. It is indeed almost impossible, once a
"movement" of this sort gets under way, to keep the sheep apart from
the goats, the relatively good-natured Goerings from the sadistic
Himmlers. With Goering, Juenger actually has more in common than
he suspec ts. The son of a provincial apothecary and the grandson of a
,mall-town school-teacher, Juenger was an officer in the First World
War and won, for his valor, the highest decorations. Ever since, he has
assimilated himself, as Goering did too, to a conception, that of an out–
sider or interloper, of the aristocratic and hereditary officer caste. In
private life, Juenger's manner, until he is at ease and can be more
natural, is sometimes oddly stiff, that of a ham actor playing the part
of an aristocrat. In his prose style, Juenger has a fondness for slightly
awkward archaisms of the kind that amateur antiquarians often affect.
As a thinker or critic, he perpetuates a long tradition of nineteenth–
century aestheticism, mostly French, and of dandyism. The writings of
Leon Bloy thus seem to have been one of the more important discoveries
of his war-years in Paris, though he recognizes, in Bloy's homicidal
hatreds, an affinity with the Nihilism of Hitler. Juenger seems indeed
to delight in all the hobbies of a dandified man-of-Ietters of the middle
of the nineteenth century: he collects beetles and botanical specimens,
rock crystals and hour-glasses, rare books on magic or on the tribula–
tions of ship-wrecked mariners in distant and almost unknown oceans.
. . . Surely, one feels, this writer must also keep a human skull on the
desk of the "den" where he does all his reading and writing, and per–
haps a chambered nautilus too....
The sub-title of
Hdiopolis
is:
A Glance Cast Back on a City.
The
book is an allegorical novel about the collapse of a mighty totalitarian
empire, presumably the one that Campanella described prophetically in
