388
PARTISAN REVIEW
the sixteenth century in his
City
of the Sun.
Though the author clearly
hated the Nazi Empire, he looks back towards this allegory of it, as he
writes his novel, with much of the nostalgia with which Lot's wife
once tl ;ned back to gaze upon the cities of the plain; and this backward
glance cast on his corrupted Utopia, instead of turning him to a pillar
of salt, often gives his style an unpleasantly decadent and aesthete
sweetness. All that Juenger has known and loved, it seems, was inextric–
ably tangled with what he hated. Now, he sees nothing ahead of him, no
future to look forward to. His romantic antiquarianism resurrects, to–
gether with all that seemed good to him in the past, much that he
should now know to have been bad or to have contained the seeds of
evil.
There are no new ideas in Juenger's writings, though they contain
many valuable insights, especially in some parts of his diaries, that are
new to German literature.
Strahlungen
thus remains, for all its limita–
tions that are somehow those of contemporary German thought and
literature too, one of the most important literary works published in
post-war Germany,
if
only because it expresses a representative German
intellectual's or artist's objections, as opposed to those of a publicist or a
politician, to the crimes of the Nazi regime, and also to the punish–
ments, the bombings and other horrors, that these crimes earned.
If
Juenger's diaries fail to achieve, outside of Germany, the importance
that Gide's have achieved throughout the world, this may be because
Juenger has failed to transcend the mere problems of being German, or
because these problems involve the individual artist and thinker more
completely than those of being French.
Young German artists and intellectuals are indeed offered at the
present time no very convincing alternatives. The old Expressionist
poet Gottfried Benn has recently published three small books of prose
and verse, his first in many years, where he rej ects the past as well as the
future and the present. His poems, dialogues, and stories ridicule all
science and knowledge much as does the prose of Louis-Ferdinand
Celine. Benn's style is a lyrical jumble of conflicting facts and theories,
and his use of terminologies reminds one of the conversations of Bouvard
and P6cuchet, except that Benn does not reject as does Flaubert but seeks
to transcend his confusion by accepting
it
as the very nature of history
amI of the universe. To this mystical or obscurantist confusion proposed
by
Germany's most persuasive or distinguished writers, the reorientation
programs of the Western Allies have, so far, opposed but confusions of
their own.
