BOOKS
SARTRE AND JUNGER
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE.
By
Iris Murdoch. Yole. $2.50.
ERNST JUNGER.
By
J. P. Stern. Yole. $2.50.
One of the most impressive of Sartre's early articles, graph–
ically entitled
"La Republique du silence,"
is an account of the feel
of life in occupied Paris. And as the volatile little philosopher strolled
through the streets of his
quartier,
feeling his existence stolen from
him at every moment by the gaze of the ever-present conqueror, it is
not impossible that one of the glances crossing his own like a sword
was that of Hauptmann Ernst Junger. Perhaps Junger was going to
one of his favorite rare-book dealers on the rue de Seine, or to keep
an appointment for tea in the rue de Bellechasse-both in Sartre's own
St. Germain des Pres district and both mentioned frequently by Junger
in
Strahlungen,
his wartime diary of Paris under the German occupa–
tion. Perhaps he had an appointment at Gallimard, Sartre's own pub–
lisher, a few blocks away from St. Germain, to see Jean Paulhan or
Henri Thomas (the latter was translating Junger's
Die Marmorklippen
into French, and the translation appeared in Paris this year). I should
be very much surprised if such an encounter had not taken place; but
of course the French
resistant
Sartre, even if he had known the elegant
German officer, would not have stopped to chat.
And yet, what might they not have found in common to talk
about!
L'
Etre et Ie N eant
appeared in 1943: Sartre was probably mull–
ing over some of those phenomenological analyses that have led one his–
torian of contemporary thought
(1.
M. Bochenski) to call him Heideg–
ger's most penetrating reader. And there before him, if he had only
known, was a member of Heidegger's intimate circle, not a philosopher
to be sure but one of the master's closest friends and disciples who, at
Heidegger's sixtieth birthday, was to write a long essay
(Uber die Linie)
for the volume compiled in his honor. And there too was a writer whose
life had not been spent (as Baudelaire's had been, according to Sartre)
in petulant perversions of bourgeois values. Ernst Junger's heroic ex–
ploits during the First World War had become legendary in the German
Army; and his war journals, anticipating Heidegger's philosophy, had
glorified the collapse of all those deceptive social supports that conceal
