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dilemma in her discussion of his concept of freedom. "Sartre connects
in an equation freedom as a general attribute of consciousness, freedom
as the openness of our response to a work of art, and freedom in the
sense it has acquired in the politics of contemporary social democracy.
He is able to make this explosive juxtaposition . . . by means of a
stupefying ambiguity in the use of the word 'freedom'." Yet, despite
Sartre's weaknesses and contradictions, Miss Murdoch is certainly right
in viewing his harried intellectual career as the most notable modern
expression "of a last-ditch attachment to the value of the individual,
expressed in philosophical terms." And the sometimes infuriating twists
and turns of Sartre's thinking are symptomatic of an unremitting en–
deavor, by one of the most gifted of modern minds, to explore and
clarify our basic dilemma. The dilemma of preserving the individual in
a world of mass ideologies without, at the same time, turning him into
an impotent spectator of social action.
As
for Ernst Junger, he too could not long remain in the position
that was dubbed "heroic nihilism" by German critics-especially when
Hitler came along to turn
Die Arbeiter
into bloody reality. Junger's
attitude to the regime was not one of overt opposition, but, as Mr.
Stern notes, he was not in the list of writers pledging their loyalty to
Hitler in 1936. And in 1939 he published
Die Marmorklippen,
a thinly–
disguised allegory attacking the sadistic cruelty of the Nazis and their
corruption of all standards of justice and honor. Posed against them,
however, was the idyllic dream of a pastoral society where a few intel–
lectual-aristocrats could pursue their botanical studies unhindered ; or
of a feudal blood brotherhood where all the chivalric conventions would
be scrupulously observed.
In Junger's latest and most ambitious novel, another allegory en–
titled
H eliopolis,
his social ideal still remains indomitably reactionary
and Prussian; but love and sacrifice are introduced, somewhat un–
convincingly, as necessary forces of social cohesion. Junger attempts to
surround his notion of sacrifice with a quasi-Christian halo, but he
cannot prevent himself from depicting it as stemming far more from
aristocratic pique at the refusal of the mob to recognize their rightful
lords and masters. At the conclusion of
H eliopolis,
where the army–
officer hero is caught between the plebeian rabble-rousers (the Nazis)
and the true and valiant knights who oppose them without mass sup–
port
(Junger's anti-Hitler friends on the German General Staff), he
decides to sacrifice himself by
withdrawing
from the conflict until the
people learn their place, and power is no longer necessary to rule.
And this idea of sacrifice as withdrawal crops up in Junger's most
