From Steel to Faith

ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS (120 pp.)--Ernst Juenger-- New Directions ($2.50).

Future historians of 20th Century totalitarianism will puzzle over this paradox: the most effective anti-Nazi novel (On the Marble Cliffs) published in Germany during Hitler's reign was written by a prominent Nazi writer.

In the '20s, while Hitler drilled his bullies, Ernst Juenger greased their path to power with his doctrine of total nihilism. Rejecting both traditional Christian and humanist values, he expressed the kind of diseased fascination with violence that led Germany's rootless youth into the Fuehrer's ranks. "All Freedom, all Greatness, all Culture," he wrote, "are only maintained and spread aloft by wars. . . ."

Juenger envisaged a new world of anonymous, depersonalized robot-men immersed in the processes of technology and disciplined into grey armies of soldier-workers. In the age of the machine, individualism seemed to him a sentimental illusion, morality a superfluous gesture. All that counted in his nightmare world was steel: cold, powerful, implacable, featureless.

Ideas in Practice. But when Hitler began to realize this satanic Utopia, Juenger, an aristocratic esthete, balked. It was one thing to preach total discipline, another thing to experience it. For the first six years of the Nazi reign he wrote mostly of private and nonpolitical matters. A few days after the Nazi invasion of Poland he published On the Marble Cliffs, a strange allegorical novel, clearly anti-Nazi in intention. Even those who hated Juenger and all he had stood for had to admit that its publication was an act of courage.

Exactly how the novel managed to see the light of day at the very moment when Hitler was preparing to overrun Europe remains a mystery. Some critics have speculated that Juenger's close connections with German army leaders saved his book and his skin; others felt that the Nazi censors were unwilling to admit they had been asleep at the switch. In any case, On the Marble Cliffs remained a thorn in the Nazi side throughout the war. When the Russians were attacked, they translated and published it--though its denunciation of tyranny fits more than one foot.

The Story. On the high reaches of the marble cliffs that separate the towns on the Marina River from rural Campagna live two brothers who have abandoned worldly affairs to study plants and words (nature and man). Life with these quiet, diligent and lawful men is deeply satisfying--until the Mauretanians, inhabitants of bordering swamps and forests, begin their raids. The Mauretanians are led by the Chief Ranger, a man who "hated the plough, the corn, the vine and the animals tamed by man, who looked with distaste on spacious dwellings and a free and open life. . . . Only then did his heart stir when moss and ivy grew green on the ruins of the towns, and under the broken tracery of vaulted cathedrals the bats fluttered in the moon. . . . Wherever the structures raised by the ordered life of man began to crumble, his brood sprang up like mushroom spawn."

In the bloody raids of the Mauretanians, the Chief Ranger "administered fear in small doses which he gradually increased, and which aimed at crippling resistance. The role he played in the disorders . . . was that of a power for order . . . like an evil doctor who first encourages the disease so that he may practice on the sufferer. . . ." To terrorize his opponents the Chief Ranger has a "flaying-hut" where "a skull was nailed fast, showing its teeth and seeming to invite entry with its grin. . . . Such are the dungeons above which rise the proud castles of the tyrants, and from them is to be seen the curling savoury smoke of their banquets." And when the Chief Ranger has conquered the peoples along the Marina, a dirge is heard in the town.

Princes are men of women born, And turn again to lowly dust . . . Since no man then can give us aid, We turn to God in our great need.

Gothic Fogs. If only because Juenger had to engage in some mystification to confound the censors, there is no direct correspondence between actual events in Europe and the development of his novel. What he does, however, is to recreate with great skill the emotional atmospheres of totalitarian terror. The pastoral scene in which the brothers explore the meanings of nature & man is transformed into a fearful and terrifying "battleground full of ominous Gothic effects--miasmal fogs that confuse the Chief Ranger's victims, weird battles between dogs that suggest the means by which Hitler dominated Europe, thick smoke arising from the crematoria and torture chambers of the "flaying-hut," and the plaguelike spread of the Chief Ranger's "glow worm" agents. The total effect of these literary devices is to suggest a far more apt portrait of Hitlerism than any conventionally realistic novel could provide.

The Author. On the Marble Cliffs was published while Author Juenger was serving as a lieutenant in the German Army (his son was killed in the war). Juenger seems to have been involved in the conservatives' plot against Hitler in June 1944. He now lives on a farm near Hannover, and preaches a United States of Europe. His latest book, The Peace, has not yet been published in Germany, though it circulates in typed copies, because the Allied Military Government has blacklisted him as one of the philosophical forerunners of Naziism.

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