Word: juenger
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Merits and Morals. Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country, a heartfelt story of South African racial problems, was admired as much for its merits as for its morals. So was the strangest parable of the year: Ernst Juenger's On the Marble Cliffs (published in Germany in 1939), in which, under a cunning mythological disguise, a talented former disciple of Hitler had denounced the Führer and all his works. In World Without Visa, a story of Marseille under the Vichy regime, France's Jean Malaquais wrote. perhaps the year's best political novel...
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...
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...
...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...