Isaiah
Berlin’s account of his conversations with Boris Pasternak provides a ‘nutshell’
summary of Ernst Junger’s view of the war in precisely the same period of time:
In 1945 he (Pasternak) still had hopes of a great renewal of Russian life as a result of the cleansing storm that the war had seemed to him to be – a storm as transforming, in its own terrible fashion, as the Revolution itself, a vast cataclysm beyond our puny mortal categories. Such vast mutation cannot, he held, be judged. One must think and think about them, and seek to understand as much of them as one can, all one’s life; they are beyond good and evil, acceptance and rejection, doubt or assent; they must be accepted as elemental changes, earthquakes, tidal waves, transforming events which are beyond all ethical and historical categories. So, too, the dark nightmare of betrayals, purges, massacres of the innocents, followed by an appalling war, seemed to him a necessary prelude to some inevitable, unheard-of victory of the spirit.
In several instances Junger recalls surreal dreams of utter destruction- including himself and members of his family- and notes that they have boosted his morale. What better explanation of the determination of the Germans to fight to the bitterest end, despite the folly of their belief that if only Hitler could be removed the Allies would accept a peace that would leave their nation in tact and without having to pay any steeper price than the prosecution of the Nazis themselves, all others having ‘innocently’ pursued legitimate though largely mythological nationalist ends.
Later, Pasternak came to regret such sentiments, at least to the extent that any suggestion that he had at any time colluded with the Soviet regime provoked him to expression of the most intense anger and denial and insisted in the most self-destructive manner in publishing Doctor Zhivago in the West, though others made provisions to preserve the manuscript even in the event of a nuclear war. Did Ernst Junger come to regret his sentiments, beyond what was necessary to preserve his own skin?
Junger denounced the Nazis as ‘cannibals’ and pitied the Jews- ‘one must always pity the persecuted’ he writes, but it is not clear that his aristocratic version of the supremacy of the State would have been any more tolerant of opposition than Hitler’s; perhaps just a ‘kinder and gentler’ approach to the mass of ‘inferior souls’ that came into his view.
Current reviews of his memoirs tout Junger as a proponent ‘the humanities’ in the midst of the greatest barbarities- ‘light shines even in the darkest abyss’- This was undoubtedly the view of the Wehrmacht’s ‘Junker’ command. They protected him from the Nazis and made sure he could not be connected to their plots to kill Hitler. Indeed, large parts of his memoir consist of demonstrating his own sensitive and superior aesthetic: his attention to the changes of season, the beauty and profusion of flowers that come into his view, the particular, detailed attention he gives to the form and variety of beetles that he endlessly observes and collects. His openness to the many writers and graphic artists he encounters in Paris, not-withstanding that it is only very late in his memoir- long after he was convinced that Germany would lose the war- that he begins to sense that such connections could have serious consequences for them after the war.
He browses the many book markets of Paris, taking advantage of the rock bottom prices occasioned by the austerity imposed by the occupation but sometimes it is difficult to discern whether the pleasure he takes in them is more in ‘the rare edition’, the tactile feel of a luxurious cover, the quality of the paper, clarity of print than in the actual content of the works of such authors as Leon Bloy or Vasilly Rozanov. He writes that he has been reading this or that author but often, it seems, in a quite desultory fashion, a ‘good way to pass the idle ‘off-duty hours’ of his time in Paris. Of his duties he says next nothing except that he had a meeting with one official or another. A snippet here and there discloses his general attitude and behavior but he conceals the particulars his many extramarital affairs. Apparently he made no effort after the war to correct the self-protecting lack of candor or distracting strategies of his original compositions.It is a vulgar and distressing book none-the-less.
There is much to be said for this ‘eye-witness’ account of the War and occupation in this memoir. One sees the decimation of helpless civilian populations caused by the allied bombing campaigns, the rains of shrapnel from anti-aircraft, the ruin of many ancient edifices, life on the precipice of annihilation and the indifference to humanity that engenders. I could make more of this book if I examined the life of its author before and after the war in more detail than is provided in the introduction. To what extent did the Allies themselves ‘figure’ the war in the same way Junger and Pasternak did: as a natural cataclysm preluding some inevitable, subsequently unheard-of victory of the human spirit?
In 1945 he (Pasternak) still had hopes of a great renewal of Russian life as a result of the cleansing storm that the war had seemed to him to be – a storm as transforming, in its own terrible fashion, as the Revolution itself, a vast cataclysm beyond our puny mortal categories. Such vast mutation cannot, he held, be judged. One must think and think about them, and seek to understand as much of them as one can, all one’s life; they are beyond good and evil, acceptance and rejection, doubt or assent; they must be accepted as elemental changes, earthquakes, tidal waves, transforming events which are beyond all ethical and historical categories. So, too, the dark nightmare of betrayals, purges, massacres of the innocents, followed by an appalling war, seemed to him a necessary prelude to some inevitable, unheard-of victory of the spirit.
In several instances Junger recalls surreal dreams of utter destruction- including himself and members of his family- and notes that they have boosted his morale. What better explanation of the determination of the Germans to fight to the bitterest end, despite the folly of their belief that if only Hitler could be removed the Allies would accept a peace that would leave their nation in tact and without having to pay any steeper price than the prosecution of the Nazis themselves, all others having ‘innocently’ pursued legitimate though largely mythological nationalist ends.
Later, Pasternak came to regret such sentiments, at least to the extent that any suggestion that he had at any time colluded with the Soviet regime provoked him to expression of the most intense anger and denial and insisted in the most self-destructive manner in publishing Doctor Zhivago in the West, though others made provisions to preserve the manuscript even in the event of a nuclear war. Did Ernst Junger come to regret his sentiments, beyond what was necessary to preserve his own skin?
Junger denounced the Nazis as ‘cannibals’ and pitied the Jews- ‘one must always pity the persecuted’ he writes, but it is not clear that his aristocratic version of the supremacy of the State would have been any more tolerant of opposition than Hitler’s; perhaps just a ‘kinder and gentler’ approach to the mass of ‘inferior souls’ that came into his view.
Current reviews of his memoirs tout Junger as a proponent ‘the humanities’ in the midst of the greatest barbarities- ‘light shines even in the darkest abyss’- This was undoubtedly the view of the Wehrmacht’s ‘Junker’ command. They protected him from the Nazis and made sure he could not be connected to their plots to kill Hitler. Indeed, large parts of his memoir consist of demonstrating his own sensitive and superior aesthetic: his attention to the changes of season, the beauty and profusion of flowers that come into his view, the particular, detailed attention he gives to the form and variety of beetles that he endlessly observes and collects. His openness to the many writers and graphic artists he encounters in Paris, not-withstanding that it is only very late in his memoir- long after he was convinced that Germany would lose the war- that he begins to sense that such connections could have serious consequences for them after the war.
He browses the many book markets of Paris, taking advantage of the rock bottom prices occasioned by the austerity imposed by the occupation but sometimes it is difficult to discern whether the pleasure he takes in them is more in ‘the rare edition’, the tactile feel of a luxurious cover, the quality of the paper, clarity of print than in the actual content of the works of such authors as Leon Bloy or Vasilly Rozanov. He writes that he has been reading this or that author but often, it seems, in a quite desultory fashion, a ‘good way to pass the idle ‘off-duty hours’ of his time in Paris. Of his duties he says next nothing except that he had a meeting with one official or another. A snippet here and there discloses his general attitude and behavior but he conceals the particulars his many extramarital affairs. Apparently he made no effort after the war to correct the self-protecting lack of candor or distracting strategies of his original compositions.It is a vulgar and distressing book none-the-less.
There is much to be said for this ‘eye-witness’ account of the War and occupation in this memoir. One sees the decimation of helpless civilian populations caused by the allied bombing campaigns, the rains of shrapnel from anti-aircraft, the ruin of many ancient edifices, life on the precipice of annihilation and the indifference to humanity that engenders. I could make more of this book if I examined the life of its author before and after the war in more detail than is provided in the introduction. To what extent did the Allies themselves ‘figure’ the war in the same way Junger and Pasternak did: as a natural cataclysm preluding some inevitable, subsequently unheard-of victory of the human spirit?
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