Word: hitler
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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 Führer's ranks. "All Freedom, all Greatness, all Culture," he wrote, "are only maintained and spread aloft by wars...
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...
...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...
...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...