Perhaps the only man in the Germany of Hitler to get away with ridiculing Nazi leaders in print came to mind when a former colleague who, on the mention here of the town of Celle a day or two ago, remarked: "That's where I interviewed Ernst Junger just after the war." Junger was the author of one of the most praised books on the first World War in his country, and bore the highest honour for bravery, the Pour le Merite medal. The book in which he gave a horror picture of humanity at its worst, which he published in 1939, is not a book directly on Nazism but is in the way of a fable. Yet its implications and allusions are clear enough for Dr Goebbels, Propaganda Minister under Hitler, to call to Hitler for its banning. The territory of the book On the Marble Cliffs is a vague jumble of sceneries, perhaps Greek, perhaps from a lake area in Southern Germany, but the general intent is to show the horrors of tyrannical regimes. The narrator and his brother Otho settle down in a hermitage to spend their lives in contemplation and in the study of botany. Around them terrible things happen. Among the chilling images is, for example, The Flayer's Copse. "Over the door on the gable end, a skull was nailed fast, showing its teeth and seeming to invite entry with its grin. It was the central link of a narrow gable frieze which appeared to be formed of brown spiders. Suddenly we guessed that it was fashioned of human hands fastened to the wall... On the trees, too, which ringed the clearing, bleached death's heads..." A lot more.
There are two major villains in this territory of violence. First the Chief Hanger, grand master of the territory of Mauretania. "We had seen him at junketings and diced and wined with him through many a night." Respected and yet somewhat ridiculous in his green coat with its gold-embroidered ilex leaves. Goering was the Chief Forester and Chief Hunter of the Reich. Could be the model, and was so taken to be. Another figure, this one of utter dread was Braquemart; "a small, dark, haggard fellow yet not without wit." No wonder Goebbels wanted the book banned, as Thomas Nevin tells us he did in Ernst Junger and Germany into the Abyss 1914-1949 (Constable 1997). Hitler replied to another protester with the same answer: that Junger should be left alone. Nevin remarks that if Hitler had read the book, he would not have found himself in it. Still in print in Germany. What about the correspondent who went to see Junger in Celle? No scrap of writing remains. Y