The German Genius

regular array of repeating units in which the individual units are not all the same.” He explained that the behavior of individual atoms could be known only statistically and therefore for genes to act with the very great precision with which they did act, they must be of a certain minimum size—which he calculated—with a minimum number of atoms. He concluded that the gene must consist of a long, highly stable molecule that contains a code. In 1943, most biologists were ignorant of the latest physics but among those who read Schrödinger’s book based on his lectures and were excited by its arguments were Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins. 18
     
     
    Walter Benjamin’s road into the open turned into disaster. In 1933 he fled Germany for Paris where he worked for the Frankfurt Institute and published some of his most influential work, notably “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction), an argument brilliantly deconstructed by Clive James. 19 In this Benjamin argued that art from antiquity to the present has its origin in religion and that even secular work keeps to itself an “aura,” the possibility that it is a glimpse of the divine. As Hofmannsthal, Rilke, and José Ortega y Gasset had argued before him, this implied a crucial difference between the artist and the nonartist. In the era of mechanical reproduction, however, this tradition, and the distance between artist and nonartist breaks down. Benjamin thought this was a good thing, and his view was to prove persuasive among postmodernists—that mass-produced entertainment can address the psychological problems of society at large. But he did not live to see what became of his idea. As the Nazis advanced on Paris, he headed south, planning to take advantage of the passage over the Pyrenees put in place by Varian Fry and others. By 1943, Benjamin thought that he had the necessary paperwork—he had a U.S. emergency visa and a Spanish transit visa. But then he found he also needed a French exit visa and, already exhausted as the result of a heart condition, the whole enterprise proved too much; he took his own life.
    What are we to make of Ernst Jünger’s road after 1933? In 1930 he had published Über Nationalismus und die Judenfrage ( On Nationalism and the Jewish Question ), in which he had condemned the Jews as a threat to the unity of Germany, followed in 1932 by Der Arbeiter ( The Worker ), which called for a totally mobilized society run by “warriors-workers-scholars.” But Jünger began to have his doubts about Hitler’s Reich, publishing Auf den Marmorklippen ( On the Marble Cliffs ) in 1939, which expressed some of these doubts, albeit metaphorically, and he still served in World War II as an army captain. In Russia in 1942, however, his reputation was such that the generals there admitted to him the terrible atrocities taking place. For a time, Jünger comforted himself that all sides in the war were equally barbaric but eventually he came to see that the Germans were far worse. He was then fortunate to be stationed in Paris where he mixed with—and to an extent was able to protect—the likes of Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau. If that redeemed him somewhat, so too did the inspiration he seems to have offered to anti-Nazi conservatives in the German army who mounted an unsuccessful attempt (one of several) on Hitler’s life in 1944. Nevertheless, after the war Jünger was banned from publishing for several years for not sufficiently resisting the Nazis.
    Gottfried Benn fared little better. In the years before 1933 he had not been as bellicose as Jünger, enjoying a good reputation as a distinguished poet and an accomplished doctor. Born in Manfeld, he studied theology at Marburg before taking a medical degree in Berlin. In World War I he served as a military doctor in Belgium, though by then he had already published his first collection of Expressionist poems, Morgue , concerned with the decay of the body. After World War I, Benn came to loathe Weimar, in particular its liberal culture, and he railed against what he saw as the nihilism of the republic and the role of intellectuals in that process. After 1933, he agreed with the Nazis’ attempt to “re-awaken” Germany and broadcast over the radio his apparently new view that “intellectual freedom was an anti-heroic ideology,” mocking those authors in exile—in particular Thomas