From Introduction:
The book you are holding in your hands, the most famous of Jünger’s novels, was published in Nazi Germany in 1939 and censored by the Gestapo in 1942. It was thanks to Hitler’s admiration of Jünger’s earlier work that On the Marble Cliffs was published at all. When other party officials pushed for its immediate suppression (“He has gone too far!”), the Führer reportedly replied: “Leave Jünger be!”
It’s not hard to see why the novel attracted the attention of the censors: On the Marble Cliffs charts the slow infiltration and eventual destruction of a sophisticated, Elysian society by a barbaric forest tribe whose ruthless leader sows anarchy and terror. Set, like all fables, in a distant time of its own, the story centers on two battle-hardened brothers who’ve renounced war, politics, and worldly concerns for a monkish existence as botanists. They live apart from the simmering chaos, high up on the Marble Cliffs.
The novel was immediately received as an allegory for the rise of the Third Reich, but as Jünger points out in a postscript included here, “People understood, even in occupied France, that ‘this shoe fit several feet.’” In other words, what happened in Germany wasn’t historically unique. Echoes were soon to be found in Axis Italy, Vichy France, and the Soviet Union, not to mention in the nascent authoritarianism stirring within Western democracies today. As Jünger saw it, Hitler’s nihilism was part of a more general crisis threatening modern civilization.
Whatever the politics of the book—and they are nothing if not equivocal (Jünger claimed elsewhere that the novel was “above all that“)—there’s no denying its icy polish. The novel is defined by its fantastical Mediterranean landscape, and we spend much of our time admiring the view. To one side of the cliffs lies the Marina with its lush vineyards and islands that “float on the blue tides like bright flower petals”; to the other, the Campagna, populated by rough but noble cattle herders, and bordered by the “dark fringe” of the forest, where the forces of anarchy lie in wait. There is much to lose: jeweled lizards, red vipers slithering as if in a single “glowing web,” astonishing orchids, magical mirrors, abundant vineyards, rarified libraries. This symbology flickers throughout the novel like reflections on a lake, captivating yet shifting, and ultimately eluding fixed interpretation. The imaginary world is at once classical and modern; perhaps this ancient-seeming realm isn’t quite so distant as we thought. There are both automobiles and ballads dedicated to a “gluttonous Hercules,” shotguns as well as Roman stone.
The most striking quality of On the Marble Cliffs is to me its stillness. If fiction is the art of lending time to concepts and truths that seem to exist outside of time, On the Marble Cliffs aims for just the opposite. It is an exercise in “draining time,” to borrow the phrase the brothers use to describe the study of botany. Until the frenzy of the final battle scene, the book distills itself to a single, suspended moment. The narration hovers over the landscape like a charge in the air. It’s the quiet before the storm, or, in our botanists’ case, before they “fall into the abyss.”
Throughout his oeuvre, Jünger remained preoccupied with this idea of stopping time. One of the few hopeful symbols to appear in the novel is the mythical mirror of Nigromontanus, designed to concentrate sunlight into a magical flame that transforms all it devours into an “imperishable” state, a process of “pure distillation” that takes place beyond the reach of either the narrative or the historical durée. One can imagine that Jünger—who after the Second World War experimented with LSD—viewed On the Marble Cliffs as just such a temporal transcendence, a way of preserving those values that Nazism perverted: chivalry, dignity, knowledge, beauty. It is not a protest novel but, like the mirror of Nigromontanus, a kind of “security in the void.”
3.
This framing of On the Marble Cliffs—the author’s own—complicates the invitation by Jünger’s hagiographers to read it as political critique, thereby exonerating him of his own far-right leanings. I tend to agree with Jünger that On the Marble Cliffs is not merely an allegory for the rise of the Third Reich. In fact, it’s difficult to extract a sustained political allegory from any of his works. (...)
The tendency to view the world through the metaphysical lens of cycles of power as opposed to “right and left” certainly seems to have granted Jünger, then an influential conservative voice, a great deal of moral latitude in distancing himself from the horrors emerging around him. Ever aristocratic, his critiques of Hitler could appear to be as rooted in intellectual snobbery as in moral outrage. He once complained that the Nazis “lacked metaphysics.” They waged war like technicians.
Jünger spent the Second World War as a military censor in Nazi-occupied Paris, where he kept up his ironical circle of acquaintances. His closest companions during this time included the prominent legal scholar Carl Schmitt, a racist and an early supporter of the Nazi Party. Then again, his diaries reveal him to be just as close to the conspirators behind the von Stauffenberg plot on Hitler’s life in 1944. Jünger himself was investigated, but no concrete evidence could be found tying him to the attempted assassination; the main conspirators were executed. (...)
“I am overcome by a loathing for the uniforms, the epaulettes, the medals, the weapons, all the glamour I have loved so much,” he confessed during a brief tour of the eastern front. There’s a reason a quip by Jean Cocteau (not exactly exemplary in his own wartime behavior) regarding Jünger’s conduct during these years endures: “Some people had dirty hands, some people had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.”
What did it really mean to be hands-on at such a time, when protest often amounted to nothing more than self-sacrifice? It isn’t a question I like to ask. Jünger’s son, briefly imprisoned for dissent, was later declared killed in action in Italy, though the two bullet holes found at the base of his skull suggested an execution by the SS.
The veterans and botanists in On the Marble Cliffs—much like Jünger himself, who studied zoology and spent long afternoons in occupied Paris collecting beetles—also delay intervention until it is too late. They are elegists more than dissidents, hunting for rare orchids as the Head Forester’s campaign advances on the classical civilization below. Yet the novel contains enough recognizable allusions to the Third Reich that it no doubt took courage to publish it. A torture hut where the Head Forester’s enemies are flayed is modeled on Hitler’s concentration camps for political and social deviants, the first of which were established in 1933; Jünger is likely to have seen prisoners marched past his temporary residence in Lower Saxony. It has been noted that the Head Forester bears a resemblance to Hermann Göring, the notorious commander in chief of the Luftwaffe and himself an avid hunter. Nazism, furthermore, valorized forests and their connection to the German Romantic spirit. The novel’s highs come by way of Jünger’s gift for the chilling aphorism. Of the character Braquemart, modeled on the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels: “He was of that breed of men who dream concretely, a very dangerous sort.” Its lows follow slips into dour, elitist didacticism: “When the sense of justice and tradition wanes and when terror clouds the mind, then the strength of the man in the street soon runs dry…This is why noble blood is granted preeminence in all peoples.”
To my reading, On the Marble Cliffs is a daring but ultimately inward-looking achievement. It is as if Jünger built himself an ivory tower in which to wait out Germany’s darkest decades. He never left. Nor did he repent. Until his death, Jünger dismissed criticisms of his wartime behavior. As he aged, he appealed to the growing asymmetry between himself and his younger critics: You weren’t there.
On the Marble Cliffs serves as a key to the cosmology Jünger developed in these later years. All the major motifs of this novel—serpents, language, nihilism, chivalry, dreams, Spenglerian theories of history as cyclical—return throughout his major wartime and immediate postwar works, most notably The War Diaries and the techno-dystopia of The Glass Bees. In the most generous light, they present an argument for the preservation of beauty, refinement, and human dignity in the face of Armageddon; in the harshest, a justification for a retreat into aesthetics and abstraction in the face of all too real atrocities. I recommend reading On the Marble Cliffs at different times of day, with both approaches in mind.Tess Lewis’s new translation makes this double reading possible. This edition does the crucial work of reinstating the novel’s intended fabular atmosphere, muted in previous iterations and yet so essential for understanding a man who thought in images over concepts, and who warned against the enormous dangers of “dreaming concretely.” The rhythmic prose captures the nostalgia, the suspension, the “presentiment of doom.” For the first time in English, On the Marble Cliffs lets its eerie, “rich red lining” show.
Jessi Jezewska Stevens
From Afterward:
It would be absurd, even on the level of intellectual fiction, to regard this first approximation of On the Marble Cliffs as an explanation that exhausts its themes. The movement that makes this book into the tragedy of the creative mind witnessing its ruin with a serene anguish endlessly deepens the vision. What rises up beneath our gaze is a world where everything that is precious seems already caught in destruction, where barbaric force necessarily breaks the forms of the finest thought, and where nonetheless this nothingness into which the mind sinks allows something to survive, like its truest emanation, that neither metamorphoses nor death can corrupt. The admirable myth of Nigromontanus participates in this proud hope for annihilation. Legacy of an old master versed in magic, this mirror has the property of concentrating rays of light on things of such a brightness that they are consumed in it by regaining the eternal, and are preserved in it in the domain of the invisible. “Things set alight by such heat became imperishable in a way Nigromontanus said could best be compared to pure distillation . . . [He] called it security in the void.” Similarly for Father Lampros there is nothing terrifying about destruction, for he is one of those natures born to penetrate into the exalted flames as one enters the gate into one’s ancestral home. And, adds the narrator, “Father Lampros, living like a dreamer behind the monastery walls, was perhaps the only one of us to live at the heart of reality.” Thus Jünger’s book reflects, in the anguish of general collapse, the temptation of fire where the spirit saves, by losing it, that which is essential to it, and is delivered by this very ruin from the oppressive hope for salvation.
Ernst Jünger’s style is very beautiful. Of a slow, almost formal allure, enclosing the lofty revelation of a message in phrases that never give way to vulgar ease, it offers words all the force that careful choice shaped to their inner and outer truth, to their reality and to their appearances, to the primordial sounds whose source they conserve. Language, in this calculated art, is an appeal to powers that knowledge cannot discover; and like a weapon forged in fire, it has the admirable coldness, the cruel dignity that makes the object richest in memories into the most effective instrument.
—Maurice Blanchot
1943
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