Internal Exile

 

It was by chance that the writer Julien Gracq discovered On the Marble Cliffs at the newsagent’s of Angers station,133  at the darkest time of the Occupation. He opened it while waiting for a train and could not tear himself away from it. He would later state that the novel was ‘Jünger’s masterpiece’. In La Littérature à l’estomac,134  a famous 1950 pamphlet that targeted the commercialisation of literature, he would add the following:

I would readily give up on almost all the literature of the past ten years for Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs.135 

At a later time, he would expand further and write:

This book, which saw the light of day at one of the turning points of history [1939], tells us not only about Jünger himself, but, through him, also about ourselves and our era […]. I believe that one should read On the Marble Cliffs as a quintessential book. It is filled with great imagery, with images that have been, and still are, those of our lives as men of the mid-twentieth century, of our joys and disasters. […] Those are the different faces of our very situation: whether moving or terrible, they are the framework under which the cards of destiny were dealt to us.136 

The Warrior Who Withdrew from the World  

These thoughts, expressed by Julien Gracq, summarise to a certain extent the purpose of our current book. Ernst Jünger is indeed the witness of the successive faces of European destiny throughout the cruellest of centuries. However, On the Marble Cliffs only relates this fate in a fleeting manner. This coded novel cannot be separated from the era that witnessed its birth, independently of any artistic judgment.

In the text that we have just quoted, Julien Gracq briefly points out the highlights of Jünger’s career as both an author and a soldier, a career whose successive stages we are well-aware of: the endless reading endeavours during his childhood and adolescence, punctuated by adventurous outings into an untouched sort of nature; the founding ordeal of the Great War; the insolent heroism of a young assault troop officer covered in scars and forever marked by the exhilaration of the military attacks and the unrelenting harshness of the trenches; and the birth of the writer from the very moment that he removed his helmet. And what a writer he was! He would first become an author of war books and then a writer of political works that would turn him into the intellectual beacon of new radical thoughts that would be collected in his sensational manifesto entitled The Worker. And it was then that the one that people sometimes considered a herald of the victorious movement of 1933 suddenly turned away from it all in the most abrupt and unbridled manner. In response to the pleas made to him, he would dryly reply, ‘There is no room for me in an army where Göring is a general.’

Jünger thus becomes a sort of inner emigrant. He travels and meditates before penning his breakthrough novel, On the Marble Cliffs, in 1939, a novel whose meaning was immediately understood in Germany. As the first copies come out of the printing house, a new war breaks out. Although Jünger is mobilised, the enthusiasm of the past has given way to resignation. The opportunities to wage battle would be rare and he would not complain about it very much. Having ordered his men to always respect the vanquished in the aftermath of the French campaign, he is appointed to the headquarters of the occupying forces. Apart from being on leave a few times and a three-month mission in the Caucasus, he spent the rest of the war in Paris, establishing friendly relations with all that the French capital had to offer in terms of talent. Indirectly involved in the plot of 20 July 1944, he evades the fate of a great many other officers. During a long life in which he would also experience other, less dramatic developments, he had overcome many a mortal peril while enjoying a strange privilege of invulnerability.

Summarising Jünger’s life in his own words, Julien Gracq compares him to ‘those mediaeval warriors who had one day chosen to hang their sword on the walls of a cloister’. Although the image itself is beautiful, the fact remains that Jünger’s long existence was punctuated by a greater number of transmutations than this single change. It is, of course, true that On the Marble Cliffs did mark a clear break in the middle of his life, heralding the immense rift that would soon befall the mind and destiny of Europeans. We shall return to this later.137 

This break in Ernst Jünger’s life and work is a source of more than one enigma. The warrior, tempted by the dreams of a violent revolution, suddenly withdraws from the world and transforms into a humanitarian and pacifistic hermit, collecting plants on the heights of the Marble Cliffs. And it is the unexpected that drives even the least curious onlooker to ask questions.

Ernst Jünger

A Different European Destiny 

Domminque Venner