On the Marble Cliffs
by Ernst Jünger
translated by Tess Lewis
NYRB Classics

When German author Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs was first published in 1939 the Second World War had just begun. The author himself had for nearly twenty years enjoyed a complicated mix of acclaim and condemnation elicited by his first book, Storm of Steel, a memoir of the First World War. In the interwar years, Jünger became an outspoken critic of the Weimar Republic in particular and liberalism more broadly, and was a favorite of senior Nazis, including Hitler, although he refused to join the party. During the war years, Jünger, again in military service, was posted to Nazi-occupied Paris, where, as the war raged and camps across Europe extinguished millions of lives, he spent much of his time collecting beetles. He was closely associated with many implicated in (and soon executed for) a plot to assassinate Hitler. The Gestapo censored On the Marble Cliffs in 1942, and only Hitler’s defense of the author (“Leave Jünger be!”) saved him from certain censure and death. Jünger died at age 102 in 1998, having survived soldiering in the century’s two biggest wars as well as postwar accusations of complicity. Jünger’s political outlook was, to put it mildly, complicated.

It was from the mind of such a man in such times that emerged On the Marble Cliffs, now available from New York Review of Books in a new English translation by Tess Lewis. This edition also helpfully includes an introduction by Jessi Jezewska Stevens, an author’s note from 1972, and a 1943 review by Maurice Blanchot of an early French translation. The novella, Jünger’s first work of longform fiction, is set in a kind of alternate, anachronistic Mediterranean Europe mingling Roman ruins and automobiles, Linnean manuscripts on botany and pre-Christian polytheism. The unnamed narrator and Brother Otho, after serving with the “Purple Riders” in a failed campaign against “the free peoples of Alta Plana,” renounced war and ensconced themselves in a hermitage atop the Marble Cliffs to dedicate themselves to “studying plants in minute detail.” For several years they lived a cloistered life of science in this mountain redoubt, until “the Head Forester gained power over the region and terror began to spread.” The narrator and Brother Otho have met this man, “an imposing lord” who is “considered slightly ridiculous;” they recall his “glint of terrifying joviality” and the “draft of the archaic power that blew around him.” Rumors circulate of the growing ranks of the “forest rabble;” unrest spreads among the plains tribes living on the expanse between the Marina and the forest. The narrator and Brother Otho note the increasing disorder and strengthen their “resolve to resist solely through the power of the spirit,” spending many nights “working silently in the library and herbarium” while “the flames of arson blazed on the edge of the cliffs.” Only quite late in the book are the narrator and Brother Otho confronted in such a way as to force their involvement.

The jacket copy describes On the Marble Cliffs as “both a mesmerizing work of fantasy and an allegory of the advent of fascism.” The latter of these is only partly apt. The Head Forester and his gruesome flaying shed readily present themselves, respectively, as portraits of Hitler and the camps; and as Jezewska Stevens notes in the introduction, the “crude theoretician” and zealot of “power and supremacy” Braquemart resembles Joseph Goebbels enough to have made publication a major risk for Jünger. Although such allusions to and artistic transmutations of Nazism are present, to read the work only as allegory or protest would require ignoring much of it. Jünger, in his note, writes that “this shoe fit several feet.” Rather, the novella is an “assault from the realm of dreams” that “reflects and captures the nightmarish political situation,” which it also “transcends.”

Here it is helpful to consider On the Marble Cliffs in relation to Jünger’s first major work, the autobiographical Storm of Steel. Despite the texts’ myriad differences—of style, genre, verisimilitude, historicity, and more—On the Marble Cliffs seems a culmination, or at least a continuation, of the autobiographical project. Where the earlier work is a literal autobiography, providing a detailed diaristic account of nearly four years of trench combat, On the Marble Cliffs is something of a metaphysical autobiography. The works share a concern for valor and a cool detachment, even in the midst of bloodshed. Indeed, the way the narrator of On the Marble Cliffs observes and records the horrors visited on friends and the whole civilization of the Marina while remaining unperturbed seems very much like the author. As Jünger writes in the author’s note, supporting or opposing any particular political cause is “secondary;” a man’s true “problem,” which is also the “touchstone of the poem” (note the author’s genre designation), is to “show how he has grown” and to “manifest his freedom…in the face of danger.” On the Marble Cliffs is thus only partly an allegory, and partly many other things.

What it is wholly, though, is a remarkable and rewarding piece of literature, in prose often poetic and lyrical that evokes a fantastic world partly resembling our own partly something other, something unclassifiable. That it perplexes and resists singular interpretation recommends it to many sorts of readers. The questions raised (among them: What is the meaning of Father Lampros’s motto “Patience is mine?” Are the narrator and Brother Otho commendable or reprehensible for their aloofness? Are they being valorized, criticized, or merely depicted? Why botany? And what’s going on with the snakes in the garden?) are sure to remain on the reader’s mind for some time to come. Like the simple things whose loss the narrator laments on the book’s opening page, On the Marble Cliffs presents “a cornucopia of riches.”

Eric Vanderwall is a writer, editor, and musician. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Star Tribune, the Chicago Review of Books, and elsewhere. Visit www.ericvanderwall.com to hear his recordings.