On the Marble Cliffs

Jünger wrote “On Marble Cliffs” in 1937, and proofread it already on the front in 1939. It was his first fiction novel and at the same time an exquisite epitaph on the gravestone of the entire previous era—a time span between the two World Wars, when conservative views still didn’t mean belonging to the ruling elite, and German writers could still be welcome guests in the salons of Paris. A sensitive heart feels the pulse of “history in the making” itself, and a lofty mind foresees the inevitable—soon everything will be over. No one will save the Great Lagoon, this little world of harmony between nature and the human spirit, from the barbaric gangs of the Chief Gamekeeper—an embodiment of the violence of power and the chaos carried by greedy rabble. A knight-aristocrat, a refined aesthete, enters into a struggle with his own time; he is doomed, but fearless—because behind his back stand reason, truth, and eternity.

This romantic and merciless text of high modernism, written in the 40s, became a manifesto of style and struggle for all of reading Europe—regardless of nation or language.