“On this pale mask from which the scalped flesh hung in ribbons and which looked on the fires from the elevation of the torturer’s pike there played the shadow of a smile intensely sweet and joyful, and I knew that on this day the weaknesses had fallen from this noble man with each step of his martyrdom, like the rags of a king disguised in beggar’s weeds. Then a shudder ran through my inmost heart, for I realized that he had been worthy of his fore-fathers, the tamers of monsters; he had slain the dragon fear in his own breast. Then I was certain of something which I had often doubted—there were still noble beings amongst us in whose hearts lived unshakeable knowledge of a lofty ordered life. And since a high example leads us in its train, I took an oath before this head that from that day forth I would rather fall with the free men than go in triumph among the slaves.” [p. 102]
I read Ernst Jünger’s Storm of Steel two years ago, in June 2024, and consider it one of my favorite books of that year. Jünger is an incredibly enigmatic figure in his own right, in addition to being a superb poet and well-rounded intellectual. His account of the First World War was not only an example of gripping storytelling, but a wholly unique perspective on the modern war genre in general. Unlike the endless tales of pacifistic moralizing and woe that seem to characterize most stories from the Great War onwards, Jünger comes across like a noble Ritter plucked from the Middle Ages and tossed into the trenches of the Somme. His is not, like the more famous and widely-assigned-in-high-school work of Remarque, an account of some cosmopolitan dandy drafted into a brutal war—but of a true warrior poet, seemingly at home both with bullets whizzing through his chest or sitting in his study, surrounded by coleopterological tapestries and dipping into his inkwell.
Jünger had enlisted in 1914 and spent most of the war on the Western Front, first as an infantryman and then as an officer. He was wounded repeatedly—seven major woundings by the usual biographical count, with fourteen individual wounds recorded—and returned to combat after each recovery. In August 1918, while leading his company near Favreuil, he was shot through the lung and nearly died. He received the Pour le Mérite, the German Empire’s highest military decoration, an extraordinary distinction for a junior infantry officer. Storm of Steel, drawn from the diaries he kept at the front, does not deny the filth or terror of the trenches. What distinguishes it is Jünger’s refusal to treat danger as meaningless. He presents courage, endurance, and self-command as virtues tested and revealed by battle.
Jünger lived from 1895 to 1998, reaching the incredible age of 102. He was born in the German Empire, fought in the First World War, lived through the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, witnessed another world war and Germany’s collapse and division, and survived to see reunification in 1990. He kept his distance from the Nazi Party and refused its efforts to enlist his prestige, although his nationalism, his earlier hostility to liberal democracy, and his position within the German establishment make his relation to the regime more complicated than a simple story of resistance. Few figures have distinguished themselves as he, and yet he is still viewed as something of a countercultural figure due to his extolling of martial virtue and a Classical, aristocratic ethos.
Given this reputation, I have long sought to revisit Jünger’s work. My reading list has included his philosophical works Eumeswil and The Forest Passage, along with his fictional The Glass Bees and—the subject of this note—On the Marble Cliffs. It was my good fortune when my dear friend Mr. Constantine offered me his slim copy while I was literally dripping sweat from scrubbing off old memories from my walls and preparing to move.
On the Marble Cliffs (1939) is narrated by a scholar living with his brother, Otho, in a quaint, vaguely Mediterranean country. It could be France or Spain; the characters have Italian names; one suspects it may also contain an idealized Germany. The brothers toil among good-natured peasants beside the Marina, endlessly observing and categorizing botanical specimens for a vast collection whose purpose is never entirely clear. They are content to labor silently and meditatively, knowing that they are building on the taxonomic work of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus.
Disrupting their work is the Chief Ranger, a bloodthirsty seeker of power. Abroad, he has begun to stir up the disreputable and disenfranchised youths and is slowly encroaching on the Great Marina that lies beneath the peaceful Marble Cliffs. A certain wild barbarian element has always inhabited the forests and grassland that secludes the Marble Cliffs, called the Campagne, although they are too preoccupied with honor and blood-feuds to bother the peaceful peasants of the Cliffs. The Chief Ranger represents a far more menacing threat. His quest for power cannot be appeased by logic or reason—the chief virtues of our protagonist—nor by the honorable if primitive values of the wild nomads; his is a totalizing quest, one which will not allow dissent no matter how peaceful and innocuous.
Herein, above all, lay a masterly trait of the Chief Ranger. He administered fear in small doses which he gradually increased, and which aimed at crippling resistance. The role he played in the disorders which were so finely spun in the heart of his woods was that of a power for order; for while his agents of lower rank, who had established themselves in the clans, fostered anarchy, the initiated penetrated into the civic offices and the magistracy, and there won the reputation of men of deeds who would bring the mob to its senses. Thus the Chief Ranger was like an evil doctor who first encourages the disease so that he may practise on the sufferer the surgery he has in mind. [47]
Given Jünger’s distance from the Nazi regime and this story’s publication in 1939, after the Nazi takeover in Germany and literally on the eve of the invasion of Poland later that year, On the Marble Cliffs has generally been read as a prophetic critique of tyranny. The back of this edition, published by Penguin Modern Classics in 1970, reads, “it can be read as a general study of tyranny… or as an astonishingly prescient parable on the rise and fall of Nazism.”
To read this novel as a simple parable of Nazism is, I think, a mistake. In the first place, the rise of Hitler bears basically no relation to the Chief Ranger’s ascent, nor does Hitler’s personal philosophy resemble his—if one can say that the Chief Ranger even has a personal philosophy. No: this is not a political book. There is basically no treatment of politics, and where it is mentioned it is brief and simplified to keep the reader from asking unnecessary questions. Rather, this is clearly a novel about one’s internal life, and—if anything—the tyranny of the mind. The narrator, his brother Otho, and their fellow scholars are obsessed with their internal lives to an almost comical degree. They toil away, collecting specimens and making small alterations to an overflowing, mouldering library for generations, with no end in sight. Outside is a living world. The peasants of the town live and breathe. From the young snake-charmer who lays a trap for the invading Foresters, to the valiant barbarian Belovar, who views the conflict as more a matter of personal authority and honor than some grand political resistance—these are the true heroes of the story, in a traditional sense. The scholars participate, even fighting in the battle, but for what? It is an open question. Ultimately, they burn most of their work and flee to greener pastures. They do not defeat the Chief Ranger. Can such men be called heroes? Can they truly be said to have resisted tyranny, when they avoided the conflict up until the moment of decision? Were their heads too far in Wolkenkuckucksheim to understand that they, too, were somehow complicit in the rise of tyranny, and destruction of all they held dear?
This is a difficult question. This is a difficult book, if one is to read it as something more than a mere parable of contemporary events. Jünger is a complicated man, and I hazard to guess that he intends this book to be more than modern commentators suggest. I enjoyed it, and look forward to reading more by him.
← Back to Notebook