The Marble Cliffs

What is my aim as a writer, and what is First Adventure? I start to address this indirectly, from the heights of the marble cliffs as it were.

The Marble Cliffs is a novel by Ernst Jünger, first published in Germany in 1939.

It describes a beautiful, civilized, imaginary and somewhat magical country, perhaps somewhere near Italy - comprising an ancient city, with vineyards rising above the sea, and beyond the vines, the marble cliffs, then the Campagna with its farms and outposts; and beyond that a wilderness of ominous swamps and lawless forests.

This magnificent, delicate world is being hollowed out from within. The agent of destruction is a man who gathers around his death-cult the forest hunters, the outlaws on the periphery, the city’s criminals and mercenaries, the opportunistic and corruptible of all backgrounds. They call him the Chief Forester. The Forester bides his time and accumulates power, then unleashes a campaign of pure destruction - with bloodlust and joy -- and burns the farms, vineyards, cities, and monasteries, even the refuge on the marble cliffs where the narrator had retired from soldiering to study botany.

Jünger’s descriptions of destruction feel first hand: he had been an officer in the trenches in the Great War, leading men through some of the most intense combat on earth. All agree he fought with superhuman self-possession, took wounds that could have killed him multiple times, and received every medal for bravery the German Army offers.

I am sure Jünger is the only person to have received both the Goethe Prize and the Pour le Merite, the highest award for courage in the Prussian military before 1918.

Jünger’s memoir of the Great War, Storm of Steel, was a massive best seller in Germany and is still in print. It is the best first-person account of the fighting, rivalled only by Robert Graves’ utterly different - also wonderful, but British, diffident, ironic, anti-war - memoir, Goodbye to All That.

Jünger was not anti-war. He believed war gives men opportunities for courage and self-transcendence and testing that can be found nowhere else.

Jünger’s memoir was beloved by German veterans, who saw in it a celebration of their heroism and sacrifice grounded in the actual facts of combat - and a refusal to denounce or denigrate the project of the war itself. Storm of Steel and his medals protected Jünger when the allegorical weight of the Marble Cliffs nearly provoked the Nazis to execute him. Hitler himself had to intervene and tell the SS to “leave Jünger be.”

The Marble Cliffs is not an exploration of what motivates ordinary people to cast in their lot with fascism.

(It is not interested in a causality from the ground up. For that, I recommend the unrivalled essay by Umberto Eco: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism).

The Marble Cliffs offers no defense and no critique of either the little man, the Follower, or his Leader. In its study of the rise of a death-wish made manifest, it shows the forces of destruction as impersonal and implacable; they descend as from above, find their local instrument here or there, and when fated to arise, sweep over the world like a meteor.

But in any case, politics is in no way what the Marble Cliffs is even about. It is more deeply concerned with the painstaking work of gathering plants, of contributing to the taxonomy of Linnaeus, of finding a temporary home to do one’s work neither in the forest nor the city, but in some place between the enemy camps, maintaining good relations with both for as long as possible, from the vantage of the marble cliffs. . . it is about the practicalities and the sublimities of being an artist in a dark time. It serves as one of the most eloquent - if elliptical - defenses ever written of the true artist’s essential refusal to be dragged into anyone’s program.

I was interested to learn recently that Jünger is quoted with admiration by Curtis Yarvin and other thinkers on the American right. Fair enough; Jünger was not a liberal.

Jünger was and is a very popular writer among people who see in him an ally in their program to win greater respect for traditional masculine virtues - stoicism and courage; competence under fire, whether literal or figurative; boldness and initiative; capacity for violence directed to selfless aims; in short, people who seek a liberating escape from the overly confining, safety-oriented, schoolmarmish, and excessively legalistic, feminized, and humiliating culture of the liberal democracies.

But I am here to tell you that Junger is a much subtler thinker than the politics of his best-known admirers implies. Jünger refused to join the Nazi party, in fact was friendly with the plotters against Hitler, and above all preserved his freedom of expression as an artist against almost impossible odds.

After narrowly surviving his second world war (many of his friends were executed after the failed coup of July 20th, and his son was murdered by the SS for other reasons) Jünger had many further adventures. For one, he became close friends with Albert Hoffman. Jünger did not just trip, he tripped with the inventor of LSD, and wrote extensively about the liberating potential of what we now call entheogens, and the complicated role of intoxicants in inner experience. (Hoffman too wrote quite tenderly about their time together in his memoir: LSD, My Problem Child).

Jünger’s collected works -- which sit on the shelf behind me as I write -- extend to 18 volumes. And he never stopped, until his death at 102.

Jünger is neglected in the United States, but recognized in Germany, and more broadly in Europe, as one of the greatest German-language writers of the 20th century - in the company of Remarque, Gunter Grass, Hesse, Mann, Musil, Döblin. In my admiration he is rivalled only by Kafka, and the poets Rilke and Celan. The mandatory statements of “ambivalence” about his achievement by his translators and other culture-keepers leave me cold. I do not care.

And so today, instead of sitting with my zazen group, I used my meditation hour to translate the first paragraph of The Marble Cliffs.

It goes something like this:

“You all know the wild melancholy that takes hold of us when we remember happy times. They are gone irrevocably. We are ruthlessly torn away, separated as though by a vast distance.

So too, in the afterglow, more alluring images arise. We think back on them as if upon the body of a beloved, now dead, who rests deep in the earth, and whose appearance makes us tremble; she is but a desert mirage, but now become higher, more spiritual, more glorious.

Again and again in thirsty dreams we feel our way towards every wrinkle and detail of our past. It seems to us then, that we never received our rightful share of life and of love; but no amount of regret can give us back what we missed. If only these feelings could teach us to weigh rightly the brief interludes of happiness we do enjoy.”

I hope this excerpt suggests something of Jünger’s mastery, preternatural calm, balance, Olympian distance. I will publish more and even better examples from The Marble Cliffs when I have time. In my opinion (and admittedly who am I to judge, I am obviously not a native German speaker) Jünger’s language is more refined, at once more precise and more evocative, than any of his rivals. He is the greatest German prose stylist of the 20th century.

And in the present moment where we find ourselves, his work and example have much to teach us.