On the Marble Cliffs

“Jünger brings to mind a different epoch, one when both soldiering and philosophy held a vastly different status in civic life…[his] writing has a comparable feeling with certain alchemical emblems: still waters, wise vipers, and black dogs. One encounters a blissed-out feel for the natural world here, but also terrible foreboding. On the Marble Cliffs is a warning of what lies up ahead.” —Ian Penman, City Journal

“On the Marble Cliffs [is] a parable of ascendant barbarism that contains an oblique protest against Nazism…[In] On the Marble Cliffs, Jünger attempted something riskier: a dark fable with unmistakable modern overtones.” —Alex Ross, The New Yorker

“The classical beauty of the writing, in Tess Lewis’s exquisite translation, gives a sense of the author’s sympathies… . [H]is short, prismatic book is beautiful.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal

“[A] literary achievement of the highest order.” —Nil Santiáñez, The Massachusetts Review

“[Jünger] was a sporadic critic of the moral obtuseness that grew like vines all around him.” —Thomas Meany, Harper’s Magazine

“Jünger’s coolly detached empirical style, with its Nietzschean cadences evident in On the Marble Cliffs, has its detractors… . Yet the primacy of his poetic imagination, his born naturalist’s observational perceptiveness, and the noble humanness undergirding his writing lend it unequivocal greatness.” —Will Stone, Times Literary Supplement

“On the Marble Cliffs might be called Jünger’s descent into the maelstrom, a record of terror seen and survived… . An allegory that does not moralize, its hermeticism is inviolable and inimitable.” —Thomas R. Nevin, Ernst Jünger and Germany: Into the Abyss, 1914–1945

“On the Marble Cliffs is a great book and virtually no one I’ve ever mentioned it to has read it.” —W.S. Merwin

Ernst J nger (1895-1998) was a German philosopher, writer, and entomologist who became widely known for Storm of Steel, his memoir of World War I. He was the author of six novels, including The Glass Bees, and dozens of works of philosophy. During his lifetime, he received the Goethe Prize as well as the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.

Tess Lewis has translated works from the French and German, including books by Peter Handke, Anselm Kiefer, and Christine Angot, and The Storyteller Essays by Walter Benjamin. Her awards include the 2017 PEN Translation Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. She serves as the co-chair of the PEN Translation Committee and is an advisory editor for The Hudson Review.

Jessi Jezewska Stevens is the author of the novels The Exhibition of Persephone Q and The Visitors. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Foreign Policy, The Paris Review, and elsewhere.

Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was a French writer and philosopher whose books, including Death Sentence, Thomas the Obscure, and The Space of Literature, frequently blended narrative and theory.

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