On the Marble Cliffs

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Resistance in Allegory Ernst Jünger published On the Marble Cliffs in 1939, six years into the Third Reich. The novella tells of two brothers living in scholarly peace on a cliff a bove the Great Marina, cataloguing the local flora, when a figure known as the Chief Ranger begins to extend his brutal power from the forests into the settled lands below. The brothers watch the destruction of their ordered world with growing horror. The parallels to Jünger's own situation were obvious to every reader in Germany, and yet the book was never banned. The Story The narrative is short and compressed. Jünger's prose has the precision of a naturalist's field notes applied to scenes of political violence and cultural decay. The brothers must decide whether to resist, to flee, or to retreat further into contemplation as the world around them burns. The Chief Ranger's power is not ideological. It is elemental: a raw appetite for domination that corrupts everything it touches. Jünger refuses to offer easy answers. The book ends not with triumph but with survival, and barely that. Why It Matters On the Marble Cliffs is one of the great anti-tyranny novels of the twentieth century, written by a man who was himself a decorated war hero and sometime fellow-traveler of the nationalist right. That Jünger could write this book from inside the regime, and that the regime let it circulate, makes it a singular document in the history of literary resistance. The prose is extraordinary. Every sentence is weighed. About This Edition Author: Ernst Jünger Publisher: New York Review of Books (NYRB Classics) Format: Paperback ISBN: 9781681376257 Show more