On the Marble Cliffs


 ERNST JÜNGER (1895–1998), the son of a chemist and pharmacist, was born in Heidelberg and early on developed a fascination with war and soldiers. As a teenager, he ran away to join the French Foreign Legion, then enlisted in the German army on the first day of World War I. Jünger’s first book, Storm of Steel, provides a graphic account of his experiences. While he kept his distance from the Nazis, he was firmly right-wing and expressed his anti-Marxist ideas for a postcapitalist, utopian society in a series of treatises that culminated with The Worker: Dominion and Form (1932). In 1939, while living in Überlingen near the Swiss border, he began to write On the Marble Cliffs, which was published later that year, initially escaping censorship because of Hitler’s admiration for Jünger’s earlier work. After the war, Jünger went on to compose several more works of speculative fiction and nonfiction, including The Glass Bees (1957), also published by NYRB Classics, a novel about a future tyrannized by technology. One of the most controversial of twentieth-century German writers, Jünger was the recipient of numerous literary prizes and continued to write until his death at the age of 102.
 TESS LEWIS is a translator from French and German. Her translations include works by Peter Handke, Philippe Jaccottet, and Christine Angot, and a collection of essays by Walter Benjamin for NYRB classics. She is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2022 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
 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. After editing the Journal des Débats from 1932 to 1940, he continued to contribute book reviews to the magazine once it became pro-Vichy. Among these was his review of On the Marble Cliffs, which displeased the censors.
 ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS
 ERNST JÜNGER
 Translated from the German by
 TESS LEWIS
 Introduction by
 JESSI JEZEWSKA STEVENS
 Afterword by
 MAURICE BLANCHOT
 NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
 
 New York
 THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
 PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
 www.nyrb.com
 Copyright © 1939, 1978 by Klett-Cotta–J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung
 Nachfolger GmbH, Stuttgart
 Translation copyright © 2023 by Tess Lewis
 Introduction copyright © 2023 by Jessi Jezewska Stevens
 Afterword copyright © 1943, renewed 1971 by Éditions Gallimard; translation copyright © 2001 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
 All rights reserved.
 
 The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut.
 First published as a New York Review Books Classic in 2023.
 Originally published in the German langauge as Auf den Marmorklippen.
 The afterword by Maurice Blanchot originally appeared in Faux Pas by Maurice Blanchot, translated by Charlotte Mandell, ISBN 9780804729345, pp 252–256. It appears here by permission of Stanford University Press.
 
 Cover image: Carel Willink, Arcadian Landscape, 1938; © 2022 Artists Rights
 Society (ARS), New York/Pictoright Amsterdam
 Cover design: Katy Homans
 
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
 Names: Jünger, Ernst, 1895–1998, author. | Lewis, Tess, translator.
 Title: On the marble cliffs / by Ernst Jünger; translated Tess Lewis.
 Other titles: Auf den Marmorklippen. English
 Description: New York: New York Review Books, [2022] | Series: New York Review Books classics
 Identifiers: LCCN 2022010898 (print) | LCCN 2022010899 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681376257 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681376264 (ebook)
 Subjects: LCGFT: Novellas.
 Classification: LCC PT2619.U43 A913 2022 (print) | LCC PT2619.U43 (ebook) | DDC 833/.912—dc23/eng/20220304
 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010898
 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010899
 ISBN 978-1-68137-626-4
 v1.0
 For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com
 CONTENTS
 Cover
 Biographical Notes
 Copyright and More Information
 Title Page
 Introduction
 ON THE MARBLE CLIFFS
 Author’s Note
 Afterword
 INTRODUCTION
 1.
 SOME PEOPLE live more history than others: Born in Heidelberg in 1895, the German literary giant Ernst Jünger survived a stint in the French Foreign Legion, the rise of the Third Reich, two World Wars, fourteen flesh wounds, the death of his son (executed by the SS), the Partition of Germany, and Reunification before his death at the remarkable age of a hundred and two. Perhaps no historical rupture had a greater influence on his thinking, however, than the rise of industrialized warfare across both World Wars. A soldier as much as a writer, Jünger memorably declared in his diaries in 1943 that “Ancient chivalry is dead; wars are waged by technicians.” Articulating the consequences of this transformation became the central obsession of his work.
 Jünger’s fascination with the ways in which technologically driven projections of power would reshape traditional civilian life and geopolitics have secured his legacy as an unignorable diagnostician of the modern epoch. He is today to industrialized warfare what his contemporaries Walter Benjamin or Siegfried Kracauer were to the rise of mass-produced culture: All three drew connections between technology’s assault on the inner life of the individual and fascism’s weaponization of the mob. Yet while Kracauer and Benjamin, prominent voices of the Weimar socialist left, denounced fascism from the start, Jünger was very much a man of the right. Though he continues to be widely read, his significant literary achievements can be contemplated only with ambivalence. He remains one of Germany’s most celebrated and controversial writers—by far the most interesting to have ever emerged from the interwar right.
 2.
 The book you are holding in your hands, the most famous of Jünger’s novels, was published in Nazi Germany in 1939 and censored by the Gestapo in 1942. It was thanks to Hitler’s admiration of Jünger’s earlier work that On the Marble Cliffs was published at all. When other party officials pushed for its immediate suppression (“He has gone too far!”), the Führer reportedly replied: “Leave Jünger be!”
 It’s not hard to see why the