New translation: On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Jünger
I just noticed where NYRB Classics has released a new translation of Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs. My brief notes on New Directions’ 1947 translation by Stuart Hood can be found here. I highly recommend it without having read the new translation yet. It is one of the weirdest books I have ever read. And that’s saying something. It is easy to read this as an allegory on the rise of Nazism, but Jünger always disputed that reading, saying it was about how evil can come to power and what it can do to people.
I first read about the book in The American Scholar‘s 1970 poll of writers on books they felt were unjustly neglected. W.S. Merwin recommended this book, and fortunately it’s now easy to obtain a copy.
If On the Marble Cliffs whets your appetite to find out more about Jünger, be sure to check out this interview by Frédéric de Towarnicki recently published by Dispatches from the Past on Substack. Early in the interview, Jünger is asked about the trouble he went through due to the publication of On the Marble Cliffs. Below is just one of the questions and answers from that interview.
FT: Your book was quickly perceived as a critique of the regime and even as an “allegory of resistance.” In the mythical atmosphere of a timeless world, you tell of the destruction and burning down of a high civilization by a tyrant with blood on his hands, the Oberförster, the incarnation of evil, the enemy of every culture, in whom many readers thought they recognized the features of Hitler.
EJ: One of the first readers of the book was Reichsleiter Bouhler. This was not surprising, since he was also the supreme censor and responsible for every publication. Bouhler immediately complained to Hitler at the next Reichsleiter meeting in Berlin. The wording was also conveyed to me: “My Führer, you have to put an end to the Jünger, it can’t go on like this,” and so on. But Hitler waved it off. He is said to have said, “Leave Jünger alone.” And so, since the Almighty had spoken….