Book Review - On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Junger

On the Marble Cliffs by Ernst Junger, translated from the German by Stuart Hood

Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970 (Auf den Marmorklippen first published in 1939)


Ernst Junger's Storm of Steel is a World War One classic, and is a book that has cast its spell over many young men since it was fist written. Its combination of lyrical writing and vague philosophy, along with thrilling accounts of combat, made this very German book a bestseller, and one still worth reading today. Junger never reached those heights again with his written work, but On the Marble Cliffs is well worth reading, and a fascinating insight into a part of the German psyche during the Nazi era.

Although Junger denied that this story was an allegory describing the rise of the Nazis, it is obvious that the political situation in Germany during the 1930s informs this tale. Set in a fictional location in a time out of history (cars and cans of beer co-exist with halberds and suits of armour), On the Marble Cliffs tells - through the eyes of a retired soldier cum botanist - the tale of the demise of The Marina, a peaceful country of agriculture, which is stormed and ransacked by the minions of the Head Ranger, the ruler of the Forest Lands that lie beyond the pastoral lands of The Campagna.

The narrator sets the scene of an idyllic life classifying plant specimens (Junger himself was an avid amateur botanist, and On the Marble Cliffs abounds with descriptions of plants) with allusions to a previous life of battle, and describes how the agents of the Head Ranger slowly bring crime, death and chaos into the land of The Campagna, and then The Marina.

Junger's description of the slow creep of nihilism into the life of The Marina is where one can more closely call this work a parable of the growth of Nazism. The people of the Marina refuse to contemplate that change is possible, and fail to see that the change in their habits has been brought about by them being tempted to sink as low as the Forest people. Junger places the narrator and Brother Otho (the term brother here is used in its real meaning, and also in the sense that the narrator and Otho  were similar to monks in their outlook on life) as above the general fray of human existence, their minds being on a higher plane. Junger's aristocratic outlook on life comes through in how he portrays most of the characters in the book - while cutting through sloganeering, the narrator does believe in a natural hierarchy of people, with the Forest people at the bottom, the herders of The Campagna having a type of rustic nobility, and the most enlightened being the poets and priests of The Marina.

Junger's style and thought is clear on every page of On the Marble Cliffs: his limpid prose creates a dreamlike quality to the story, which only adds to the horror of the final battle and destruction of The Marina. Junger's philosophy is also threaded through the text: a nineteenth-century Germanic outlook of romantic angst, where feelings matter, but are almost indescribable, and where human worth and value is only seen at the ultimate when put to the test in battle, and if you are on the losing side, you either die with honour, or retreat and leave the victor to his spoils.

While On the Marble Cliffs certainly makes some sort of political point, its ethereal quality dulls its polemic nature, and gives the whole book a sense of unreality that disengages the reader from the action. In many ways it reads like a fairy tale, and perhaps that is exactly what it is.

Cheers for now, from
A View Over the Bell