As I was contemplating the lily, a thin blue ray of light flashed on the vineyard road below and groped its way over the slopes. Then I heard an automobile stop at the main gate. Although we were not expecting guests, I went down to the gate … and there I saw a powerful car, humming softly like the almost imperceptible whirring of an insect. It bore the colors reserved to the high nobility of New Burgundy, and before it stood two men, one of whom made the sign with which Mauretanians identify themselves in the dark. He told me his name, Braquemart, one I recalled, and introduced the other as the young Prince of Sunmyra, a lord of New Burgundian lineage.
This is how Ernst Jünger’s 1939 classic On The Marble Cliffs reaches its turning point.
In the 1920s Ernst Jünger emerged as one of Germany’s most influential writers of World War I and its aftermath. A holder of Germany’s highest decoration for valour - Pour le Mérite - Jünger’s Storm of Steel (1920) rendered the experience of trench warfare in both vivid and at times hallucinatory terms. In the 1920s and 1930s Jünger made a name for himself as a nationalist prophet of technological modernity, advocating a wholehearted, nihilistic embrace of modern power beyond any of the claims of conventional, 19th-century norms. Writings on total mobilization (1930) and “The Worker” (1932) were the pinnacle of this phase.
Compared to these urgent, highly contemporary diagnoses of “modern times”, On The Marble Cliffs, published in 1939 just before the outbreak of World War II, marks a break. Though many more intellectual Nazis no doubt saw themselves as translating Jünger’s vision into action, Jünger himself was not at ease in the Third Reich. Unlike figures such as Heidegger and Schmitt, with whom he had been familiar in the early 1930s, Jünger sought no close association with the regime. He traveled, wrote unpublished manuscripts and withdrew to the provincial idyll of Überlingen on Lake Constance. It was in this period, that he conceived On the Marble Cliffs, a fantasy, set not so much within the present day, as in an imagined, composite moment in history.
Jünger conjures a world of high-powered cars with powerful lights, which make evening visits to vineyard retreats. This could be a scene in a French movie or novel at any point from the 1910s onwards.
But the drivers of the car don’t themselves belong in the 20th century. They are members of a hierarchical aristocratic order, with its own distinctive livery. They recognize each other by the gestures of their warrior clan, the Mauretanians. Even their names carry the flavor of the French middle ages. Braquemart is the name of a short sword.
Their livery is that of “New Burgundy”. Of course, there is no such thing. But amongst the cognoscenti, the lost principality of Burgundy is a byword for chivalric honor and medieval chic.
So this is a world both futuristic and medieval at the same time. It is a strange cultural cocktail, the past and the future in one. A strange cocktail, perhaps, but hardly unfamiliar. The feudal-sci-fi mix will inspire science-fiction for the rest of the 20th century. The AI algo is well primed.
In Jünger’s book we are not in a galaxy far, far away, but in a terrestial geography that seems modeled on the picturesque countryside around Lake Constance. In Jünger’s fantasy, Burgundy lies to the West, the realm of the horrible Oberförster, the forests, are to the North, the Alps to the South.
So, why are these two warlike New Burgundians paying an evening visit to our narrator?
Braquemart and the Prince of Sunmyra are on a mission. They are plotting a strike against the Oberförster (Chief Forester), the shadowy force threatening this idyllic world with overthrow and disaster. The grisly fiasco of that mission will produce the terrible climax of Jünger’s short book.
Here is a short description from an excellent, near-contemporary review by William H. Rey.
The novel Auf den Marmorklippen is the story of two brothers who witness the collapse of a civilization brought about by a barbaric demon of the forests, the Oberförster (Chief Forester). In their struggle for the old order they find allies in a Christian priest, Pater Lampros, and the noble prince Sunmyra, both of whom sacrifice themselves when the catastrophe occurs: Lampros meets death in the flames of his monastery; Sunmyra is tortured and lulled by the subhuman creatures of the Chief Forester after an unsuccessful attempt to break his power. This attempt was supported by Braquemart who is, however, not a defender of the old order but rather a modem rival of the Chief Forester in the struggle for power. In the end, the whole civilized area is destroyed and conquered by the Chief Forester, and the two brothers have to leave the country.
One crude reading of Auf den Marmorklippen is that it is an allegory on Hitler’s dictatorship. The Oberförster is the Führer, or perhaps his #2, Hermann Goering. The Prince of Sunmyra is a member of Germany’s aristocratic resistance, the men who met their fate in July 1944.
But this seems both simplistic and implausible. The Oberförster and the Führer may both be evil, but otherwise they have little in common. The Oberförster’s disastrous project consists above all in the unleashing of wild, destructive animal violence. That was not Hitler’s vision. Stalin was a greater sadist than Hitler, but he too hardly fits the image of primal violence evoked by the Oberförster.
Jünger knows a thing or two about violence. His battle scenes are vivid, at times bordering on the pornographic. To add to the incongruity of timescapes, the most violent scenes feature war dogs - one strain of which, Jünger goes out of his way to tell us - were bred from the notorious slave-hunting mastiffs of Cuba.
Rather than focusing on specifically 20th-century horror, Jünger seems determined to evoke an entire history of violence. In the battle between the narrators, their allies and the forces of the Oberförster, amidst the howling and baying of the dogs there are crossbows, medieval siege weapons, the flaying of corpses, and memories of unnamed “machines of destruction” operated by champagne-swilling warriors (sic). It is all a little reminiscent of the legendary Roy Batty monologue in Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner.
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
It would be easy to dismiss Jünger’s novella as little more than violent pastiche, were it not for the fact that it serves as a vehicle for a quite extraordinary psychogram of the modern, warrior technician, the violent visionary, the nihilist captain of power.
The crucial figure here is not the narrator, who is trying to overcome his own violent past by turning to religion and natural history. Nor is it Prince Sunmyra - a self-sacrificial aristocrat who chooses transcendental sacrifice. The key figure, is Braquemart, the Mauritanian warrior and associate of the Prince of Sunmyra. In this short novel Braquemart is the only character described with real psychological depth and he is a figure full of ambiguity. Here is Jünger’s description:
We knew Braquemart from earlier days (the narrator tells us, AT) but had only ever seen him briefly, because he was often traveling. He was a short, dark, gaunt fellow whom we found to be cut from a rather coarse cloth but, like all Mauretanians, he did not lack wit. He was one of those we jokingly called “tiger hunters” because we often met them embarked on some exotic adventure. He sought danger the way others climb richly crevassed massifs for sport: he despised the plains. Stronghearted, he did not shy away from obstacles; unfortunately, however, this virtue was paired with contempt. Like all zealots of power and supremacy, his wildest dreams were reserved to utopian realms. He believed there had always been two races on this earth—masters and slaves—and that over the course of time some interbreeding had occurred. In this regard, he was a disciple of old Petardier and, like the latter, called for them to be separated again. Like every crude theoretician, he fed on those sciences of the moment and was particularly occupied with archeology. He was not nuanced enough to suspect that our spades infallibly uncover the very evidence we already have in mind, and like many before him, he had in this way discovered the first cradle of the human race. We were present at the assembly when he reported on his excavations, and we heard how he had come upon a strange tableland in some distant desert. Tall columns of porphyry rose from the vast plain—they had withstood the weather’s onslaughts and stood like bastions or rocky islands. Braquemart had scaled these columns and on their high plateaus he had found the ruins of princely palaces and temples of the sun he dated to prehistoric times. After he had described their dimensions and characteristics, he evoked a picture of the land. He portrayed lush, green prairies settled by herders and farmers with their flocks as far as the eye could see and, above them … He set ships with purple decks sailing down a river that had long since run dry; we could see the hundred oars dip into the water with insect-like regularity and hear the clash of cymbals and the crack of the whip that lashed the ill-fated galley slaves. These images were fitting for Braquemart. He was of that breed of men who dream concretely, a very dangerous sort.
Given Jünger’s own proclivities - he was, indeed, a man who “dreamed concretely” - this is painfully close to the bone. And Jünger does not flinch from the obvious question:
It may seem strange that Braquemart would want to oppose the Head Forester in this conflict even though many of their thoughts and actions were aligned. But we often make the mistake of conflating a similarity of means with a similarity of goals and a unity of motivations driving them. The difference was that the Head Forester intended to populate the Marina (the idyllic urban civilization by the side of the lake) with wild beasts while Braquemart saw it as a land that would furnish slaves and captive armies. It was, fundamentally, an internal conflict among the Mauretanians, which is not feasible to elucidate here. Suffice it to say that there is a profound difference between fully formed nihilism and unchecked anarchy. The outcome of the struggle will determine whether human settlements will become wasteland or virgin forest.
This should be enough to exclude any reading that aligns the Head Forester with either Hitler or Stalin. An anarchy of wild beasts in a virgin forest was neither of their ideals. They were closer, in fact, to Braquemart and so were many others of their generation. And this, surely, is Jünger’s point:
With regard to Braquemart, he was marked by all the traits of full-fledged nihilism. His was a cold, rootless intelligence with a penchant for utopias. He, like all his kind, saw life as the workings of a timepiece and so in his eyes violence and terror were simply the wheels that drive life’s clock. At the same time, he indulged in the idea of a second, artificial nature and became intoxicated by scents of man-made flowers and the pleasures of a simulated sensuality. In his heart, creation had been suffocated and reconstructed like the mechanism of a toy. Frost flowers bloomed on his forehead. On seeing him, one inevitably thought of his master’s profound saying: “The desert grows—woe to him who carries deserts within!” (The master in question is Nietzsche’s Zarathustra).
And Jünger does not stop there. He takes us closer and closer. He allows us to “feel” the man.
Nevertheless, we still felt some sympathy for Braquemart—not so much because he was fearless, for the closer to stone a man is, the less credit he deserves for bravery. Rather, we were drawn by a subtle suffering—the bitterness of a man who had lost all hope of salvation. For this he sought vengeance on the world, the way a child destroys a bed of flowers in futile rage. He did not spare himself and penetrated the labyrinths of terror with cold audacity. Similarly, when we lose the sense of our fatherland, we set out in search of distant worlds filled with adventure. Braquemart modeled his thinking on life and insisted that ideas be armed, tooth and claw. Yet his theories were like distillations without any real vitality; they lacked the delicious element of lavishness that gives any dish its flavor. His projects all suffered from aridity even though not a single flaw could be found in his logic; so a bell’s sonority is sapped by an invisible fault. This was due to the fact that for him, power was expressed too much in thought and not enough in grandezza, or in innate disinvolture. In this respect, he could not match the Head Forester, who wore his power like an old hunting jacket that fit more comfortably the more it was soaked with dirt and blood.
The recondite vocabulary is one of the ways in which Jünger distances us from the present and composes his historical pastiche. In case you were wondering, “disinvolture” derives from the French désinvolture and Italian disinvoltura. It is a noun that means a casual, free, and unconstrained manner, sometimes bordering on flippancy or offhandedness, in other words an attitude of aristocratic ease. By the late 1930s it had emerged as one of Jünger’s personal ideals.
For all the historical drapery, it is here, in this description of Braquemart that Jünger breaks cover. “Braquemart modeled his thinking on life and insisted that ideas be armed, tooth and claw.” This is a portrait of the character of power that goes beyond cliché, whether that be Max Weber’s “iron cage", or the banality of “seeing like a state”.
Ultimately, it seems obvious that Jünger is writing about himself. If so, this penetrating characterization of the nihilism of power, marks a significant waystone in his intellectua development. The Jünger of World War I and its long aftermath, was locked in the persona of Braquemart. By the late 1930s, in Auf den Marmorklippen Jünger is trying to imagine an escape.
Having fallen into the hands of the Oberförster and his grisly crew, Braquemart chooses suicide. The story is carried forward by the narrator and his brother. They heed the call of duty and follow Braquemart and the Prince into battle. Against the bloodthirsty violence of the Oberförster’s demon dogs, they too go down to defeat. But for Jünger this is not the end of the story. As William H. Rey remarks:
… the attitude of the narrator and his brother is determined by the realization that the powers of life do not represent the only, and certainly not the highest, level of reality. Within the elementary abundance of nature they have discovered a spiritual structure which endows the chaos of boundless vitality with law and measure. It is quite significant that Linnaeus (the 18th-century naturalist), ‘who with the Marshall’s rod of the word steps into chaos of animal and plant life’ appears here as a venerated guide and model. Under his influence the brothers see in the garden an ideal combination of spontaneous vitality and spiritual order. In the delicate forms of their flowers - Remember where we started: “As I was contemplating the lily, a thin blue ray of light flashed on the vineyard road below” (AT) - they find both the sensual beauty and the divine secret of life. This metaphysical insight requires a corresponding ethic.”
Auf den Marmorklippen is a document of this realization. The Nietzschean embrace of violent energy is revealed as a lethal threat to any possibility of a good life. The answer to that threat is a “humanistic ideal of a synthesis between freedom and responsibility, the powers of the earth and of the spirit.”
However, Jünger doesn’t simply relapse into an ethical voluntarism. The power of the Oberförster cannot be denied and his violent and destructive triumph is no accident. The rise of nihilism has historical conditions:
The rise of nihilism is possible only through a loss of faith, a reduction of the religious substance as it occurred in modern Europe under the influence of rationalistic and scientific criticism. … neither the Chief Forester nor Braquemart are the real causes of the cultural crisis: both of them exploit only an existing situation brought about by the decay of moral and spiritual values. If this is true, then the enemies of civilization cannot be fought effectively either in the political or in the military field. … neither liberalism (which he regards as the historical preparation of nihilism) nor conservatism (which has lost its social and moral foundations) can be the remedy for the nihilistic crisis. Since force can create only terror but not belief, the best weapon against nihilism is the change of the human heart
What saves Jünger from despair, is not just the hope of a spiritual reawakening, therefore, but a reimagining of history. Crucially, Jünger, perhaps under the influence of Sengler, comes to see history as cycle. As Rey explains:
Jünger believes that the process of cultural decay is a historical necessity that occurs periodically. This cyclic concept of history results in a strange mixture of resignation and hope. Resignation - because the crisis of civilization is inevitable. Hope - because it is only one phase in the swinging of the historical pendulum and will be followed by a period of regeneration. … History, like nature, belongs now to the realm of appearance. The divine order cannot be affected, therefore, by historical repercussions; it will always re-emerge out of the vortex of catastrophe. This means that the victory of the Oberförster is only an historical episode and not a metaphysical decision. … In the midst of catastrophe and panic the Christian community at the Marina turns to God for help, and Jünger gives us reason to believe that their prayers will not be in vain. Their reborn faith appears as the germ-cell of a new civilization based on the permanent order of things.
Rey’s analysis of Jünger’s train of thought is both illuminating and by the same token unsatisfying. Ultimately, Auf den Marmorklippen, beautiful though it may be at times, is an exercise in escapism. But what remains truly impressive is Jünger’s portrait of the forces that he is seeking to escape. What we should read and reread is his warning against the crude zealots of power, the makers of self-serving archaeologies and arid utopias, comforting their subtle suffering with the intoxicating scent of man-made flowers.
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Is the mood of resignation before cyclic history not a bit like the joke about the two Berliners in 1933, one of whom says to the other, "Don't worry about this Hitler fellow, he'll only last twelve years"?
I cannot believe someone as savy as you describes Stalin as more a sadist than Hitler or a sadist at all. We have Stalin to thank (whatever errors he may have made) for both the victory of the red army over the Nazis and the struggle for industrialization that insured that victory. While any regime is likely to find some “sadists” to do the dirty work, think of ICE today, the Soviets did correct sadistic behavior when it was discovered. As a surviving member of a large family, my father’s most of whom met their end in the death camp of Treblinka I take offense at your conflating Stalin with a genocidal murderer like Hitler. The red army will always be my hero.