I have read On the Marble Cliffs and I enjoyed it very much.
I would like to point out why I find especially the final claim convincing and thank the reviewer for stating it so clearly (I missed this when I read the book myself).
Twelve years after On the Marble Cliffs, Jünger published his essay The Forest Passage (Der Waldgang). The point of this essay is essentially, to use the reviewers own words, that "[...] he was publishing advice. Advice on how to survive the catastrophe of evil totalitarian dictatorship. And the beauty is the point." And as non-fiction essay, it is much more straightforward in doing so. It starts with the question "How do you resist (say in an autocracy)? What does it mean to rebel?". In answering this, he is not giving a technical manual of steps to follow. He still remains opaque, but nonetheless I found it very obvious that the same burning questions are occupying him.
Whether you enjoy the mythical-poetic language, which also On The Marble Cliff is soaked in, or not, is a matter of taste I guess. But The Forest Passage neatly continues the themes, the legacy of this novel, that were discussed in this review.
I would question the claim that "He was remarkably right, years before most could see it": a lot of Germans knew precisely what Hitler was long before 1935 (many of the Jews, but a lot of others, too). Perhaps the author meant that within the subset of "German nationalists who were not Nazis", most couldn't see it, and while that's doubtlessly true, I think that fact is far more a critique of German nationalists than anything positive about Jünger.
Also, pet peeve I suppose, but "fiction novel" is redundant. Notwithstanding the few efforts by Norman Mailer & one or two others, novels are fiction. (This is a common mistake among students, but it *is* a mistake, one that grates.)
Well written review, convinced me to read the book! If anyone found the description of Weimar Germany interesting, I highly recommend the TV show Babylon Berlin, a fantastic crime/detective series with strong political overtones set in the era (it's on Netflix).
Not to detract from Junger's bravery in publishing these sentiments, but I think the author here went a little overboard claiming that Junger was the first to see or say these things on Hitler. It's my understanding that people had been declaiming Hitler from the start, but he still had enough of an appeal to enough people to get ahead.
> If you saturate the full bandwidth of your attention with observation, no space remains for looping thoughts, mourning and rumination. And the easiest way to fill your mind with observation is to find beauty in all the little details.
I can confirm this. I've been doing this for decades and it's great at dispersing intrusive thoughts as well. One avenue is to deliberately widen your perception to your entire visual field.
Great review. Irrelevant comment below, but one I've always wanted an answer to:
Is it possible that Junger was just a bullshit merchant? I've never read anything that stank of bullshit as much as Storm of Steel did. Alright, "read" would be an overstatement, I gave up, but a lot of it seemed in involve a distinct lack of survive eye witnesses, he was a weird military fetishist (and failure) even before the war, and again, the reek of bullshit. A very teenage kind of bullshit.
You've almost made me want to read something else he wrote, though, which I wouldn't have thought possible. Thank you
I like the review overall, but I have an objection. If a soldier only kills the people he's supposed to kill, it's not right to call him a serial killer, even if he enjoys it.
The review mentions that some people think the Chief Ranger is Göring, but doesn't say why. I assume it's because he was the head of the Reich Forestry Office.
FWIW, Ernst Juenger and his brother both resigned their membership in their regiment's veterans' organization when that organization expelled its Jewish membership. He also refused to speak on German radio and refused to allow Nazi papers to reprint his works. That said, it would not do for the Nazis to crack down on their most famous non-Nazi nationalist in Germany. Something similar is also apparently what protected Wilhelm Furtwaengler.
Moreover, Wilhelmine Germany wasn't particularly antisemitic, by the standards of Europe at that time. That bogus prize probably went to Czarist Russia, although the Czarist government's antisemitism was based on religion and not race, per se. This is why a lot of German Jews worshiped Germany, why Arnold Schoenberg wrote without a touch of irony that he had secured the supremacy of German music. In 1932.
This is not to say that Juenger was a western-style liberal, but he also wasn't a caricature.
It seems like there's another piece of advice in the book for how to survive an evil totalitarian dictatorship that might be so obvious it goes without saying: once you realize what's going on, get the fuck out before it's too late.
"Germany had entered modernity without democracy. The Kaiserreich (German Empire) had united the many small German states, aggressively worked to catch up with industrialization, built a state to rival France and Great Britain, and remained authoritarian throughout. "
It wasn't unusually undemocratic relative to its neighbors, Germany had universal suffrage at the national(not the state) level in 1871, Britain didn't get it until 1918.
An extremely minor quibble to an otherwise interesting review: snakes are not "poisonous", they are "venomous". An animal is "poisonous" if it has a toxin that makes you ill if you consume it, e.g. a pufferfish or, surprisingly, any amphibian. An animal is "venomous" if it injects venom into you via bites or stingers or the like. (Technically there are I think a couple of species of poisonous snakes, that become poisonous because they consume highly poisonous newts.)
I don't know much 1930's German history, but I know snakes. Now back to the serious comments.
"I believe this book is his answer. And the answer is: look at beauty. Once you realize this, the entire book turns around. When the brothers see the extermination camp and distract themselves with botany, it isn't minimizing the horror, it is advice on how to remain functional in the face of catastrophe. Jünger says that quite explicitly:"
This reminds me of something Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in Orsinian Tales:
"What good is music? None ... and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, 'You are irrelevant'; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, 'Listen.' For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky."
Hey there reviewer X. Have you read Mann’s Magic Mountain. I’ve only read it in English but the second time I read it I realized there are a _lott_ of English idioms in there. That translation seems very good but It would be interesting to hear how well they correspond to the original German.
I read some - not a whole lot - Russian and Russian idioms can pack a lot meaning into some phrases the don’t always work in English.
I’m thinking of a phrase from Dostoyevsky, “Let the stove and cottage dance!” A lazy translation might be “Party time!” but you would lose the Russian folk wisdom and humor with such a dry phrase.
I would like to deliberately invert Godwin's Law by invoking Trump in a discussion about Hitler. I wonder to what extent Jünger's criticism of Hitler was merely a mask for an antipathy towards a man and a movement that was -low class-.
"There were parties, a parliament and a newly homogenized judiciary, but they had little power to check the executive."
I don't think that this is an accurate characterisation. While the WRV (see for example Art.48 WRV)/the institutional system certainly had its defincies, it was the lack of a political homogeneity that crippled parliament and led to the Reichspräsident governing by executive order. That said, I did enjoy "In Stahlgewittern" most of all the Jünger books I have read so far.
Braquemart and Smyrna are indeed based on acquaintances of Jünger, as noted in a New Yorker piece by Alex Ross, published a month ago.
"In 1938, Heinrich von Trott zu Solz, a young member of the anti-Nazi resistance, drove up to the house where Jünger and his brother were living, accompanied by two former members of the Communist Party, one of whom appears to have inspired the character of Sunmyra. The idea was to recruit Jünger, but he proved unwilling. Five years after “On the Marble Cliffs” was published, on July 20, 1944, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, acting in league with Trott zu Solz’s brother Adam, attempted to assassinate Hitler. Both conspirators were executed."
An outstanding review among many great reviews. Congratulations to the author, this was one of the most interesting and captivating texts I’ve read in a while.
This ought to be read in tandem with another great, less allegorical, work about the Nazis: Victor Klemperer's _I Will Bear Witness_. I am tempted to write a companion review of Klemperer just to explore the comparison and contrast-- he was a liberal Jewish intellectual who I am sure would have disagreed with Junger about almost everything, and yet found some common ground in extolling the life of the mind as a coping technique in dark times.
Re the section on translations: I know waaaaay too little about German to know if Junger would have intended this allusion, but "Blumenkelche" reminds me of Heine's "Ich will meine Seele tauchen / In den Kelch der Lilie hinein" (which admittedly I only know because Schumann put it in the Dichterliebe) and if it is an allusion to Heine, I can only imagine what a fraught little bit of anti-anti-semitism that might have been at the time.
The writing is interesting, I read it to the end. The author's enthusiasm was obvious.
On the other hand it had the stated goal of making me want to read the book, and it definitely failed at that goal, for me. Book reviews can have the desired end result of warning people off a bad book, but it's weird to read one that is highly enthusiastic about the greatness of a book, that everyone should read, that also sounds... Intolerably dull.
Your conclusion and slice of personal advice caught me off guard, I almost cried. This review is one of the most beautifully constructed story on the internet. Thanks so much.
> He knew enough about the military strength of the various European powers, and was distant enough from the Nazi enthusiasm for war, to know that the putrid state of Germany that surrounded him was headed for catastrophic defeat and collapse.
While I detest the Nazis as much as anyone, I do not think that their military enterprise was doomed to fail from the start. In fact, it went really well for a time. Various fascists controlled most of continental Europe in 1942, after all.
Of course, one can argue that the ideology of the Nazis made it impossible for them to keep the peace with Stalin (they considered the Slavs to be Untermenschen, after all), but that is not a purely military argument.
In a dystopian alternate world, a smarter revanchist Germany may have well conquered most of Europe without pissing of either the USSR or the US.
It took far more time than I'd have liked to get through this review, but I am glad that I did. You've taken an admirable lesson from the book. One of my favorite reviews this year.
Interesting review. I highly recommend On the Marble Cliffs as well.
This is an outstanding essay, everything a book review should be:
- A thorough review of the book itself? Check.
- A digressive essay that takes the book as a starting point and goes its own merry way? Check.
- Novel, thought-provoking ideas? Check.
- Conveys a sense of personal enthusiasm and fascination, while avoiding didacticism? Check.
IMO the best so far! Well done to the author.
I have read On the Marble Cliffs and I enjoyed it very much.
I would like to point out why I find especially the final claim convincing and thank the reviewer for stating it so clearly (I missed this when I read the book myself).
Twelve years after On the Marble Cliffs, Jünger published his essay The Forest Passage (Der Waldgang). The point of this essay is essentially, to use the reviewers own words, that "[...] he was publishing advice. Advice on how to survive the catastrophe of evil totalitarian dictatorship. And the beauty is the point." And as non-fiction essay, it is much more straightforward in doing so. It starts with the question "How do you resist (say in an autocracy)? What does it mean to rebel?". In answering this, he is not giving a technical manual of steps to follow. He still remains opaque, but nonetheless I found it very obvious that the same burning questions are occupying him.
Whether you enjoy the mythical-poetic language, which also On The Marble Cliff is soaked in, or not, is a matter of taste I guess. But The Forest Passage neatly continues the themes, the legacy of this novel, that were discussed in this review.
Worth noting that Hood was a Communist (although apparently of the Trotskyist variety).
Great review.
I would question the claim that "He was remarkably right, years before most could see it": a lot of Germans knew precisely what Hitler was long before 1935 (many of the Jews, but a lot of others, too). Perhaps the author meant that within the subset of "German nationalists who were not Nazis", most couldn't see it, and while that's doubtlessly true, I think that fact is far more a critique of German nationalists than anything positive about Jünger.
Also, pet peeve I suppose, but "fiction novel" is redundant. Notwithstanding the few efforts by Norman Mailer & one or two others, novels are fiction. (This is a common mistake among students, but it *is* a mistake, one that grates.)
A nicely done review.
I appreciated references to the nuances of translation.
Not sure about the ostensible suicide and your own personal gloss.
For another well done review. See https://voegelinview.com/between-order-and-disorder-ernst-junger-on-the-marble-cliffs/ by Portuguese fellow Francisco Carmo Garcia
Well written review, convinced me to read the book! If anyone found the description of Weimar Germany interesting, I highly recommend the TV show Babylon Berlin, a fantastic crime/detective series with strong political overtones set in the era (it's on Netflix).
Not to detract from Junger's bravery in publishing these sentiments, but I think the author here went a little overboard claiming that Junger was the first to see or say these things on Hitler. It's my understanding that people had been declaiming Hitler from the start, but he still had enough of an appeal to enough people to get ahead.
> If you saturate the full bandwidth of your attention with observation, no space remains for looping thoughts, mourning and rumination. And the easiest way to fill your mind with observation is to find beauty in all the little details.
I can confirm this. I've been doing this for decades and it's great at dispersing intrusive thoughts as well. One avenue is to deliberately widen your perception to your entire visual field.
Great review. Irrelevant comment below, but one I've always wanted an answer to:
Is it possible that Junger was just a bullshit merchant? I've never read anything that stank of bullshit as much as Storm of Steel did. Alright, "read" would be an overstatement, I gave up, but a lot of it seemed in involve a distinct lack of survive eye witnesses, he was a weird military fetishist (and failure) even before the war, and again, the reek of bullshit. A very teenage kind of bullshit.
You've almost made me want to read something else he wrote, though, which I wouldn't have thought possible. Thank you
I like the review overall, but I have an objection. If a soldier only kills the people he's supposed to kill, it's not right to call him a serial killer, even if he enjoys it.
The review mentions that some people think the Chief Ranger is Göring, but doesn't say why. I assume it's because he was the head of the Reich Forestry Office.
FWIW, Ernst Juenger and his brother both resigned their membership in their regiment's veterans' organization when that organization expelled its Jewish membership. He also refused to speak on German radio and refused to allow Nazi papers to reprint his works. That said, it would not do for the Nazis to crack down on their most famous non-Nazi nationalist in Germany. Something similar is also apparently what protected Wilhelm Furtwaengler.
Moreover, Wilhelmine Germany wasn't particularly antisemitic, by the standards of Europe at that time. That bogus prize probably went to Czarist Russia, although the Czarist government's antisemitism was based on religion and not race, per se. This is why a lot of German Jews worshiped Germany, why Arnold Schoenberg wrote without a touch of irony that he had secured the supremacy of German music. In 1932.
This is not to say that Juenger was a western-style liberal, but he also wasn't a caricature.
It seems like there's another piece of advice in the book for how to survive an evil totalitarian dictatorship that might be so obvious it goes without saying: once you realize what's going on, get the fuck out before it's too late.
I've often wondered how people like Jünger who support authoritarianism of some stripe or another can write peons to human freedom.
I suppose by freedom they don't necessarily mean the degree to which it is taken in the modern west?
Or perhaps you meant authoritarianism in contrast to democracy, as Scott used the word in the previous post, not in contrast to liberty?
Great review. Many kudos to the author.
"Germany had entered modernity without democracy. The Kaiserreich (German Empire) had united the many small German states, aggressively worked to catch up with industrialization, built a state to rival France and Great Britain, and remained authoritarian throughout. "
It wasn't unusually undemocratic relative to its neighbors, Germany had universal suffrage at the national(not the state) level in 1871, Britain didn't get it until 1918.
An extremely minor quibble to an otherwise interesting review: snakes are not "poisonous", they are "venomous". An animal is "poisonous" if it has a toxin that makes you ill if you consume it, e.g. a pufferfish or, surprisingly, any amphibian. An animal is "venomous" if it injects venom into you via bites or stingers or the like. (Technically there are I think a couple of species of poisonous snakes, that become poisonous because they consume highly poisonous newts.)
I don't know much 1930's German history, but I know snakes. Now back to the serious comments.
Fascinating review!
Re:
"I believe this book is his answer. And the answer is: look at beauty. Once you realize this, the entire book turns around. When the brothers see the extermination camp and distract themselves with botany, it isn't minimizing the horror, it is advice on how to remain functional in the face of catastrophe. Jünger says that quite explicitly:"
This reminds me of something Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in Orsinian Tales:
"What good is music? None ... and that is the point. To the world and its states and armies and factories and Leaders, music says, 'You are irrelevant'; and, arrogant and gentle as a god, to the suffering man it says only, 'Listen.' For being saved is not the point. Music saves nothing. Merciful, uncaring, it denies and breaks down all the shelters, the houses men build for themselves, that they may see the sky."
Absolutely beautiful, thank you. And the comments on translation are very apt.
Kaiserreich is an online game that does not mean "German Empire". That would be Deutsches Reich.
Hey there reviewer X. Have you read Mann’s Magic Mountain. I’ve only read it in English but the second time I read it I realized there are a _lott_ of English idioms in there. That translation seems very good but It would be interesting to hear how well they correspond to the original German.
I read some - not a whole lot - Russian and Russian idioms can pack a lot meaning into some phrases the don’t always work in English.
I’m thinking of a phrase from Dostoyevsky, “Let the stove and cottage dance!” A lazy translation might be “Party time!” but you would lose the Russian folk wisdom and humor with such a dry phrase.
I would like to deliberately invert Godwin's Law by invoking Trump in a discussion about Hitler. I wonder to what extent Jünger's criticism of Hitler was merely a mask for an antipathy towards a man and a movement that was -low class-.
Amazing review btw.
Ok, I think we may need to complexify the voting this year. Too many fantastic reviews. Ranked choice? Quadratic voting? Condorcet?
What about allowing for tied ranks except 1st place? I'd love to hear three reviews ranked 2nd place and four others 3rd.
"There were parties, a parliament and a newly homogenized judiciary, but they had little power to check the executive."
I don't think that this is an accurate characterisation. While the WRV (see for example Art.48 WRV)/the institutional system certainly had its defincies, it was the lack of a political homogeneity that crippled parliament and led to the Reichspräsident governing by executive order. That said, I did enjoy "In Stahlgewittern" most of all the Jünger books I have read so far.
Geez, not too many reactionaries like that anymore.
Braquemart and Smyrna are indeed based on acquaintances of Jünger, as noted in a New Yorker piece by Alex Ross, published a month ago.
"In 1938, Heinrich von Trott zu Solz, a young member of the anti-Nazi resistance, drove up to the house where Jünger and his brother were living, accompanied by two former members of the Communist Party, one of whom appears to have inspired the character of Sunmyra. The idea was to recruit Jünger, but he proved unwilling. Five years after “On the Marble Cliffs” was published, on July 20, 1944, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, acting in league with Trott zu Solz’s brother Adam, attempted to assassinate Hitler. Both conspirators were executed."
An outstanding review among many great reviews. Congratulations to the author, this was one of the most interesting and captivating texts I’ve read in a while.
Excellent review. Well done to the author.
Previously, I wasn't going to vote for a review as so many were so comparably good
This ought to be read in tandem with another great, less allegorical, work about the Nazis: Victor Klemperer's _I Will Bear Witness_. I am tempted to write a companion review of Klemperer just to explore the comparison and contrast-- he was a liberal Jewish intellectual who I am sure would have disagreed with Junger about almost everything, and yet found some common ground in extolling the life of the mind as a coping technique in dark times.
Re the section on translations: I know waaaaay too little about German to know if Junger would have intended this allusion, but "Blumenkelche" reminds me of Heine's "Ich will meine Seele tauchen / In den Kelch der Lilie hinein" (which admittedly I only know because Schumann put it in the Dichterliebe) and if it is an allusion to Heine, I can only imagine what a fraught little bit of anti-anti-semitism that might have been at the time.
amazing stuff. probably the best written review this year yet
This is my favorite review of the current crop. I think there should be more fiction reviews in the contest.
Well this is an interesting one to evaluate.
The writing is interesting, I read it to the end. The author's enthusiasm was obvious.
On the other hand it had the stated goal of making me want to read the book, and it definitely failed at that goal, for me. Book reviews can have the desired end result of warning people off a bad book, but it's weird to read one that is highly enthusiastic about the greatness of a book, that everyone should read, that also sounds... Intolerably dull.
So. Not sure how to grade this one.
OK, color me *damned impressed* with this review as a piece of writing in its own right!
Having only read Storm of Steel I don't really agree that Jünger had no sense of humor. There's a lot of dry humor in that book.
Your conclusion and slice of personal advice caught me off guard, I almost cried. This review is one of the most beautifully constructed story on the internet. Thanks so much.
https://archive.org/details/ErnstJungerOnTheMarbleCliffsbOk.xyz
The best review I’ve seen in all the book contests to date
> He knew enough about the military strength of the various European powers, and was distant enough from the Nazi enthusiasm for war, to know that the putrid state of Germany that surrounded him was headed for catastrophic defeat and collapse.
While I detest the Nazis as much as anyone, I do not think that their military enterprise was doomed to fail from the start. In fact, it went really well for a time. Various fascists controlled most of continental Europe in 1942, after all.
Of course, one can argue that the ideology of the Nazis made it impossible for them to keep the peace with Stalin (they considered the Slavs to be Untermenschen, after all), but that is not a purely military argument.
In a dystopian alternate world, a smarter revanchist Germany may have well conquered most of Europe without pissing of either the USSR or the US.
Wow! Amazing review.
It took far more time than I'd have liked to get through this review, but I am glad that I did. You've taken an admirable lesson from the book. One of my favorite reviews this year.
Incredible review. Thank you so much. I had reread Storm of Steel multiple times and now look forward to reading this book.