On marble cliffs - SpeedyLook encyclopedia

On marble cliffs ( Auf den Marmorklippen ) is an account of Ernst Jünger published in 1939 which represents what many criticisms regard as its masterpiece. It is about a novel Allégorique, or a “legendary account”, denouncing the Barbarie. It was translated into French by Henri Thomas.

Account

In this text, Ernst Jünger describes two brothers who work within vast a Ermitage, occupied by their Bibliothèque and their immense Herbier, living peacefully in the contemplation of the Nature. Their quietude is brutally broken by the irruption of the Grand Forester whose Horde S sow devastation: The criminal acts which Campagna knew already renewed then, and the inhabitants were removed with the favor of the night and the fog. No one did not return from there. What we intend to whisper of their destiny among the people made think of the corpses lizards that we find skinned under cliffs, and the heart filled us with affliction. Some see in this figure of the " Large forestier" a vision hardly transposed of Hitler. The author, then old of 97 years, expressed itself on this point:

To tell the truth, I still thought of a type of more powerful dictator, démoniaque. (...) If it went well in Hitler, the history showed that it could also be appropriate for a character of greater scale still: Stalin. And it will be able to correspond to good of others hommes.

Genesis of work

Reactions around the book

Its life, like that of its editor, is threatened by the publication of the book, but he escapes any sanction because Hitler tested Sympathie to its first accounts of war (and in particular Orages of steel ) and its figure of hero of the First World War.

The book was as of its publication a sharp success and the first pulling was quickly exhausted by it.

George Steiner estimates that the book perhaps was the only act of major resistance, of sabotage inside, which appeared in the German literature under the mode hitlérien.

Account analyzes

Julien Gracq delivered a text in which he comments on his reading of the account. For him, On marble cliffs, It is not an explanation of our time. is not either a book with key where one can, as some were tempted to do it, to put names on the worrying or imposing figures which rise these pages. With more truth, one could call it a work symbolic system, and it would be only on the condition of admitting that the symbols can there be read only in enigma and through a mirror.

According to Michel Vanoosthuyse, the character of the Large Forester returned from the start to Stalin and certainly not to Hitler:

To make of the satrap vivor and very Eastern that by certain sides the Large Forester is the transfer of Hitler, it is to be short-sighted. That the victims of the Large Forester and his henchmen are precisely the craftsmen and the sedentary peasants of the Marina, faithful to their rites, their festivals and their ancestors, amateurs of order, should incite with prudence, or suggest, if one wants to maintain at all costs interpretation antinazie novel, that Jünger does not include/understand definitely anything with the policy; actually, it includes/understands it too well.

See too

anti-totalitarian Literary works

External bonds

Quotations drawn from the book on Wikiquote

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