SOURCE: "Ernst Jünger's Auf den Marmorklippen: a sketch toward an interpretation," in Symbolism and Modern Literature, edited by Marcel Tetel, Duke University Press, 1978, pp. 26-43.

[In the following essay, Evans, Jr. discusses the plot and philosophy behind Jünger's Auf den Marmorklippen, and asserts that Jünger believes "in the power of civilizing energies to overcome evil."]

Ernst Jünger's allegorical novel depicts a model of world harmony, a cosmos destroyed by brutish, anarchical forces. It opens on a nostalgic note, evoking the poignant memories of a way of life founded on fraternity, civil order, the rhythm of nature, and a respect for the traditional pieties. The mood is autumnal and, appropriately, reference is made to the festivals celebrated once upon a time in conjunction with the yearly harvests. The new wine is tasted, nuts are eaten, there is time for bird shooting, and crowds congregate along the shores of the Grand Marina to carouse and joust with one another in displays of wit. At early morning the sun rises over Alta Plana, situated to the south, beyond the waters of the Marina, just as the sun will set, at the end of the novel—to rise again, we know—upon the prosperous homestead of Ansgar up on the mountains of Alta Plana. On a bright day the eye can see all the way to the borders of New Burgundy where the high-born family of Sunmyra, representative of the declining aristocracy, lives and farms its estates. On their way home at dawn from the fall feastings, the two brothers now and then catch a glimpse of some startling scene or image having the power to call up, but only for a moment, the archaic, preternatural spirit of the land, fecund yet terrible in its promise of unnamed menace.

There were celebrations, too, which usher in the spring equinox. Here the brothers and townspeople of the Marina, dressed up as clowns decked out in bird feathers, join in the merriment by attaching themselves to the guild of the woodpeckers. Meanwhile, the crowd sets up in the old marketplace the traditional tree of fools. In mocking, discordant accompaniment to the general festivity are the shrill call and answer of the authentic birds of the area. Their ominous cry is to the rites of spring what the chilling images of nature's secrets are to the winemaking holidays: a sign of foreboding amidst the general air of abundance and well-being.

The narrator and Bruder Otho live in the Rue Cloister (Rautenklause). To get to their home from the Marina one passes through the Cock Gate, from which on the left loom up the Marble Cliffs, the cloister itself being situated on the edge of the cliff in close proximity to long stretches of grapeland. During the spring the hyacinth blooms and in fall the wild cherry, but all year long the silver-green rue bushes give off their pungent odor. Ruta, herb of grace in the lore of flowers, possesses powers against evil spells: formerly, a branch of rue was used to sprinkle holy water in churches, and the ancients, according to Pliny, believed that the plant not only improved the physical strength of the eye but bestowed, as well, an inner vision, a second sight. The Rue Cloister consists of a library, which opens onto the garden where the golden lily is in flower, and, on the second floor, an herbarium. Here the brothers are engaged, with the aid of Linnaeus' Systema Naturale, upon a lifetime's labor of collecting and classifying the flora of the region. Living with the two of them is Lampusa, who acts as a housekeeper and tends the kitchen placed in the lower recesses of the Marble Cliffs, and Erio, the illegitimate child of the narrator, whose mother is Silvia, daughter of Lampusa. The boy and his grandmother have been brought to the Cloister by Bruder Otho who has the knack of winning people's confidence, a gift for bringing out the best in them. Lampusa is the Terrible Mother, a telluric force, one who knows the dark, generative—and destructive—secrets of nature. She entertains Belovar, the just herdsman, in her cliff cellar but at the same time is on good terms with the Oberförster's ruthless huntsmen. Lampusa communicates with the lancehead vipers who dwell in the crevices of the Marble Cliffs and, at sunset, descend to the court of the cloister to drink the milk which she sets out for them. Distinguished from the rest by her brass-burnished scales and jewel-like green head is the leader of the viper train, Griffin, who becomes the special pet of Erio, the divine child or puer senex, a model of strength and purity whose presence invigorates the brothers while at their work. Whenever these serpents join company with Erio, they gather about him in the form of a sun disk.

Hard by the Rue Cloister, on the southern, Marina side of the Marble Cliffs, stands the monastery of the Falcifera, dedicated to Maria Lunaris. She, in the words of Bruder Otho, combines on a higher plane the virtues of Fortuna and Vesta and must be seen as a beneficent counterforce to the baleful charms of Lampusa. The monastery houses the eminent botanist Father Lampros, who, as a specialist on the symmetry of fruits, can help the brothers currently at work on a study of how plants, in their growth, form a circle around an axis. Obedient to nature's ways, as is indicated by his other name Phyllobius, he who lives with leaves, and by the motto engraved on his cornelian ring, "meyn geduld hat ursach" (patience is my strength; i.e., I bide my time), Lampros has been initiated into the nutritional, curative, and integrating properties of plant life. First met by the brothers with a gladiola in hand (Siegwurzrispe) and light streaming from the transept window on his white mantle, this priest is the great force for good, for the sustaining recreative virtues of spirituality in the face of the destructive powers unleashed by the Oberförster. Lampros and Maria are, respectively, the solar and lunar principles at work, a hieros gamos or union of the blazing sun of science and the twilight of imagination and mystery. Both the Rue Cloister and the monastery, then, are fully achieved centers of being, for at the brother's house it is they who represent the conscious, rational mind, whereas Lampusa incarnates infrarational, chthonic drives. The force joining and transcending the two realms, and the link between cloister and monastery—in his messages to the brothers, Lampros will entrust their dispatch only to him—is Erio, the mystic, heroic child. And the configuration of the sun disk formed by the serpents under Erio's spell—"coiled into a circle, [the serpent] symbolizes the self-sufficiency and oneness which are associated with God's preservative power"—finds its parallel in that mysterium revealed in the monastery garden by Lampros to the two brothers, the green circlet of leaves and the vibrant, radiant center of the otherwise quite inconspicuous plantain, Plantago major. Coiled snake and plantain, like Bruder Otho's golden lily and the gladiola of Lampros, are thus mandalas, Indian circular images signifying, in modern psychoanalytic terms, that wholeness which the human personality strives to attain. The contemplative stillness of the monastery enclosure, the bright blue sky and strong sunlight which are the atmospheric setting for the disclosure of the hidden, restorative virtualities of the plantain flower, form a pastoral landscape, a locus amoenus, lying at the extreme opposite to the horrible forest clearing of Köppelsbleek with its instruments of torture and perversion, lost in mist, and haunted by the mocking cry of the cuckoo bird and the whispering of bats.

This place of infamy, the source from which terror will spread out over the land—"die üble Küche, aus der die Nebel über die Marina zogen"—lies to the north of the Marble Cliffs, on the far side of the Campagna, just beyond the marshlands where the domain of the Oberförster begins. On days when the brothers are pleased with the progress of their research, they will climb to the summit of the Cliffs and enjoy the sublimity of its panoramic view. At other times, tired and depressed, the two will set out on botanical excursions in search of a new specimen. One such field trip, undertaken to find a variety of Linnaeus' rubra—the woodland orchid (Rote Waldvögelein)—brings them deep within the Campagna, past the three poplars and the obscene image of the Red Steer, to the sickle-shaped Flayers' Copse (the depraved antitype of Mary's cloister, the Falcifera, "sickle-bearing," "sickle-shaped"). To their delight they discover the flower—but at the same time, too, the ghastly spectacle of Köppelsbleek with its stakes and hooks, rattling skulls, and singing dwarf hard at work. Terrified, the impulse is to flee the place, but catching hold of themselves, they are reminded of their obligation as scientists to enter a description of the woodland plant and its natural setting in their journal. Here again the flower functions as a mandala, an image of the potentialities of the self. In the juxtaposition of orchid and skull, beauty in its vital growth and radiance resists the destructive power of evil.

Linked with the mandala as a conserving, integrative force are the lamp and mirror of Nigromontanus (necromancer), used at the discretion of Bruder Otho, the pure blue flame of which acts as a caustic burning objects down to their very essence. In the "time of troubles" which has overcome the land of the Marble Cliffs, the brothers must be ready at any moment to set fire, as eventually they will, to herbarium and library. Nigromontanus' mirror with its device, "Und sollte die Erde wie ein Geschoss zerspringen / Ist unsere Wandlung Feuer und weisse Glut" (And were the earth to explode like a shot / In our transformation we have become fire and a white glow), is assurance that their painfully acquired spiritual acquisitions will not fall prey to base powers, but instead be preserved in a higher order. If the mandala is an expression of the organic, curative virtues of nature, then the mirror translates the transforming power of art in its victory over the forces of destruction. These agents of conservation gather to themselves a whole series of such efficacious symbols. At moments of fatigue and discouragement, the narrator and Bruder Otho close the doors of the cloister, drink wine, breathe the fragrance of stored-up leaves and flower petals, light the pure-grained candles of the Provençal knight Deodat, which call to mind the sunset hour in Rhodes; they will page through the books of trusted authors and browse among old letters from cherished friends. These varied, intimate sensations and nostalgic musings nourish an idealizing memory which shores up the fragments of the past and protects them against the erosion of time. The brothers are fond, too, of composing gnomic couplets or doggerel lines which sum up, in their pithiness, nature's laws. Scribbled down on slips of paper, they serve in the evening as points of departure for serious conversation, after which they are discarded. These sibylline jottings join mandala and mirror and the various stimulants to memory as steps in a contemplative ritual dedicated to moral order, heightened awareness, and the effort to discern a pattern in the manifoldness of nature.

The present course of events occurs some seven years after the war against Alta Plana to which the brothers ascribe the ills that have ever since slowly infected the land. During the war they were enrolled in the Purple Riders, an elite squadron of the order of the Mauretanians, and it was here that they knew and frequented the company of the Oberförster, who was for a time commander of all Mauretania. Prior to their enlistment, the brothers were living at loose ends; distracted and jaded by a way of life which had no meaning for them, they joined this far-flung order dedicated to the pursuit of power for its own sake. The Mauretanians are cool, disabused realists, the managerial strategists of Jünger's Der Arbeiter. Disciplined, endowed with keen practical intelligence, these men are committed to a ruthlessly detached view of political power. The philosophy of action which they espouse is a peculiarly abstract, efficient one intent only upon the manipulation of tangible forces: a priori values and inherited loyalties count for nothing in its calculations. These ascetics of the will, with their single-minded vision, exercise a strong attraction on the brothers wandering about feckless and apathetic.

Thus the Mauretanian order and the regiment of the Rue Cloister lie at opposite poles from each other, yet their extremes meet. The Rue Cloister:

Vielleicht war es die starke Luft der Rautenklause, die unserem Denken eine neue Richtung gab, gleich wie im reinem Sauerstoff die Flamme steiler und heller brennt (The new direction which our thought took was no doubt owing to the bracing air of the Rue Cloister, just as in pure oxygen the flame burns higher and brighter).

And the Mauretanians:

Bei den Mauretanieren … herrschte unberührte Stille wie im Zentrum des Zyklons. Wenn man in den Abgrund stürzt, soll man die Dinge in dem letzten Grad der Klarheit wie durch überschärfte Gläser sehen. Diesen Blick, doch ohne Furcht, gewann man in der Luft der Mauretania, die von Grund auf böse war (An undisturbed stillness as in the center of a cyclone prevailed among the Mauretanians. When we plunge into the abyss, we see things in their highest degree of clarity, just like looking through a sharply focused lens. This is the kind of vision, but without fear, that one attained to in the air of Mauretania which [nevertheless] was evil from the ground up).

The discipline of each of these separate ways of life, active and contemplative, calls for lucidity of outlook and the strict dedication to an ideal. The common denominator is an ethic which will both concentrate and liberate vital energies. Something of the element of play in its detachment and gratuitousness, its release of powers within very fixed limitations, enters into both spheres. Each of these styles is radically set apart from the normal, commonplace routines of life and demands from its initiates the virtues which we normally associate with solitude: a freedom from distraction, perseverance, and a steady reliance upon one's own moral resources. Given, then, the factors common to these two pursuits, the conquest of power, on the one hand, and the search for truth, on the other, both by nature radically alien to a bourgeois existence, though directed to entirely opposite ends, it is not surprising that they should appeal to the two brothers at different periods in their life, just as, indeed, they have to Ernst Jünger himself, warrior and contemplative, the author and actor of In Stahlgewittern and Subtile Jagden. On the level of biography, of la vie romancée, an essential though not, of course, the most important vantage point from which to read our novel, the campaign in Alta Plana with its sorry aftermath is a near-literal translation of Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger's engagement in the First World War and their subsequent conviction, never in doubt, that Germany's series of humiliating setbacks in the twenties must be seen as a result of the fatherland's disastrous defeat and the succeeding injustices of the Versailles Treaty. The boredom with life as it is felt by narrator and Bruder Otho transcribes fictionally the Jünger brothers' disdain for the Weimar Republic's experiment in parliamentary democracy, with its assumed concessions to mass opinion, as well as their fear of the growing rationalization and vulgarization of all areas of life in contemporary Germany. Even such a detail in the story as the magnanimity shown by the brothers towards Ansgar, the enemy soldier, finds its real-life counterpart in Jünger's gallant attitude and gestures towards his English enemies on the western front during the Great War and in his desperate efforts generally to imagine some kind of chivalry in even the bloodiest moments of trench fighting.

Yet for all the points of similarity between the way of the Cloister and that of Mauretania, it is the differences which are crucial and must be stressed. The latter has as its purpose self-aggrandizement achieved through means which depend upon aggression, domination, and exploitation; the other, to which the brothers have become converted, calls for a renunciation of self, an openness to natural laws and processes which transcend the individual person and serve to integrate him in an indivisible order, at once physical and spiritual. The grandmaster of the Mauretanians is the Chief Ranger—the Oberförster. His extraordinary presence, alluded to in the very first pages of the novel, shadows the entire narration without his ever once making an actual appearance. We hear his trumpeting laughter at the moment when he unleashes Chiffon Rouge and the bloodhound pack, and can envision the ilex-leaf pattern of his coat as he rides with arrogant assurance through his domains. He is the prince of darkness, "der Geist, der stets verneint." From his various strongholds deep within the forest interior, he sends forth his "glowworms," huntsmen, and mercenaries to spread suspicion, pick quarrels, aggravate troubled situations, abet corruption, and perpetrate acts of terrorism. Since the days of Charlemagne the Marina has often been invaded and occupied by foreign troops; but manners, customs, and even the physical setting of the area have changed very little. It is only now with the end of hostilities against Alta Plana that a perceptible deterioration has come about in the quality of life and the general look of things. The time-honored ways of the vintner, poet, and philosopher are despised in favor of the raw, boisterous behavior of the Campagna herdsmen. Once the privilege of heros, the sacred funeral rites of elegeion and eburnum, severely set forth and devoutly attended to, have become profaned, being now nothing better than raucous wakes to which any common bootlicker is entitled. One-time citizens of the Marina, who as refugees from justice have fled to the bogs and meadows of the Campagna, keep up connections with the homeland, thus making possible a continuous intrusion of alien, questionable practices. Progressively, the constabulary of the local police chief, Biedenhorn, himself open to corruption, has been infiltrated by bullies and criminal types dispatched from the "back of the beyond." For life in the Campagna, too, has degenerated. Because of the sinister influence of the Oberförster, the native, barbaric elements have become unruly, prone to yield to the darker, vicious sides of their nature. The kind of rude but fundamentally decent code of social behavior as represented by Belovar and his son Sombor, who stand for the older, authentic morality of the Campagna, is fast disappearing. A debilitating fever, a general failure of nerve paralyze the whole area, from the confines of the Campagna down beyond the Marina's shore to the holiday islands of the Hesperides where in happier times people used to row over, during the autumn, to enjoy the festivities of St. Peter's Fish and to delight in the sight and fragrance of the roses which bloom all year. Only the Rue Cloister and the Convent of Maria Lunaris, both close by the Marble Cliffs and oases of the spiritual life, remain immune against this corrupting malaise. Yet even here the menace is very real: Lampusa's ambiguous presence inhabits the lower depths of the white peaks.

During their tour of duty with the Mauretanians, the narrator and Bruder Otho would, on occasion, drink and ride with the Oberförster. His grand manner and the charismatic authority which he wielded fascinated them. His person, if somewhat ridiculous, possessed a genuine compelling force, all the more dominating for standing out in such contrast to the inertia of the times. Here was a creature possessed by some daemonic power, capable, one feared, of appalling acts; yet demanding from us, however grudgingly and qualified, our admiration. As the brothers remark upon listening to the ruthless exploits of the Capitano, who was later to introduce them to the Oberförster and to Mauretania: "Lieber noch mit diesem stürzen, als mit jenen leben, die die Furcht im Staub zu kriechen zwingt" (Better to fall with this fellow than to live with those whom fear brings to their knees in the dust). Nor do the brothers question the rightness of the war they engage in against the Alta Plana. For them it is a matter, in the last resort, of doing their duty—and duty is itself a source of order, of inner strength. Nevertheless, they sympathize with these people who were defending their freedom against foreign oppression. It is perhaps the encounter with Ansgar and the mercy they show him that first prompt a decisive change of heart. From their present point of view, absorbed in the life of the Rue Cloister, they see that the two of them could have risen high in the ranks of Mauretania were it not for their sense of outrage at its repressive measures against the suffering and the weak. The fundamental inhumanity of the order was intolerable to them and they had to leave. That change of heart brought on by the meeting with Ansgar in the treacherous mountain passes of the Bergland is steadily reinforced and brought to a firm resolution in the close association with Pater Lampros. They have renounced the use of force and put off forever the way of the Mauretanians. This is apparent in the brothers' refusal, after momentarily weighing their decision, to join Belovar in ridding the area through violent means of the Oberförster's terrorist gangs. Aided by Lampros' example, they are determined to resist the present tyranny by remaining unswervingly devoted to a life of study and contemplation.

The choice they have made is summed up in the meeting with Braquemart (short, broad-bladed sword) and Sunmyra (he who does not speak). Each of the two is only half a person: the first, the epitome of the Mauretanian outlook, is a technician of power but with no feeling for the affective, infrarational bases of our existence; the other a sensitive, noble spirit but without the force to act upon his fine impulses. The two, nihilist and aristocrat, have come together to challenge in his very seat of authority the despotic rule of the Oberförster. Their well-intentioned, futile, and ultimately tragic union points to the deep, seemingly irreconcilable divisions in contemporary Western culture between a conservative humanism which has lost confidence in itself and is powerless to shape the dynamic forces released by contemporary civilization, and an arrogant, runaway technocracy, heedless of spiritual values and revealing itself in certain of its grander conceptions to be grimly antihuman. "Tout ce que nous savons, tout ce que nous pouvons," Valéry writes, "a fini par s'opposer à tout ce que nous sommes." As the two men walk up the Marble Cliffs, the Prince of Sunmyra scarcely pays attention to the magical lance-head vipers, while Braquemart contemptuously steps aside from their path. Head and heart have been severed from each other, and the "two cultures" go blindly each its own way. The pathetic, frustrated efforts of Sunmyra anticipate with astonishing foresight the deliberations and abortive attempts of the German aristocracy, such men as Claus von Stauffenberg, Count Helmuth James von Moltke, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg, and Adam von Trott zu Solz, to resist and overcome Hitler. It had been Jünger's forlorn hope, often commented upon in his journals of the World War II years, that the aristocracy, the Prussian landed gentry, would provide the moral leadership for a "conservative revolution" against the modern ideologies of capitalism and communism, thus preventing the rise to power and consolidation of National Socialism. Lampros' intercession on Sunmyra's behalf and the preservation of the latter's head in the petal-strewn amphora represent Jünger's sympathies with the traditional values of the German nobility, the bearers of that "Third Force," so called from the vantage point of the political right. Hearing on May 1, 1945, of Hitler's death, Jünger remarked—referring to Stauffenberg's abortive attempt at assassination the year previously—upon his own early awareness that any serious try on Hitler's life would have had to be made by one born of the old aristocracy and that, paradoxically, the dramatic and spiritual effect of such an act would lie only in its failure. "I pointed this out in detail with the figure of Sunmyra in 1939."

Sunmyra is scarcely twenty years old, yet already stooped in body and world-weary in mind. He shows interesting resemblances to and differences from the thaumaturgic child Erio, wise far beyond his years and a never-failing source of joy. When the narrator sets out on his perilous search for the young prince, he takes with him the reassuring smile of Erio. It is the brother's hope, disappointed by events, that Sunmyra can come under the care of Father Lampros, for they are confident that this counselor of souls can restore to the tired scion of an old Burgundy family the faith, purpose, and resolve to check the disorders raging all about and to build anew. They do join each other in spirit, priest and dreamer, in the spectacular scene of apotheosis capping the catastrophic events which overtake the Grand Marina. While the Cloister of Maria Lunaris goes up in flames, the brothers hold aloft to Lampros amidst the wreckage the embalmed head of Sunmyra; the hierophant, as a sign of consecration, returns this invocatory gesture by raising his hand with the cornelian ring (bearing the motto, "I bide my time"). The nobleman's sacrifice has been made wholly acceptable, a pleasing gift. The large rose window in the transept, where the brothers first met the priest, falls in upon Lampros, its green tracery reproducing in outline the wondrous plantain flower of the monastery garden. The prince's head, purplish in cast from its preservative of wine and roses, and the glowing stained-glass window complete the series of mandalas and thus set a seal upon the exchange of sacred gestures. In the general holocaust which sweeps the country, the young Sunmyra's death is an offering in prayer for a new beginning.

Braquemart is Jünger's embodiment of a specifically modern form of evil, rootless, without allegiance, scientifically trained but one-dimensional; contemptuous of sentiment, resentful by instinct, he is bent upon destruction—even if it means, as by the logic of his character it must, self-destruction. He belongs, like Koestler's Gleitkin, to the race of the Neo-Neanderthals. In the play of forces, ideological and psychological, Braquemart sides with the Oberförster, though there are important differences between them. As the principle of evil, the Chief Ranger belongs, mythologically, to an ancient heritage which includes the various personifications of Satan as well as the archvillains of the Gothic novel and the Romantic imagination. A creature of the twilight, he has a wisdom of the ways of beast, wind, and rain. He is the dark, gnostic power of all the many versions of a Manichaean view of life (cf. his countertype, Lampros, the Greek word for "brilliant," "effulgent"). However real his menacing presence, there is, as a creation of myth, something fanciful and literary about him. Though both men are possessed by a frenzy to destroy, Braquemart is a different matter. He is a peculiarly modern phenomenon, conceived and analyzed imaginatively in Dostoevski's novels, heralded in Nietzsche, and realized in the revolutions and wars of our century. His nihilism is the product of a dehumanized rationalism which thrives in our modern age of capitalist enterprise, vast urbanized conglomerates, relentless technocratic advances, bureaucratization, and sophisticated advertising. The complexity and nervous rhythms of today exasperate his sensibilities and turn him inward, creating a mood of sullenness and self-hate. Hence Braquemart's urge to make tabula rasa of everything: his natural climate is the desert, just as the forest is the habitat of the Oberförster. Jünger insists upon the fact that der Alte of the forest is a man of action, whereas Braquemart is a theorist. In any confrontation the modern city-bred nihilist is no match for the anarchist from the deep, primeval interior; the former, as the inheritor of all the dark secrets of the selva oscura, is simply too old in experience to be outdone by such a latecomer. And so, quite predictably, the latter's joint expedition with Sunmyra ends in disaster. Upon the arrival of the pair in the evening at the Rue Cloister, the Japanese lilies have opened up, displaying in their flawless beauty six slender stamens set in a circle about the pistil; when they take leave of the brothers at dawn, the lily's purity has been flawed: night moths have done it violence, and as the narrator makes this discovery, he detects in the distance the cuckoo bird's call, its mocking sound not having been heard since that horrendous afternoon at Köppelsbleek.

This ghoulish site serves at the end of the novel as the meeting ground for the deadly struggle between Belovar and the Oberförster, the autochthonous forces of the Campagna pitted against the barbarous anarchy of the forest. Here, in the natural scheme of things, the contest is more evenly matched, and it is only because of greatly superior numbers that the Chief Ranger is finally able to rout his opposition. Their savage encounter engages the two dog packs, the Molosson mastiffs of Belovar led by Leontodon and the Oberförster's red-and-black Cuban bloodhounds with the dreaded Chiffon Rouge at their head. The dog of story and legend, Anubis, Cerberus, Xolotl, has been traditionally associated with death and the underworld, and these dogs of the Marmorklippen are hellhounds. Their tearing at each other, in this Night of the Long Knives, is the final, convulsive release of all the pent-up fury and agitation, intrigue and suspicion which have been plaguing the country. The discharge of brutish force, of hot blood, must be seen as setting off the general destruction by fire which sweeps the entire area. The war between the Campagna and Forest, in which the narrator takes part almost in spite of himself—dedicated as he has been to the pursuits of peace—is a psychomachy, a death struggle between the powers of good and evil which explodes into holocaust. From the top of the Marble Cliffs where the narrator had been given in privileged moments of the past a vision of world harmony, he sees, laid out in front of him as far as the eye can reach, a view of total conflagration. The old order of things has gone up in smoke, and together with it the Rue Cloister, consumed by the flame of Nigromontanus' lamp, and the Convent of Maria Lunaris.

In Chiffon Rouge's deadly pursuit of the narrator, it is Erio who comes to the latter's aid. Lampusa, in league with the Oberförster, scorns to give help to the oppressed, while Bruder Otho, preoccupied with mirror and lamp, is lost in thought and not to be distracted by any concern for his brother's physical safety: these are witch and scientist transfixed by their own obsessive concerns and closed to any call from outside. The narrator leaps over the garden wall, falling in the lily bed, whereupon at a signal from Erio the lance-head vipers, Griffin in the lead, descend the steps of the Marble Cliffs. The bejeweled serpent strikes at Chiffon Rouge, who drops dead among the lilies, while the remaining vipers, in describing a golden circle about the feeding bowl, move out in stately, martial rhythm and strangle in a flash both bloodhound and men. The boy leaves then, smiling at the narrator, and we never hear from him again. Erio, like Lampros, has acted as a psychopomp for the brothers, initiating them into the mysteries. Griffin (Greifin), the name of the magnificent queen of the vipers, is an allusion to the mythical beast of antique and medieval lore (m. Greif) whose twin nature, lion(ess) and eagle, binds together in a single whole earthly and celestial energies. The rich, complex symbolism adhering to this serpent makes her a figure of harmony, and thus a salvific force. With the extermination of the hellhound Chiffon Rouge, the sinister powers released by the Oberförster have been brought under control, and life can now begin anew on the Grand Marina. As an emphatic sign of resurrection. Bruder Otho restores to its former dignity the sacred ritual of the eburnum while participating in funeral services for Sunmyra at the old family chapel. Yet if there are hesitant steps toward a return to normality and hope, the dangers to existence persist: Biedenhorn, the sycophantic police captain, always alert to which way the wind is blowing, has run up over the town fortress the flag of the red boar's head, an emblem, like night moth, dog, and cuckoo bird, of the Oberförster's menacing presence.

Our parable's schematic alignment of good and evil forces finds its metaphoric counterpart in the studied use of narrative moments rendered antithetically in light and dark: the smile of Erio and Lampusa's surly glance; the gold lily and the shimmering bodies of the lance-head vipers as contrasted with the blood-stained, weathered imagery and dark fauna of Köppelsbleek; the periods of joy in scientific study accompanied by excursions to the summit of the cliffs, followed by intervals of depression and the outings into the grey Campagna marshlands. Appalled by the sight of the decapitated Sunmyra, the narrator falls into a trance, a traumatic seizure in which his right arm is paralyzed; it is in such a state that he participates in the great regenerative destruction by burning and sees the gardens of the Rue Cloister, while being chased by Chiffon Rouge, as in a magical, metallic light. It is only when the serpents have assumed the mandala shape just prior to their attack that the narrator is roused from his dream and his arm quickened to life. Indeed the two principal centers of action, symbolic poles in this fable, are conceived in terms of chiaroscuro: the gleaming Marble Cliffs and that heart of darkness, the forest lair of the Chief Ranger. The motif of light as a symbol of harmony is complemented by a strong if discreet colorist sense which presents in rich array efficacious objects and phenómena. Their virtuality for good is mirrored forth in vivid, pleasing color. Consider only the dramatic moment of the ruin by fire of Rue Cloister and Maria Lunaris late in the novel; chromatic values and hues are set off against each other with rich yet restrained effect: lilies and roses, the white of Deodat's candles and the wine-purple trophy of Sunmyra's head, Lampros' vestments and cornelian ring placed in the green setting of the cloister window, and the pure, steady, resonant blue of Nigromontanus' lamp. These colors burst forth, then, and are burned out in the awesome incandescence of the final, apocalyptic fires which sweep the country.

The purging holocaust brings with it the hope of a new life. The Alta Plana for which the brothers set sail succeeds, as a spiritual landmark, to the Marble Cliffs of the Grand Marina, just as Ansgar père et fils, who welcome them to their farmstead, now replace Belovar and his son Sombor. The barns, stalls, and family dwelling are all, within the shadow of the live oak, set together in one complex—the image of a unitary, organic scheme of life, and similar in this singular grouping to the brothers' family house in the north where the sword of chivalry lies. As in a spiraling climb, like that about the margin of the White Cliffs, we have come back to a point from where we started but on a higher level of ascent. In moments of deep contentment, narrator and brother are in the habit of climbing the marble peaks to watch the sun play upon sea and countryside.

Wenn wir vom hohen Sitze auf die Stätten schauten, wie sie der Mensch zum Schutz, zur Lust, zur Nahrung und Verehrung sich errichtet, dann schomolzen die Zeiten vor unserm Auge innig ineinander ein. Und wie aus offenen Schreinen traten die Toten unsichtbar hervor. Sie sind uns immer nah, wo unser Blick voll Liebe auf altbebautem Lande ruht, und wie in Stein und Aekerfurchen ihr Erbe lebt, so waltet ihr treuer Ahnengeist in Feld und Flur (When we look out from high places upon the abodes of man, and consider how they have been erected in his honor and for his enjoyment, protection, and sustenance, then before our view all time fuses into a single moment. And the dead step forward, invisible, as though from open shrines. They are always close to us wherever our eye rests, full of affection, upon the land cultivated from old, and just as their inheritance lives in stone and furrow, so the true ancestral spirit presides in field and meadow).

From this privileged prospect, the different periods of the past merge into a single span, and time is seen under the sign of infinity, sub specie aeternitatis. "I live in the leaf" (which buds and withers), says Lampros for whom all scientific theories have their validity because each one, in turn, brings its contribution to the great mystery of genesis. Disintegration and reintegration, the recurring cycle of cosmos and chaos, catastrophe and rebirth, in individual lives as well as among nations and civilizations, define the underlying pattern of historical enactment which Ernst Jünger studies from the top of the Marble Cliffs. Individual fate functions as type and symbol, while the single occurrence in time is charged with depth and gravity, being conceived as the manifestation of a supratemporal order of recurrence. In this allegorical meditation on world harmony, the vision of which is gnostic, mythic, and archetypal, Jünger belongs squarely to the tradition of German romanticism: his Naturphilosophie, with its organicism, Platonic resonances, and delight in symbol and faraway incident, makes him a frère spirituel of Goethe and Novalis.

"Dreieinig sind das Wort, die Freiheit und der Geist" (The Word, Freedom, and Spirit are triune). This solemn, trinitarian affirmation occurring in the very middle of our narration gives witness to Jünger's credo in the power of civilizing energies to overcome evil—an act of faith nourished by a perennial philosophy which equates order with logos. Hence the studied, disciplined care with which the novel is composed, Jünger assuming, in the manner of his master, Nietzsche, a prophetic, monumental, apodictic tone. Archaisms and exotic touches reinforce the timelessness of this fable in which automobiles make their way through feudal settings. Sentences are deliberately weighed against each other to assure a full, steady, cadenced effect, while a telling image or an aphorism of gnomic import rounds off the individual paragraphs unanimated by any conversation and, in their unremitting gravity of mood, giving the semblance of marble stelae. Ritual, choice artefacts, beautiful natural forms, contemplative leisure, and scientific research—in a word, all of the ingredients and values of a classic, high culture—are celebrated in a book completed on the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland and just a few weeks before Jünger himself, resignedly, will report for military service as a captain in the Wehrmacht. His aestheticism and detachment, which have been strongly criticized and do at times lapse into a cold preciosity, are intended to serve as charms which ward off malign forces threatening to overwhelm philosophic composure and the rule of reason.