[In the following review, Clair asserts that Jünger's On the Marble Cliffs "is an anti-Nazi document, but it is also one of the most beautiful novels of imagination of modern Germany, an allegory in the grand symbolist manner of the death of a civilization."]

Somewhere in a mythical landscape, high above the marble cliffs, on the edge of a fertile valley, two brothers—retired army officers—have settled after a lost war. Below in the peaceful countryside an industrious and quiet people tills its fields; farther on lives a rude yet hospitable tribe of shepherds, closely following traditional ways of life. Still farther away, in the thicknesses of the dark and impenetrable forest, the Chief Ranger, a demoniac figure, rules over the marshes with the aid of his cruel, inhuman underlings and plans to conquer the peaceful world of the peasants and shepherds outside his dark domain.

This is the setting. Juenger describes the methods, of cunning maneuver combined with brute force, which the Chief Ranger uses to achieve his goal.

On the Marble Cliffs is a roman à clef, an attack on Nazism only thinly veiled by the extraneous allusions, the strange locale, and the romantic style; but it is also a work of art in its own right. Juenger is a masterly stylist, who likes to experiment with the rhythmic possibilities in sentence structure and takes a sensuous pleasure in the quality of words and the shades of meaning. (The translation, if somewhat stiff, has succeeded in conveying much if not all of the dense brilliancy of Juenger's style.) Literary German suffered considerably from the barbarian language of command that the Nazis introduced in all media of communication, but Juenger is one of the few whose style not only kept its earlier purity but also gained in power and richness.

The book appeared in German shortly after the outbreak of the war and immediately achieved a considerable success, though the Völkische Beobachter and other Nazi papers attacked it violently and succeeded for a time in having it withdrawn from circulation. The ostensibly unpolitical story, set in a region outside time and space, in which demons consort with human beings, and primitive and highly civilized peoples live side by side, where the real and the unreal are constantly mixed and ironically inverted, was an unmistakable attack upon the regime. No German could miss the allusions to the terrorists who "wore the mask of order," to the man "who hated the plow, the corn, the vine, and the animals tamed by man, whose heart was only stirred when moss and ivy grew green on the ruins of the towns," and of whom the narrator could say, "Fear enveloped him, and I am convinced that therein far more than his own person lay his power. Only when things had begun to totter from their inherent weakness could he exercise his might." Though Juenger used that "slave language" which has been employed many times to cloak a political message against a hated tyranny, his meaning could hardly have escaped the censor. The reasons for the opposition of the Nazis are obvious; it is much less clear how the book could appear at all.

In fact, no author but Juenger would have dared to publish it: it would have been difficult to suppress the work of a man who had been one of the intellectual fathers of Nazism. To be sure, Juenger himself had never belonged to the Nazi Party, but among the young intellectuals who later became devoted Nazis he played a much more important role than the fussy prophets of blood and soil. Juenger had achieved fame as the author of books which hailed the "cosmic experience of war," as the prophet of the "total mobilization," that is, the total annihilation of the personality in the meshes of the all-embracing, all-pervasive state. Juenger had hailed the emergence of a new depersonalized type, the "worker type," destined to replace the bourgeois individual and to express the complete functionalism of the war society; he had written that morality now had become an unnecessary luxury and that the "worker" type must develop a sort of "color blindness toward values." Juenger was looked upon as a deviant yet basically dependable ideologist of the regime, though he had kept aloof from things political since 1933. Overt action could not be taken against the work of such a man, especially since he was backed by some influential army circles.

Moreover, On the Marble Cliffs is by no means a call to action. The brothers chronicle the gradual success of the forces of evil but abstain from any attempt to halt its progress. When they finally flee to the country that has been their enemy in the last war, they listen to a song from the shore: "Since no man then can give us aid, We turn to God in our great need." However, if Juenger chronicles the progress of evil, he refuses to participate in it. The narrator says: "I took an oath that I would rather fall in loneliness with the free men than go in triumph among the slaves."

Juenger showed great courage in publishing the book at the time he did, for it is a balance sheet of the depravity, the nihilism, and the destruction of all moral values that were the Hitler regime; it marked, moreover, the author's complete break with his past. It is an anti-Nazi document, but it is also one of the most beautiful novels of imagination of modern Germany, an allegory in the grand symbolist manner of the death of a civilization.