A Fable for Our Time

By the time of his death in 1998 at the age of 101, the German author and veteran soldier Ernst Jünger had written enough to fill eighteen volumes with his collected works. The most famous of these (at least in the English-speaking world) remains Storm of Steel (originally In Stahlgewittern), which is Jünger’s visceral account of his experiences on the Western Front during the First World War. Less well known, though no less relevant in our age of growing tyranny, is Jünger’s early novel, On the Marble Cliffs (originally Auf den Marmorklippen), a new translation of which has recently been published by the New York Review of Books.