On Maneuvers

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Ernst Jünger (1895–1998), the German writer, war hero, man of the Right, and sphinx, claimed that On the Marble Cliffs (Auf den Marmorklippen, 1939) came to him in a dream.1 It may have. Jünger was a devotee and a hoarder of dreams, and this story reads as if it were one of them. Now available in a new, and significantly improved, translation for New York Review Books Classics by Tess Lewis, the book is a tale of mounting horror, in which its two principal protagonists (the unnamed narrator and his brother, Otho, are proxies for Jünger and his younger brother, Friedrich Georg) are participants and yet, in a sense, spectators, as in a dream: “While evil spread across the land like fungus on a rotten log, we delved ever deeper into the mystery of flowers.”…

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The importance of being Ernst

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The more you study history, the less you know. Straight paths turn into labyrinths. So it is that, in the Paris journals of Ernst Jünger (now translated into English by Thomas and Abby Hansen as A German Officer in Occupied Paris), we learn that in July 1942 Jünger, who had previously swapped books with a fellow author by the name of Hitler, dropped in on a future Stalin Prize winner, one Pablo Picasso. The artist was an exile, Jünger a captain in the Wehrmacht, an occupier. The meeting passed off agreeably. Picasso declared that the two of them “would be able to negotiate peace over the course of [that] afternoon.”

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