Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs is both a mesmerizing work of fantasy and an allegory of the advent of fascism. Tess Lewis, translator of this new edition, published by New York Review Books, is joined by Jessi Jezewska Stevens, author of the introduction, Ajay Singh Chaudhary, executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and Corey Robin, political theorist and journalist, for a discussion of this caliginous masterpiece.

Jünger’s tangled legacy, comprising his long-standing service as a highly decorated officer, first in World War I and later in the Wehrmacht, was an expression of his rejection of liberal democratic values and support of German militarism, yet his decisive turn against Nazi totalitarianism led him to call, belatedly, for peace. In 1944 he was expelled from the army. Jünger’s novel presages this volte-face, and its timely invocation of the fraught dialectic between the violence of military expansion and the desire for peace is embodied by its protagonists, two brothers who have seen enough of war and have resolved to live quiet lives devoted to inner reflection and the pursuit of knowledge.

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