Jünger is as famous for who he was and what he did (and didn’t) do as for his books, of which this is the most celebrated. Unlike most of the authors of his generation who are still read he was not a left-winger or a liberal forced to keep a very low profile or flee from Germany altogether in the Hitler period. Jünger was, rather, a professed right-winger, associated with various nationalistic and militaristic circles. He neither openly espoused nor resisted the Nazi regime but enlisted in the Wehrmacht and was part of the forces occupying Paris.

One might say that he behaved rather like some institutions that managed to coexist fairly conveniently with Nazi barbarity, the Catholic Church for instance, and that had it both ways; so that after the war one could see Bishops who had shamelessly collaborated (in Belgium for example) while there were Catholic priests who had been supporters of the resistance in France. Jünger willingly served as an officer in Hitler’s Wehrmacht and attended meetings of the order of the Iron Cross even as the war was ending, while also having friends amongst the anti-Hitler Stauffenberg plotters — although he wasn’t part of that plot.

But more interesting in the end is the book, the work of art this morally ambiguous man leaves behind him.

On the Marble Cliffs is undoubtedly one of the most intense and virtuoso pieces of writing in German in the twentieth century. It is set in a kind of Utopia, ‘the Marina’, a tranquil, exquisite place of quiet libraries, jolly taverns and lovely gardens. The joys of drinking new wine with old friends in a beautiful place are appropriately celebrated — ‘more highly than those hours which sped in sparkling wit we treasured the quiet homeward path under the deep waters of intoxication through garden and field.’ Marina is a permanent spring carnival, an ideal town for lovers, drinkers and scholars. Inevitably there is a snake in this Eden — a power struggle breaks out and rather like in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings a Dark Lord gathers up all the most evil and embittered riffraff of the countryside and launches a war that results in horrible destruction. As the churches and libraries of Marina burn one is chillingly reminded of the fate of Germany itself in 1944-45 as enthusiastic bombing reduces ancient cities to rubble. The really chilling thing though is that Jünger published this book in 1939.

It’s not hard then to read On the Marble Cliffs as an allegory of the Hitler time and its likely (and actual) outcome. The book is a marvellous, acute account of how a dictator conserves and consolidates his power by spreading suspicion and embroiling as many as possible in his dirty deeds. It is not however an anti-war book. It can’t be because it is a celebration of the warlike manly spirit. (Jünger’s women, predictably enough in this scenario, are bearers of sons and bakers of cakes). Side by side with a respect for learning and reason that populates his Utopia with libraries and herbariums is a parallel worship of the dark gods generally held to be their opposite; ‘Once when we were drinking with the Condottiere he looked into his wine-dewed glass as if it were a mirror that held the images of times long past, then he said pensively: «No glass of noble wine was more precious than the one they handed to us beside our machines the night we burnt Saguntum to the ground». Then we thought: «It is better to fall with him than live with those who grovel in the dust from fear.»’

Hundreds of thousands of copies of On the Marble Cliffs were in circulation in 1939 and 1940 when the German military were ‘joyously’ burning down plenty of Saguntums.

Nevertheless this is a stunning book, with many grains of truths amongst the poisoned fruit.

‘When we are happy our senses are contented with however little this world cares to offer. I had long done reverence to the kingdom of plants, and during years of travel had tracked down its wonders. I knew intimately the sensation of that moment when the heart ceases to beat and we divine in a flower’s unfolding the mysteries that each grain of seed conceals... I caught the fragrance of the white-starred thorny valleys where I had drunk in the bitter springtime of Arabia Deserta, or the scent of vanilla which refreshes the wanderer in the shadeless furnace of the candelabra woods. Then there opened up like the pages of some old book memories of hours spent amidst savage profusion — of hot marshes where the Victoria Regia blooms, of tidal groves seen sweltering at noon on their pale stilts far from the palm-lined coast.’ p26-27