On the marble cliffs

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On the Marble Cliffs , 1939

In the novel Auf den Marmorklippen from 1939 , Ernst Jünger describes a fictional society in upheaval. The focus is on the highly developed civilization on the shores of an inland lake, the Great Marina. She maintains close relationships with a semi-nomadic shepherd people whose pasture grounds, separated by the marble cliffs, are in the north. Beyond that extends the forest of the head forester, a refuge for social outsiders. The first-person narrator lives secluded with his family on the marble cliffs and dedicates himself to botanical science. The life at the marina, described in an idyllic way, is threatened by the erosion of values ​​and traditions. The chief forester takes advantage of the cultural decline to bring the area under his control. The prince Sunmyra becomes a martyr over the attempt to defend the old order. In return, the chief forester lets the marina culture perish in a fire disaster.

The novel can be understood as a parable on National Socialism . In retrospect, it was not only Jünger himself that gave his work an explanatory power in terms of the philosophy of history, which would include totalitarianism in the sense of Hannah Arendt.

The work is considered typical of Jünger's aestheticism , which contrasts annihilation with serenity or inner emigration . The attitude towards life gained from the experiences of the First World War of facing the impending doom and yet maintaining one's standards of value is stylized.

content

overview

The first-person narrator looks back on his life in the land of the Great Marina with its old port cities and vineyards and the Campagna to the north. Four sections can be distinguished:

1. The old peasant and pastoral societies, their traditions and laws (Kp 1-9).

2. The time of the disintegration of society and spiritual authorities and the unrest caused by the gangs of the "forest lighters" instigated by the chief forester and his Mauritanians (Kp. 9-19). These descriptions show three retrospectives

a) the narrator's earlier intellectual closeness to the head forester's ideology of power and struggle and his membership in the military Mauritanian order, an elite secret society (Chapter 7),
b) on the failed campaign against the freedom-loving rural population in the mountains of Alta Plana, in which the narrator and Otho participated as crimson riders. There he had an affair with Lampusa's daughter Silvia, the mother of his son Erio (cp. 5),
c) on the return of the narrator to Marina seven years ago (cp. 13).

3. The fight of Sunmyras, the prince of New Burgundy, against the chief forester (Kp. 20) and the procession of the narrator with the pastoral patriarch Belovar into the forest region (Kp. 21-25). The subsequent conquest and destruction of the Campagna and the Marina by the chief forester's militias (Kp. 26-29).

4. The emigration of the brothers from the occupied Marina to Alta Plana south of the lake (cf. 30).

Exposure

At the beginning the narrator addresses his readers and creates an atmosphere of shared experience: “You all know the wild melancholy that seizes us when we remember times of happiness. How irrevocably they are gone ”. Then he describes a traditional wine festival in the towns and villages of the marina and the way home over the vine hills to the Rautenklause on the marble cliffs. What follows is the description of life on the marble cliffs on a summer day. There he lives with his brother Otho studying plants in a symbiotic community, together with his illegitimate son, little Erio, and his grandmother Lampusa, who takes care of the household. Both have magical powers and can summon poisonous snakes, lance vipers. Here the researchers collect plants from the area in their herbarium, determine them with the help of the books in their library and search for the language of nature through mystical empathy. H. according to the basic forms and eternal laws of life. From the battlements of the cliffs they overlook the northern and southern surroundings, in which the novel is set. The narrator concludes the exposition with a panorama that covers the entire landscape as the seasons change.

The collapse of spiritual values

From the tenth chapter the general decline of the marina and the takeover of power by the chief forester is described. In the seven years after the failed campaign, the customs of the forest rabble spread in the pastureland, and at the marina the herdsmen's clans gain the upper hand. The cultural institutions themselves are shaken. The previously revered poets lose their priest-like roles in festive rituals. The chief forester controls the rampant brutality and violence from his forests. At the same time, his confidants infiltrate the elites at the marina and offer themselves as a new power of order. The corrupt leader of the mercenaries, Biedenhorn, is increasingly leaving control to the forest captains of the chief forester. The foresters re-measure the land at the marina, because the chief forester wants to transform it into primeval forest.

The retreat into the marble cliff hermitage

Already during the campaign, the narrator and Othos were turning away from the Mauritanian ideology. They have chivalrously fraternized with Ansgar, one of their opponents, whom they warmly allow the successful defense of their freedom. After the defeat, they renounce violence and honorably resign from the Mauritanian order to return to the marina as botanists. As the threat from the chief forester grows, they look for allies. The shepherd leader Belovar is her confidante in the pasture grounds (cf. 15). In the marina they confer with Father Lampros, who as the librarian of a nearby Marian monastery maintains an extensive network of communications and instructs them that the hour of destruction must be the hour of spiritual life (Chapter 16).

The Schinderhütte

From chapter 15 the action runs chronologically towards the fight with the chief forester. The realization of the extent of the threatening danger is triggered by an excursion by the brothers. In an increasingly threatening environment, in search of a rare plant, the red forest bird, they reach the clearing Köppelsbleek. There they discover decayed body parts in the shacker's hut decorated with a skull and hands. It is the lemur-run murder and torture center of the head forester, where the killing takes place with dispassionate craftsmanship. (Cp. 19). Horrified, they flee, but then return and conscientiously finish the botanical field study.

The visit of Sunmyra

The next day (Chapter 20) unexpected guests arrive: the Mauritanian Braquemart introduces them to the young prince of Sunmyra. Braquemart, a cold nihilist and intolerant technician of power, is planning an attack on the chief forester and wants information about the enemy. The brothers share their observations and discuss the strategies. For both of them, murdering a tyrant is not a solution, since Braquemart represents the same ideology as the chief forester. You see the cause of the crisis not in the chief forester, but in the collapse of values. In their opinion, only a new theologian can restore order. According to Alta Plana, they have resolved to “resist violence through pure spiritual power” (cf. chapter 15). In contrast to Braquemart, they see Sunmyra as a true representative of the just order, but Braquemart does not reveal his plans. At dawn the guests move on.

The attack on the chief forester

Since Lampusa is too late to deliver a message from Lampros with the wish to meet the prince urgently, the brothers fear that he and Braquemart, with the magical cooperation of the housekeeper, are at the mercy of the demon powers, and they want to warn them. While Otho remains in the hermitage in order to prepare the ritual burning of the fruits of her labor, which are to be saved in this way into the timeless, the narrator sets out in hunting gear at the request of the priest to support Sunmyra (Chapter 21). Belovar wants to go with him. On his pasture in the Campagna they assemble a troop and unleash the dogs of war (an allusion to Shakespeare's drama Julius Caesar ) (Kp. 22) , designed by the author in a chase metaphor . After a skirmish on the edge of the forest (Chapter 23) they encounter stronger opponents with their sharp dogs and the terrible manhunter themselves (Chapter 24) in front of Köppelsbleek. In his eagerness to hunt down the head forester's favorite mastiff, the narrator is separated from his group and in the clearing finds the prince's and Braquemart's heads speared on poles. The transfigured face of Sunmyra moves the narrator to tears. He swears that in the future he would rather fall alone with the free than go with the servants in triumph. In a state of trance, he hides the prince's head in his pocket. In the meantime his companions and their pack of dogs have been massacred in the counterattack of the head forester (Kp. 25).

The capture of the marina and the flight to Alta Plana

On the way back he flees past the devastated pasture yard of Belovars to the battlements and looks from a great distance at the burning marina: “The spectacle spread out in terrible silence [...] Of all the horrors of destruction, only the golden glimmer rose to the marble cliffs. So distant worlds flare up to the delight of the eyes in the beauty of doom. ”(Chapter 26)“ Rigid as a dream ”he notices on the descent to the Rautenklause, how the bloodhound pack of the head forester is sitting on his neck. He seems to be floating in the garden. The pursuers break through the garden gate. Otho is currently in the process of setting fire to the herbarium, to which they have dedicated their lives, with the rock-crystal lamp in which the power of the sun fire is stored, in order to save it from earthly destruction in the immortal realm of the spirit. Lampusa is already turning to the new rulers. In this apparently hopeless situation, the narrator is helped by the boy Erio as Deus ex machina by destroying the attackers with a magical poisonous snake attack. Then he waves goodbye with a smile and disappears with his grandmother behind the gate that locks the kitchen carved into the rock. With this the spell that weighs on the narrator is broken and he feels free again (Chapter 27). The brothers leave the house, look back to the burning gable of the hermitage ("No house is built, no plan is created in which the downfall is not the foundation stone, and what lives immortally in us does not rest in our works.") And hurry past the collapsing monastery to the port of the city, in which the banner of the chief forester is already waving (Kp. 28). Thanks to their relationship from Mauritanian times with the new governor Biedenhorn, they received a ship and crossed over to Alta Plana (Kp. 29), where friends expected them and found a new home. (Kp. 30) You will first bring the prince head home to the ancestral castle of the Sunmyras for a heroic celebration and then insert it into the foundation stone of the new Christian cathedral in Marina.

Interpretation and reception

A resistance book?

Jünger's novel shows unmistakable references to reality: many autobiographical details are reflected in the figure of its narrator. The Rautenklause corresponds to the vineyard hut near Überlingen, where he lived with his brother Friedrich Georg , who remains unmistakable as Otho, immediately before the start of the Second World War. The large marina east of Burgundy and north of the mountainous region, floating indefinitely in the 19th century, is Lake Constance. Jünger invites his readers to play this game of parallelism as far as possible. But the further the plot moves away from the Rautenklause, the more vigorously Jünger fictionalizes his characters. His contemporary German-speaking readership had to ask less to what extent the jovial , brutal and insidious "head forester" Hermann Göring had served as a model than whether Hitler was up to the comparison with this ideal figure. Even Josef Stalin is mentioned as a possible model for the forester.

The Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler , who was responsible for the Nazi literature control, made an application for the indexing of the marble cliffs , and Goebbels applied - as Jünger was later reported - that the author be imprisoned and sent to a concentration camp . Allegedly, however, Hitler personally held his hand over Jünger. The fact is that from 1942 onwards no paper was approved for his book in Germany. In 1942, however, the book was also published in a French translation by Henri Thomas . In retrospect, Jünger himself did not want his work to be understood exclusively as a book of resistance. “Some could and can put on the shoe” he noted in 1946 in Die Hütte im Weinberg . The literary scholar Erwin Rotermund suggests that the Nazi literature control could not afford to ban the novel, as this could have been understood as a signal to the public that one of the regime's intellectual pioneers had sided with the dissidents.

In 1972, Jünger added a note to the novel, which has since been part of the complete edition. In it he describes the person who inspired him to create the figure of Prince Sunmyra as the "later executed". The two encounters on Lake Constance in autumn 1938 went beyond the scope of the episodic. The assumption that it was the resistance fighter Adam von Trott zu Solz is confirmed by Jünger's diary entry from February 23, 1943.

Position in the complete works

Jünger's claim to not only capture what is happening in Germany but to point beyond them puts the marble cliffs in a row with his essay Der Arbeiter , published in 1932 .

In Jünger's novel Heliopolis , published in 1949, there are some references to On the Marble Cliffs . First of all, the bailiff plays a very similar role here as the chief forester as a despot who uses force to expand his power. The Mauritanians were taken over with the name, again in a similar shady role. As a direct linkage of the "Hunter Association Orion" hangs in the parlor in Heliopolis, an image of the forester "in the green, with gold holly leaves embroidered Fracke" what exactly the description of the forester from the Marble Cliffs equivalent. (Illex also refers to the "seductress" or "decoy" in Latin .)

Reception history

Jünger's novel, published at the beginning of the Second World War, was immediately accepted by rather conservative-minded oppositionists as an explanatory model for National Socialism.

This interpretation sparked a lively argument after 1945. Bertolt Brecht flatly denied Jünger the quality of being a writer. Alfred Döblin preferred to remain silent. Thomas Mann was initially undecided whether it might not be a book of resistance after all. With relief, he took a public statement by Jünger as an opportunity to distance himself.

In the Bonn Republic , the marble cliffs temporarily achieved the rank of school reading in the 1950s. The rejection from journalistic and specialist Germanistic directions increased considerably in the mid-sixties. In the end, the book was only seen by many as an artistically backward negative example of aesthetic and ideological approval of the National Socialists' work of destruction.

This position was also represented by Wolfgang Kaempfer in 1981. The story in Kaempfer is only mentioned in connection with Jünger's aesthetics in order to prove that the author at this stage of his development wants to raise himself above political and moral concerns by the destruction, as described in Chapter 26 as the marina fire, is consistently aestheticized.

Karl Heinz Bohrer, on the other hand, admits the disciple of the marble cliffs in The Aesthetics of Terror three years earlier to overcome a pure aestheticism. In the 11th chapter it is described how the hateful hateful cruelty of the head forester skin the beautiful pearl lizards alive and also search for the last remnants of freedom - for Bohrer the proof of an aesthetic that takes a clear moral position.

The review by Helmuth Kiesel

In 1989, Helmuth Kiesel regretted that Kaemmer had not come to terms with Bohrer's assertion of morality. For him, at this point in time, Auf den Marmorklippen remains an “ethical and aesthetic problem book”.

Kiesel regards the references to the Third Reich as clearly given. As far as Jünger's historical-philosophical ambitions are concerned, he admits similarities to the fascism theory advocated by Georges Bataille . However, he restrictively points out that Jünger lacks any reference to economic relationships. He expressly praises Jünger's deep insights into the practice of rule by the Nazis. With the loving design of the figure of the chief forester as a powerful violent perpetrator of the Wilhelmine style, however, he undermines his protest against unjust rule and acts of terrorism. According to Kiesel, the farewell to the Mauritanian warrior order is to be interpreted as a clear rejection of the Nazis' plans for extermination. However, the aristocratic claim of the Rautenklausen brothers and the appeal to feudal-sounding value concepts must appear arrogant and at the same time non-binding to today's readers. Jünger himself questioned the appropriateness of his portrayal of the concentration camp sphere as "perhaps a little too rosy" in his essay Philemon and Baucis in 1972 . Kiesel considers the cold reaction of the brothers to the sight of the Schinderhütte to be no less problematic. In Jünger's view of the world at that time, cold is a virtue necessary for survival. The morality ascertained by Bohrer is therefore limited to a cold pity that is consoled in secret Leibnizianism . With the dream-like trance state of his narrator watching the fire in the marina, Jünger precisely depicts the disposition of an entire contemporaneity acquired through the First World War. However, it is precisely this type of reaction with which destruction can be aestheticized and made palatable. The ethical problematic of the narrative lies in the fact that it criticizes the desire to destroy, but the being destroyed is aesthetically trimmed and celebrates it as a prerequisite for a new and higher creation. This doom philosophy forms the background for Jünger's reluctance to face resistance plans or even the idea of ​​an assassination attempt on Hitler. According to Kiesel, the marble cliffs are the earliest and most complex document of the efforts to justify this non-assassination attempt.

Musical implementation

On March 8, 2002, the opera Auf den Marmorklippen by Giorgio Battistelli (libretto by Giorgio van Straten) was premiered at the Mannheim National Theater.

literature

expenditure

The first French edition appeared in 1942: Sur les falaises de marbre, translated by Henri Thomas , Paris, Gallimard, coll. "Blanche", 1942.

In an edition of 250 numbered copies signed by the author, an edition designed by Carl Keidel as a book artist with ten signed original etchings by Hans Fronius was published .

Secondary literature

  • Helmuth Kiesel: Ernst Jüngers Marmor-Klippen, renown and problem book of the 12 years . In: Norbert Bachleitner, Christian Begemann u. a. (Ed.): International Archive for Social History of German Literature . Born in 1989, Vol. 14, H1. Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen, ISSN  0340-4528 , pp. 126-164.
  • Hartmut Sommer: The indestructible in the spiritual - Ernst Jünger: The forest 125 near Arras and the 'marble cliffs' on Lake Constance , in: Revolte and Waldgang - The poet philosophers of the 20th century , Darmstadt: Lambert Schneider, 2011, ISBN 978-3-650 -22170-4 .
  • Alexander Martin Pfleger: “Gerhart Hauptmann's visit to the marble cliffs. The underlinings in Gerhart Hauptmann's reading copy of Ernst Jüngers On the Marble Cliffs in the context of Hauptmann's late work. ”In: KUCZYNSKI, Krzysztof A. (Ed.): Carl-und-Gerhart-Hauptmann-Jahrbuch, Volume III. Scientific publishing house of the State University of Applied Sciences in Plock. Plock 2008, ISSN  1641-9839 . Pp. 75-112.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Göring was u. a. at that time also " Reichsjägermeister ".
  2. ↑ See Helmuth Kiesel 1989; Guido Giacomo Preparata (2005): Conjuring Hitler - How Britain and America made the Third Reich. Pluto Press, London Ann Arbor 2005, pp. 255ff .; German: Who made Hitler powerful. How British-American financial elites pioneered the Third Reich. Perseus Verlag, Basel 2009, ISBN 978-3-907564-74-5 .
  3. ↑ See Steffen Martus: Ernst Jünger . Metzler Verlag, Stuttgart 2001, p. 128.
  4. ↑ Ernst Jünger: Complete Works, Vol. 3, p. 615
  5. ↑ Erwin Rotermund: Forms and Reception Problems of the “Covered Writing” in the “Third Reich” (1933-1945) . In: GOŁASZEWSKI, Marcin, KARDACH, Magdalena, Krenzlin, Leonore (eds.), Between Inner Emigration and Exile. German-speaking writers 1933-1945, Berlin / Boston: de Gruyter, 2016. de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2016, p. 44 .
  6. ↑ a b Kiesel 1989, online edition, section 7.
  7. ↑ Günter Scholdt: Failed on the marble cliffs . In: Journal for German Philology . 1979, No. 98, pp. 543ff
  8. ↑ a b Kiesel 1989, online edition, section 1.
  9. ^ Wolfgang Kaempfer: Ernst Jünger. Metzler, Stuttgart 1981.
  10. ↑ Karl Heinz Bohrer: The Aesthetics of Terror. Ullstein, Frankfurt 1978.
  11. ↑ Kiesel 1989, online edition, section 2.
  12. ↑ Kiesel 1989, online edition, section 3.
  13. ↑ Kiesel 1989, online edition, section 4.
  14. ↑ Kiesel 1989, online edition, section 5.
  15. ↑ Kiesel 1989, online edition, section 6.