SOURCE: A review of On the Marble Cliffs, in The Nation, Vol. 166, No. 13, March 27, 1948, pp. 357-58.

In the following review, Clair asserts that Jünger's On the Marble Cliffs "is an anti-Nazi document, but it is also one of the most beautiful novels of imagination of modern Germany, an allegory in the grand symbolist manner of the death of a civilization."

Somewhere in a mythical landscape, high above the marble cliffs, on the edge of a fertile valley, two brothers—retired army officers—have settled after a lost war. Below in the peaceful countryside an industrious and quiet people tills its fields; farther on lives a rude yet hospitable tribe of shepherds, closely following traditional ways of life. Still farther away, in the thicknesses of the dark and impenetrable forest, the Chief Ranger, a demoniac figure, rules over the marshes with the aid of his cruel, inhuman underlings...