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.”

The pair, men from a northern country, are former soldiers who now spend their days engaged in botanical studies, an interest, not so coincidentally, of Ernst’s, surrounded by books and herbarium sheets, cataloguing their discoveries, reveling in the beauty and order of nature, “bantering over recondite trivia,” playing philosophical games, and indulging in a little magic. Regardless of the quality of the Jünger brothers’ banter, this is obviously an idealized representation of their inner emigration in pre-war Nazi Germany. The duo live “in great seclusion” in an old house built on and into the Marble Cliffs overlooking one of the “beautiful, ancient” towns that “wreath” a large lake—the Grand