On the Marble Cliffs FIRST EDITION

New York: New Directions, 1947. First American Edition, 1st Printing. Hardcover. Very good +/good. First American Edition, 1st Printing. Hardcover. A presentable first American printing of Ernst Juenger's first novel, a "mesmerizing work of fantasy and an allegory of the advent of fascism" (New York Review of Books). Shockingly originally published in 1939 in Germany, decorated WWI German soldier Ernst Juenger's first novel is set in a serene agricultural society undergoing upheaval and ruin through the strategies by which tyranny and authoritarianism take power. As the front flap of its notoriously fragile dust jacket notes: "It is hard to understand (truncated) how On the Marble Cliffs could have been published in the Germany of 1939. For although it is an allegory, its intention can hardly have been mistaken; it is a study of the nature of tyranny, showing by what processes a totalitarian regime wins its hold over a free people," even unto the portrayal or perhaps prediction of the death camps Hitler's Germany would become infamous for.

7 5/8" X 5 1/4". v, 120pp. Presents nicely in protective archival sleeved jacket. Fragile original dust jacket shows long splits along edge of spine at front panel, still attached, with chipping to head and tail of spine and at edges and folds, and neat tear to upper marging of rear panel, with no losses. Front flap clipped, but price present on rear flap. Bound in blue cloth over boards, with spine lettered in black. Gentle rubbing and bumping to extremities. Toning to endpapers. Binding is firm and sound. Pages are clean and unmarked.

From the rear cover:
"Juenger showed great courage in publishing this book at the time he did, for it is a balance sheet of the depravity, the nihilism, and the destruction of all moral values that were the Hitler regime; it marked, however, a complete break with the author's past. It is an anti-Nazi document, but it is also one of the most beautiful novels of the imagination of modern Germany, an allegory of the death of a civilization in the grand symbolist manner." — Louis Clair, review for The Nation, March 1948.

"I regard On The Marble Cliffs as a little masterpiece, recording the struggle of the human spirit in our time. I know Juenger's earlier record, and I know that he flirted for a time in the antechambers of Nazi thinking. But that's why this book of his, written on the high tide of Hitler's power comes with all the greater force as an intellectual and moral rejection of any form of tyranny. It is a dense and yet somehow luminous allegory. It has an almost insupportable richness of language and imagery. It could not have been written except by a man within whose own heart the deepest forces of our time have fought it out like a coil of wild serpents. This book is one of the few literary monuments that stand out on the desert waste of Hitler's Germany." — Max Lerner. (Inventory #: 16816)