Jünger wrote “On the Marble Cliffs” in 1937, and read the proofs already at the front, in 1939. This was his first fiction novel and at the same time an exquisite epitaph on the tombstone of the entire previous era - the time period between the two world wars, when conservative views did not yet mean belonging to the power elite, and German writers could still be welcome guests in the literary salons of Paris. A sensitive heart feels the pulse of “history in its infancy”; an exalted mind foresees the inevitable - soon everything will be over. No one will save the Big Lagoon, this small world of harmony of nature and the human spirit, from the barbaric gangs of the Senior Forester, the personification of the violence of power and the chaos carried by the greedy mob. An aristocratic knight, a sophisticated esthete enters into a struggle with his time, he is doomed, but fearless, because behind him are reason, truth and eternity. This romantic and merciless text of high modernity in the 40s became a manifesto of style and struggle for all of reading Europe , without distinction between nations and languages.