![]() ![]() ![]() Commoners had negligible political influence. The Kaiserreich (German Empire) had united the many small German states, aggressively worked to catch up with industrialization, built a state to rival France and Great Britain, and remained authoritarian throughout. Germany had entered modernity without democracy. The obvious frame for this book is what has been fittingly termed the German Catastrophe: the fate of Germany in the late 19th and early 20th century, as viewed from the perspective of German nationalists who were not Nazis - the perspective of people like Ernst Jünger. To expose what in my opinion is the actual point of this book, but which (no doubt due to its many other attractions) all reviews of it I have read have missed entirely. To contextualize it in such a way as to enhance your appreciation in case you actually read it. To persuade you that On the Marble Cliffs is so unique, so beautiful and so absurdly courageous that you should at least know about it. I picked On the Marble Cliffs, because it is all of that at the same time. Or maybe an unusual political book, such as an ultraconservative indictment of democracy by Adolf Hitler's favorite author? Or rather an indictment of both Hitler and Bolshevism, written by someone who was among the first to recognize Hitler as a true enemy of humanity? How about the drug-fueled fantasies of a serial killer? Or perhaps the innovative, sophisticated prose of the first novel of a brilliant polymath? Or would you prefer a book written in such fantastically lucid language it feels more like a dream than a story? Possibly you’d be more interested in a book so unbelievably dangerous that the attempt to publish it was literally suicidal. What kind of fiction could be remarkable enough for an Astral Codex Ten review? ![]()
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