By Josh Niesse Saturday, Jun 07, 2025

The Dual State

Originally published in English in 1941, The Dual State is a foundational work on authoritarian governance and one of the most important legal and political analyses of Nazi Germany to emerge from the anti-fascist exile community. In it, Fraenkel, a Jewish socialist lawyer who fled Germany for the U.S. in 1938, lays out his now-famous theory of the coexistence between a “normative state” (ruled by law) and a “prerogative state” (ruled by arbitrary power)—a chilling duality that continues to resonate in contemporary debates about the erosion of democratic norms, as detailed in Aziz Huq's March 2025 Atlantic article "America Is Watching the Rise of a Dual State."

This 1969 reprint is notable not just for its intellectual significance but also for its personalized inscription from Fraenkel, dated July 13, 1970, Berlin, in full: "To President Frederick P. McGinnis / With the compliments of the author / Berlin, 13. July 1970 / Ernst Fraenkel". The circumstances of this transatlantic exchange remain unknown, though McGinnis’s presidency was marked by academic expansion and involvement in early international exchange programs. Whether the two men met in Berlin during a Cold War academic conference or through mutual legal-political interests is unclear—but the connection opens a compelling avenue for further research. Nevertheless, a striking artifact linking one of the 20th century’s sharpest minds on dictatorship with a quiet figure in American academia, and a timely relic of democratic exchange made extra potent during our present moment of acute global ideological fractures.

A presentable signed later printing of Fraenkel’s foundational work on authoritarian governance, inscribed by the author in Berlin in 1970 to President Frederick P. McGinnis, then head of Alaska Methodist University (now Alaska Pacific University), whose early leadership helped shape one of the country’s youngest private liberal arts institutions.

 

The Marble Cliffs

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 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.

 

"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

 

 

From Death-Camp to Existentialism [Man's Search for Meaning]

This is a presentable first printing of the first edition in the English language of one of the most influential books of all time.

Originally published as From Death-Camp to Existentialism, it is best known today as Man's Search for Meaning and it is the work of Viktor Emil Frankl (1905–1997), psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, providing an account of Frankl's years in four different concentration camps, including Auschwitz, while his pregnant wife and family lost their lives, as well as introducing his theory known as logotherapy, the idea that our life's primary drive is not pleasure as Freud proposed, but the creation of meaning. It was this making of meaning in one's life that Frankl believed helped him and others survive the Holocaust. When Frankl passed away in 1997, From Death-Camp to Existentialism, retitled Man's Search for Meaning, had sold over 10 million copies and had been translated into 24 languages.