Ernst Jünger

The 1938 version of Ernst Jünger’s The Adventurous Heart: Figures and Capriccios must be considered a key text in the famous German writer’s sprawling oeuvre. In this volume, which bears comparison to the Denkbilder of the Frankfurt School, Jünger assembles sixty-three short, often surrealistic prose pieces—accounts of dreams, nature observations, biographical vignettes, and critical reflections on culture and society—providing, as he puts it, “small models of another way of seeing things.” Here Jünger experiments with a new method of observation and thinking, uniting lucid and precise observation with the unconstrained receptivity of dreams. He calls this method stereoscopy, a form of perception by which our commonplace understanding is extended to include a simultaneous awareness of additional dimensions of sense or value in the object observed. But equally important to Jünger is an intuitive receptivity that comprehends matters directly at the midpoint of the matter, making laborious determinations of the periphery superfluous—intuition is a master key that opens all, and not just the individual doors of a house. With these methods, Jünger attempts to penetrate to the hidden harmony of things that lies behind the dualities of surface and depth, image and essence.

Originally published in Germany in 1977, when Junger was eighty-two years old, Eumeswil is the great novel of Junger's creative maturity, a masterpiece by a central figure in modern German literature. Eumeswil is a utopian state ruled by the Condor, a general who has installed himself as a dictator and who dominates the capital from a guarded citadel atop a hill - the Casbah. A refined manipulator of power, the Condor despises the democrats who conspire against him. Venator, the narrator of the novel, is a historian whose discreet and efficient services as the Condor's night steward earn him full access to the forbidden zone, at the very heart of power. Every evening, while attending to the Condor and his guests at the Casbah's night bar, Venator keeps a secret journal in which he records the conversations he overhears, delineating the diverse personalities in the Condor's entourage while sketching out an analysis of the different aspects of the psychology of power. Venator's days are spent building a hidden refuge in the mountains, a hermetic retreat where he hopes one day to realize his dreams of utter self-sufficiency. In the meantime, however, he continues to pursue his career as a historian, using the magnificent tool that has been placed at his disposal - the "luminar", a holographic instrument that can summon up any figure or event in human history. Venator, in a word, embodies Junger's ideal of the "anarch" - a heroic figure whose radical skepticism and individualism are not to be confused with mere anarchism. Around the opposite figures of the dictator and the anarch, Junger weaves a hallucinatory and poetic rumination on the nature of history and on the mainsprings of political power. At once tale, essay and philosophical poem, Eumeswil offers a desolate and lucid assessment of totalitarianism by an author who witnessed its horrors firsthand.

"In this fascinating account of the battle tanks that saw combat in the European Theater of World War II, Mary R. Habeck traces the strategies developed between the wars for the use of armored vehicles in battle. Only in Germany and the Soviet Union were truly original armor doctrines (generally known as "blitzkrieg" and "deep battle") fully implemented. Storm of Steel relates how the German and Soviet armies formulated and chose to put into practice doctrines that were innovative for the time, yet in many respects identical to one another."--BOOK JACKET.

Unter den Historikern, die sich mit der Verfolgung und Vernichtung der europäischen Juden im Nationalsozialismus beschäftigt haben, nimmt Joseph Wulf als Auschwitz-Überlebender und erster Chronist des Holocaust eine besondere Stellung ein. 1962 nahm er Kontakt zu Ernst Jünger auf, mit dem er bis zu seinem Tod im Oktober 1974 korrespondierte. Der Briefwechsel, der durch mehrere Treffen in Wilflingen und Berlin ergänzt wurde, umfasst etwa 150 Schreiben, in denen beide ihre Auffassungen zur NS-Zeit, zum Holocaust und deren Aufarbeitung dargelegt haben. In vielen Fällen stimmen ihre Bewertungen überein, doch gab es auch Divergenzen. Die Korrespondenz wird damit zu einem bedeutenden Zeugnis der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus in der Bundesrepublik.

In The Glass Bees the celebrated German writer Ernst junger presents a disconcerting vision of the future. Zapparoni, a brilliant businessman, has turned his advanced understanding of technology and his strategic command of the information and entertainment industries into a discrete form of global domination. But Zapparoni is worried that the scientists he depends on might sell his secrets. He needs a chief of security, and Richard, a veteran and war hero, is ready for the job. However, when he arrives at the beautiful country compound that is Zapparoni's headquarters, he finds himself subjected to an unexpected ordeal. Soon he is led to question his past, his character, and even his senses ... When The Glass Bees was first published in 1960, junger's German critics dismissed the book's vision as lacking contemporary relevance. Today, however, the future it imagines seems very much like the present we now know.

Storm of Steel, a memoir by Ernst Jünger, is a firsthand account of his experiences as a German officer during World War I. The book describes the brutal and chaotic nature of trench warfare, heavy artillery bombardments, gas attacks, and the relentless violence of combat.

Ernst Jünger’s The Forest Passage explores the possibility of resistance: how the independent thinker can withstand and oppose the power of the omnipresent state. No matter how extensive the technologies of surveillance become, the forest can shelter the rebel, and the rebel can strike back against tyranny. Jünger’s manifesto is a defense of freedom against the pressure to conform to political manipulation and artificial consensus. A response to the European experience under Nazism, Fascism, and Communism, The Forest Passage has lessons equally relevant for today, wherever an imposed uniformity threatens to stifle liberty.