The Heart of the Adventurer

The book of the outstanding German thinker Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) is a collection of essay-sketches from the Weimar Republic era, balancing on the verge of a fictional diary and a political manifesto. The lonely and brave heart of the adventurer lives among catastrophes, where old values and hierarchies of the bourgeois world perish. The "burning dreamlike landscapes" of the First World War opened for the author a veil behind which lay a demonic world, impenetrable to the daylight of reason, and here the dream, where the amazing and magical is envisioned, becomes for Jünger a paradigm for interpreting the experience of reality. The state of contemporary civilization is a tangled dream. Mysterious images of the monotonous movement of technology, the symbolism of death, the intrusion of destructive demonic forces into the bourgeois world — all this "night side" of life, detailed in "The Heart of the Adventurer," is deeply connected not only with the experience of war but also with the life of a big city. The current edition also includes the essay "Sicilian Letter to the Moon Man."