The book by the outstanding German thinker Ernst Jünger is a collection of essay-sketches from the era of the Weimar Republic, balancing on the edge of a fictional diary and a political manifesto. A lonely and brave heart of an adventurer lives among catastrophes, where old values and hierarchies of the bourgeois world die off. “Flaming, fire-dream landscapes” of the First World War opened for the author a curtain behind which hid a demonic world—impermeable to daylight reasoning—and here, in a dream, the wonderful and magical becomes for Jünger a paradigm for interpreting the experience of reality. The state of modern civilization is a tangled dream. Mysterious images of monotonous motion of technology, symbolism of death, the invasion into the bourgeois world of destructive demonic forces—all of this “night side” of life, carefully rendered in “The Heart of an Adventurer,” is deeply connected not only with the experience of war, but also with the life of a big city.
The second edition is expanded with a translation of Jünger’s essay “Sicilian Letter to the Moon Man” and a new afterword by the translator.