Telos Press has recently re-issued Joachim Neugroschel’s translation of Ernst Jünger’s Eumeswil, this time with an introduction by Jünger biographer Russell A. Berman. This is to be celebrated of course, as Jünger deserves to be more present on the English-speaking market. In this novel from 1977, Jünger gives voice to Martin Venator, a philosophising historian who works nights as a bartender for the ruling elite of a North African city state called Eumeswil. Already here, we see a set-up so proto-Jüngerian that it is correct to regard this book as a key novel in Jünger’s oeuvre: an outsider on the inside thinking about the structure of power from both philosophical and historical perspectives. How to retain the necessary distance every free human being needs? Venator’s solution is two-fold: he studies and teaches under the supervision of enlightened academic mentors, who provoke new angles and perspectives in subtle historical hints. But he also secretly constructs a little...
