A Dangerous Encounter

First edition in English. The Eridanos Library series. 8vo. 187pp. Quarter-bound green cloth over blue-grey boards, stamped in blue foil to spine.

Translated from the German original Eine gefährliche Begegnung (1985), by Hilary Barr.

A murder mystery of acute psychological insight set in fin de siècle Paris. By the prolific German novelist and essayist, whose interwar militarism and anti-Semitism transmuted in his 1939 allegory Auf den Marmorklippen (On the Marble Cliffs) into outright criticism of German National Socialism. However, Ian Buruma's review of Barr's translation in the New York Review of Books, led to a series of acrimonious exchanges between them, over the extent of Jünger's contrition at his youthful fascination with Nazi ideology.

By 1943, Jünger had noted in his diary: "When all buildings shall be destroyed, language will none the less persist. It will be a magic castle with towers and battlements, with primeval vaults and passageways which none will ever search out. There, in deep galleries, oubliettes and mine-shafts it will be possible to find habitation and be lost to the world. Today that thought consoles me." During his centenarian lifetime, he was awarded the Iron Cross I. Class, Pour le Mérite, Grand Merit Cross, Schiller Memorial Prize, Goethe Prize, and the Maximillian Order, among many military and literary distinctions.