[In the following review, McGonigle discusses Jünger's Aladdin's Problem and asserts that "through the power of fiction and the authority of a long life's experience, Jünger makes us take with appropriate seriousness his observations about the modern world."]

At 97, Ernst Jünger is both Germany's and Europe's oldest and most distinguished writer. Unfortunately he is little-known in the United States. But in a long and adventurous life Jünger has been able to fulfill two-thirds of the famous prescription of Baudelaire: "There are but three beings worthy of respect: the priest, the warrior and the poet. To know, to kill and to create."

Even before the First World War, Jünger had already run away from his conventional middle-class family and served in the French Foreign Legion. During WWI itself he fought, for Germany, an entire four years in the front-line trenches; was seriously wounded seven times and was awarded the German equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Two of his books about his wartime experiences have been translated as The Storm of Steel and Copse 125. The first of these is a celebration of the exhilaration that Jünger experienced during combat while leading a unit of shock troops. "It was," he writes, "a good and strenuous life and the war for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart."

After the war Jünger studied biology and pursued entomological research, publishing a number of books foretelling the rise of an inhuman technological society and the death of both the individual and of personal heroism.

Recalled to the army at the outbreak of the Second World War, he served notably in Paris where he was a sort of unofficial liaison between the German army and French intellectuals. After the war, the novelist refused to submit to any Allied denazification procedure on the grounds that he had never been a Nazi.

In the years since then Jünger has published a shelf of books: a series of visionary novels, an extensive diary that is a perennial bestseller in France, entomological research papers, volumes of travel writings, and even a book of recounting his experiences under LSD (administered by his friend, the inventor of the drug, Albert Hofmann).

Hitherto Jünger has been best-known in this country for two novels: the anti-Nazi parable On the Marble Cliffs, published originally and astonishingly in Germany in 1938, and the futuristic novel The Glass Bees (translated by poet Louise Bogan). In the newly translated Aladdin's Problem, first published in 1983, Friedrich Baroh, disguised scion of an aristocratic German family, delivers a monologue about the aftermath of the Second World War in Poland: Baroh is drafted into the Polish army, rises quickly and then defects to the West where he goes to university, marries and takes a position in his uncle's funeral parlor. After a visit to the cemetery at Verdun, Baroh conceives the idea of a vast mausoleum, to be built in Turkey, to provide a resting place for all the world's restless dead.

Such a bald description does little justice to the epigrammatic plot of Aladdin's Problem. However, the author himself provides, in the final section, another summary:

So far, my story is a statistical matter, under the subheading: Personal success after difficulties in war and civil war. These ascents occur not only in business, but also in art and science. Like a winning lottery ticket, they presuppose an enormous number of losers. Nor do I consider unusual that stage of nihilism in which I abide as in a waiting-room, half bored, half expecting the warning bell. Individuals become passengers, and it is surprising that the waiter still takes their order? Given the sinister way in which our world is changing, almost everybody ought to be familiar with this mood, in which one begins to doubt rationality. Perhaps the whole thing is a ghostly dream.

By having carefully delineated the rise of his hero, Jünger is able to conflate that story with his own personal history. Moreover, through the power of fiction and the authority of a long life's experience, Jünger makes us take with appropriate seriousness his observations about the modern world: "Culture is based on the treatment of the dead culture vanishes with the decay of graves or rather: this decay announces that the end is nigh."

And finally, Aladdin's problem? Jünger reminds us, "Aladdin's lamp was made of pewter or copper, perhaps merely clay." Through its power "he could put up palaces or wipe out cities overnight … The lamp guaranteed dominion as far as the frontier of the traveled world—from China to Mauritania. Aladdin preferred the life of a minor despot. Our lamp is made of uranium. It establishes the same problem: power streaming toward us titanically."