From The Worthy House on January 21, 2019
Eumeswil (by Ernst Jünger)

One cannot really understand Eumeswil without reading, preferably first reading, Jünger’s earlier The Forest Passage, which was published in 1951, twenty-six years before Eumeswil. On the surface, they are very different—this book is cast as dystopian science fiction, and The Forest Passage
is a work of philosophical exposition. But Jünger himself explicitly
ties the two books together, linking the earlier book’s concept of the
“forest rebel” with this book’s concept of the “anarch.” In both books,
the author’s focus on freedom, specific to each individual, is easily
misinterpreted, because what freedom means to most people today is not
what Jünger means by the term. Jünger means an internal, spiritual
freedom, an elitist freedom, not the freedom of license and consequent ennui. This confusion drives all the misunderstandings of Eumeswil.