SOURCE: "Witness to the Century," in Washington Post Book World, February 7, 1993, p. 11.

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...