The Details of Time: Conversations With Ernst Junger

From a series of informal interviews at the time of the author's ninetieth birthday, The Details of Time: Conversations with Ernst Junger is the intense account of a life spanning the whole of the twentieth century. Both witness and active player in some of our century's most dramatic and often tragic moments, Junger talks here with remarkable candor of the events and ideas that shaped him as a writer.
Scarred by terrible ironies and contradictions, Junger's extraordinary career holds as much fascination as his writing: escape to Africa as a teenager to join the French foreign legion; wounded fourteen times in the trenches and awarded Germany's highest distinction during World War I; service as an officer in Occupied France during World War II, while writing On the Marble Cliffs, a thinly veiled attack on the Nazi regime that slipped past the censors to gain notoriety as an international best-seller; his association with the July 20 assassination attempt against Hitler, and, finally, the difficult years of a notorious man-of-letters who would also become a noted entomologist and a onetime dabbler in hallucinogenics.
These "conversations" are an intense reflection on the major events of the author's life, from a childhood marked by the Dreyfuss Affair and the sinking of the Titanic, to his meetings with such major figures as Heidegger, Borges, Picasso, and Braque. Junger treats ambiguous, sometimes alarming beliefs with rare honesty, affording an absorbing, often haunting look into the mind of one of Europe's most renowned writers. Full of wit and wisdom. The Details of Time is a perfect introduction to Junger's work, as well as a personal testament to a life in which joie de vivre and intellect are inevitably intertwined.