The book by the eminent German thinker Ernst Jünger is a collection of essay-sketches from the Weimar Republic era, balancing on the edge of a fictional diary and a political manifesto. The solitary and courageous heart of an adventurer lives amidst catastrophes, where old values and hierarchies of the bourgeois world perish.

The "fiery dreamlike landscapes" of World War I unveiled for the author a veil behind which lay a demonic world, impenetrable to the daylight of reason. Dreaming, where the marvelous and magical are envisioned, becomes for Jünger a paradigm for interpreting the experience of reality. The state of modern civilization is a tangled dream.

Mysterious images of the monotonous movement of technology, the symbolism of death, the invasion of the bourgeois world by destructive demonic forces—all this "night side" of life, meticulously depicted in "The Heart of an Adventurer," is deeply connected not only with the experience of war but also with life in the big city.

The second edition is supplemented with the translation of Jünger's essay "Sicilian Letter to the Man in the Moon" and a new afterword by the translator.