In his essay "Across the Line" (1950), Ernst Jünger explores nihilism as the key problem of modernity—a disease process that has engulfed the entire planet. Drawing on the ideas of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, the author proposes three approaches to the problem: diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy. If in "The Worker" (1932), Jünger saw a solution in "total mobilization," now he speaks of the need to "cross the line"—to overcome nihilism through a personal experience of freedom, which will reveal a "new turning point in being." This text is an attempt to find a foothold in an accelerating technological world.

In the afterword to the translation, philosopher Alexander Mikhailovsky explains key images and concepts—"zero point," "nothingness," "pain," "wild wilderness"—and explores the questions raised in the dialogue between Jünger and Heidegger, who responded to this essay with his article "On the Line."