2000 [original German edition in 1957], nyrb, NY, 209 pages

The Glass Bees is the story of Captain Richard, told as if he were relating his memoirs to a ghostwriter. Like the author, Captain Richard has survived two great wars, and his reflections on events leading up to his discovery of The Glass Bees are saturated with accounts of his formative years in the light cavalry. Although an infantryman, I suspect Junger chose for his protagonist’s service to have been on horseback, as a means to more starkly sketch the deep descent into a technological society, a descent of spirit alongside an ascent to luxurious apathy.

In a brief four pages, with some retouching on pages 14-15, Junger draws a masterful self-portrait of a conflicted and flawed man without the moxie to be an antihero. The reader comes to like Captain Richard, despite his flaws, much like an elder cousin or aging uncle. Captain Richard, however, does not seem to age; is ever the cavalry cadet who rode through his burning world on a doomed steed as everything he thought he understood burned around him. He is a man taken unawares by the miracle of his own survival.

Plagued by his nature, which is inextricably intertwined with his war experiences, he attempts to make some money despite himself for the benefit of his guiltlessly loyal wife. Toward this end the first portion of the book focuses on his few meetings with a former fellow from the cavalry, who has become a headhunter for various techno-industrialists; particularly the Bill Gates of this might-have-been Europe, an Italian innovator who employs an army of artisan like adventurers who seem very much like today’s software coders.

The second portion of the book involves Captain Richard’s meeting with the technology tycoon, whose inventions have in Junger’s future, like video games in our time, usurped the attention of children and come to dominate entertainment. It is impossible to note Junger’s six technological predictions [not overly ambitious for a sci-fi author] and his 16 predictions of the societal changes these innovations had wrought, without being moved to consider the gee whiz American sci-fi authors from his day and the later Star Trek franchises. I cannot make this leap without laughing at the infantile implausibility and arrogance of American science-fiction. A gazillion gismos, some killer babes, and hundreds of years of space travel, and the best you can do is the U.S. Navy under U.N. Command in space?

Ernst Junger took a deeper look into the human condition with more grace, wit and wisdom, in this one slim novel, than three generations of American screenwriters did in a half dozen TV series and more movies. What makes this doubly pathetic is that Junger used for his canvas, one man’s pathetic quest to land a security job.

The joy of reading Junger is his insight into what it is to be human, which surpasses most of what I have read by nonfiction and fiction writers who address the subject in an often more direct way.

Some of my favorite quotes from The Glass Bees are:

“A great physicist is always a metaphysician as well; he has a higher concept of his knowledge and his task.”

“Though we later fought on apparently different sides, one in the same machine mowed us down.”

“Words had changed their meaning; even police were no longer police.”

“Nearly everyone today is a slave to material means.”

In the end the reader finally gets to fathom the mystery of The Glass Bees, and what the reader of 2014 will be struck with, is something that is being promoted avidly by environmentalists, politicians, scientists, and military planners alike, something that may make Ernst Junger the single most prescient science-fiction prophet in history—and perhaps the darkest.