Ernst Jünger was a German war hero who became a writer, and presented himself as a kind of mystical warrior-dandy. His most famous novel, On The Marble Cliffs (1939), is too dreamlike in its symbolism to be pinned down as an allegory, but too precise and focused to have the effect of a dream. To a modern reader, the novel is obviously critical of Hitler, except that it seems impossible to articulate precisely how.

Jünger loathed the Nazis, yet avoided criticising them directly, as though it would be beneath his dignity to discuss something so low. Somehow, he avoided reprisals even when he was implicated in the Stauffenberg plot to assassinate Hitler. Nobody could mistake him for a liberal, but nor was he a reactionary, even in his artistic tastes. Instead, he tried to hold himself to principles that stood outside time.

Jünger’s short 1951 treatise The Forest Passage lays out a strategy for entering a realm beyond the control of a seemingly omnipotent state in order to pursue freedom in a struggle against unconstrained power. Over the past three quarters of a century, it has revealed itself as an uncannily prescient meditation on the nature of tyranny as it has evolved since the Second World War.

Jünger’s vision of resistance against totalitarianism demands the effort of a few singular men, whom he calls ‘Forest Rebels’. Instead of defining them, he describes them in detail, albeit in spiritual rather than practical terms. The special integrity of the Forest Rebel demands deep self-respect, a love of freedom, and knowledge of the most important traditions through which civilisation survives.

The Forest Passage is almost a religious text, except that it makes no declaration of faith. Although an agnostic throughout his life, Jünger was fascinated by Christianity, and read the Bible cover to cover more than once while serving as an intelligence officer in Paris during the Second World War. At the age of 101, he converted to Catholicism, faithfully receiving the sacraments until he died, not long before his 103rd birthday. Yet his beliefs are as difficult to pin down as his political views.

Jünger is endlessly quotable, or seems so until you try to take one of his insights out of context. His pithiest one-liners are invariably embedded in a fabric of equally pungent aperçus; you find yourself compelled to quote paragraphs or entire pages, rather than single observations.

Perhaps Jünger’s greatest works were published after he turned 75. Approaches: Drugs and Altered States (1970) appears at first to be a meditation on the author’s experiments with various intoxicants, from caffeine, tobacco and alcohol to hashish, ether, cocaine, mescaline and LSD. But, in Jünger’s eyes, books, music and works of art are also intoxicants. Was religion one as well? He knew that drug-taking originates in the thirst or hunger for some form of transcendence. In exploring the mysteries of perception, consciousness and ecstasy, he was searching for deeper meaning about life and reality.

In 1977, aged 82, Jünger published his richest philosophical fiction, Eumeswil, which is a sequel to The Forest Passage, and cannot be understood without it. It is less a novel than an evocatively atmospheric rumination on power in the form of a narrative. Jünger had little interest in character, plotting or storylines, preferring instead to create extended prose-poems interspersed with occasional anecdotes.

Eumeswil unfolds in a post-apocalyptic landscape in North Africa. Except for a short epilogue, it is told in the voice of Martin Venator, who comes from a family of historians, and works mainly as a ‘night steward’ for a figure known as The Condor, who rules over the city-state of Eumeswil like a Renaissance-era strongman. Jünger expects his readers to have a grasp of Greek and Roman history, and a wide reading in poetry and philosophy, deliberately addressing a self-selecting audience because not everybody will want to hear what he has to say.

Eumeswil develops Jünger’s concept of the ‘Anarch’, who is to an ‘anarchist’ as a ‘monarch’ is to a ‘monarchist’. The Anarch is completely free; unlike a Forest Rebel, he feels no need to withdraw from society, because he knows how to live around people without ever becoming part of their world. Venator, the model Anarch, lives in a relatively benign dictatorship in a decaying world that has no obvious future, just a kind of listless idleness in which the Condor tries to maintain some semblance of order.

If The Forest Passage implicitly focussed on the conditions of postwar East Germany, Eumeswil began as a guide to surviving the West German world of the 1970s. You cannot enjoy it as an ordinary novel, but nor can you treat it as a political-science textbook. This is a poetic thought-experiment; Jünger was not a systematic philosopher, but an aesthete who sought to be heard only by those who might be willing to teach themselves how to understand his work.

The Forest Passage, Approaches and Eumeswil all demand at least as much care and attention as an ancient philosophical dialogue composed in classical Greek. They cannot be speed-read, nor do you always feel like the right reader for them. In Chapter 23 of Eumeswil, one character tells the Condor:

What you call ‘genius’, Excellency, is outside of time; it therefore cannot be rewarded appropriately, much less according to set criteria. Whenever it goes far beyond talent, it is recognised wither inadequately or not at all. An artwork fetches high prices long after the death of its creator, who may have died in poverty. Yet the very high price can signify only that genius is priceless. Hence, even when patrons or rulers spoil a genius, he labours for free. In this respect, he resembles the gods, who bestow freely. The world as Creation is not beyond but outside of things. That is where its immutable Being is to be found.

To many readers, this sounds like fortune-cookie wisdom; but in the eyes of a few, Jünger is a prophet.