HERVIER: If I focus on the two utopias of your great novels Heliopolis and Eumeswil- 1949 and 1977 respectively-it seems that your view of the world has definitely grown more somber.
JÜNGER: Yes, but I would like to say that I do not want this to be interpreted as a prophecy about the future. At the moment, there is a portion that involves everything that Nietzsche says about his last man. For me, the last man is, above all, a phantom: man living amid comfort, as depicted in Nietzsche's Zarathustra, is only the before- last, and another will soon emerge. This is the kind of thought that comes to mind at twilight, and that is then pondered. But Eumeswil does not boil down to that. As for the period of "Passage of the Line," [translated as "Across the Line", AF] which, Heidegger says, should have posted the problems differently, I was playing an optimistic game. This doesn't mean that I'm contradicting myself, I am simply revealing facts that contradict one another. This an entirely different matter
- The Details of Time: Conversations with Ernst Junger
