TY - JOUR T1 - Ernst Jünger’s <em>Dangerous Encounter</em>—the Detective Closes the Case on the Adventurer JF - Monatshefte SP - 383 LP - 399 DO - 10.1353/mon.0.0053 VL - 100 IS - 3 AU - Martin Rosenstock Y1 - 2008/09/21 UR - http://mon.uwpress.org/content/100/3/383.abstract N2 - Ernst Jünger’s detective novel Eine gefährliche Begegnung (1985) dramatizes a clash between the concept of adventure and the principles of order and modern scientific inquiry. Set in Paris, in 1888, the text tells the story of a murder investigation. Two adventurers embody, respectively, adventure’s origins in medieval chivalry and adventure’s eighteenth- and nineteenth-century form of colonial exploration; the detective embodies nineteenth-century advances in applied science as well as modern anthropological and psychological theories. Jünger’s narrative engages with defining nineteenth-century texts, such as Bertillon’s writings on anthropometric identification, Cesare Lombroso’s theories on the nature of the criminal, and Gustave Le Bon’s analysis of mass psychology. These texts articulate a rationalist ethos, advocated in Jünger’s novel by the detective. The opposing principles of unregulated individual freedom and a fanciful code of honor, embodied by the adventurers, are depicted as relics of a bygone age, whose passing can only be lamented, not remedied. ER -