Drugs, like wars, are dangerous. The German author Ernst Jünger feasted on both. As a young soldier in the Kaiser’s army he fought furiously in the trenches, before burying himself under mountains of Weimar Berlin’s cocaine. As he aged, Jünger’s taste in chemical delicacies grew more refined: hashish, morphine, peyote. His novel Heliopolis (1949) is set in a dystopian future city where a scientist defies its miseries through drug-induced mental voyages. Jünger coined the term “psychonaut” to describe the character who “captured dreams, just as others seem to pursue butterflies with nets”. But how could the psychonaut uncover dreamlike truths?
The method had a formula: C₂₀H₂₅N₃O, or lysergic acid diethylamide — LSD. This unbelievably potent, ego-dissolving, madness-teasing drug was discovered, synthesized and first ingested by Jünger’s friend and spiritual mentee, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann. While Jünger was one of the greatest artists to experiment and enjoy the drug — JG Ballard tried it once in 1967, said it opened up a “vent into hell” and refused to take anything stronger than a whiskey and soda ever again — it is Hofmann, not Jünger, who is the hero of Norman Ohler’s entertaining, if occasionally melancholic, study of LSD, Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age.
