Having narrowly dodged the too-closely-associated-with-Nazis bullet with his reputation intact (perhaps enhanced), Ernst Junger spent the postwar years traveling the world, writing, and trying various drugs. He moves to Southern California for a while in the early 1960s and enjoys the warm weather and sea air. He becomes enamored of a subculture he observes on the beaches, daredevil young men with their own code of ethics and an impulse to seek the infinite through danger: surfers. Conversing with these children of a null culture proves a challenge for our kulturmensch, but he finds common ground with some; adventure, psychedelics, Buddhism, a certain disregard for conventional morality. His new friends inspire a novel he feels is among his best work, about an unusually Nietzschean band of surfers who take up bank robbing to fund their adventures, and a G-man assigned to bring them in who finds himself drawn in to their way of living. Junger names the novel after a surfing term his friends taught him: Point Break.

Several decades later, film director Kathryn Bigelow attempts to stir up interest in an adaptation, but opinion around the studios is that a movie based on “some book no one’s read by a weird gay old Nazi” is a non-starter.