FICTION

ALADDIN’S PROBLEM by Ernst Junger, translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel (Marsilio: $19; 136 pp.). Aladdin’s problem, according to Ernst Junger (who was born in 1895 and wrote this novella in 1982), is that the genie’s lamp gave him godlike power without any corresponding insight into the universe. This also is the problem of modern man. Junger examines it through the eyes of Friedrich Baroh, an East German military officer who defects to the West, joins a mortuary firm and becomes involved in a gigantic scheme to sell millions of jittery moderns the illusion of security: “eternal rest” in ancient catacombs in Turkey.

The novella, too, has its problems. The first is that Baroh, a descendant of the old Prussian aristocracy, is a hard fellow to like. “I am no liberal,” he says, “at least in the sense that people have to get together and vote. . . . A man with a good mind will realize his potential in any regime.” He defects, in part, because the armies of the Warsaw Pact lack the esprit of those of Frederick the Great . In West Germany, this self-proclaimed nihilist chases a career like any other yuppie and lets his marriage slide. We come dangerously close to not caring what happens to him.

The second is that Junger (best known for his 1939 anti-Nazi novel “On the Marble Cliffs”) seems to have grown impatient with the nuts and bolts of fiction. “Aladdin’s Problem” is more of a sketch than a story, though it shows an unusual grasp of the thought processes of people in power. Junger wants to get on with the philosophizing, but the story takes its revenge. We are insufficiently prepared when Baroh encounters a mysterious figure named Phares who, he believes, “knows the primal text” of the meaning that underlies the material world--a meaning that the modern world has lost.