Description

AN ECONOMIST, GUARDIAN AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR

A gripping narrative of the intertwined lives of the four philosophers whose ideas reshaped the twentieth century

The year is 1919. Walter Benjamin flees his overbearing father to scrape a living as a critic. Ludwig Wittgenstein, scion of one of Europe’s wealthiest families, signs away his inheritance, seeking spiritual clarity. Martin Heidegger renounces his faith and aligns his fortunes with Husserl’s phenomenological school. Ernst Cassirer sketches a new schema of human culture on a cramped Berlin tram. The stage is set for a great intellectual drama. Over the next decade the lives and thought of this quartet will converge and intertwine, as each gains world-historical significance, between them remaking philosophy.

Time of the Magicians brings to life this miraculous burst of intellectual creativity, unparalleled in philosophy’s history, and with it an entire era, from post-war exuberance to economic crisis and the emergence of National Socialism. With great art, Wolfram Eilenberger traces the paths of these titanic figures through the tumult. He captures their personalities as well as their achievements, and illuminates with singular clarity the philosophies each embodied as well as espoused. It becomes an intellectual adventure story, a captivating journey through the greatest revolution in Western thought told through its four protagonists, each with their own penetrating gaze and answer to the question which has animated philosophy from the very beginning: What are we?

Publisher Review

A tremendous feat of scholarship but also a technical masterpiece, knitting together the four men's love lives, money troubles, ontological anxieties and the wider ferment of the Weimar republic with uncommon dexterity -- Oliver Moody * The Times * Splendid, highly entertaining, attentive -- Jonathan Derbyshire * Financial Times * Magnificent, elegantly composed and beautifully narrated -- David Motadel * The Times Literary Supplement * Eilenberger's survey of high thoughts and low politics among German-language philosophers of the 1920s is a salutary tale for today, not just a gripping panorama of century-old dreams and feuds * Economist * Accessible and deeply human ... He draws these four intellectual magi out of the shadows of their writings -- John Kaag * The New York Times * Like any great story, Eilenberger's is not made up, but retrieved. Events have a way of narrating themselves when they encounter a gifted storyteller -- Costica Bradatan * Los Angeles Review of Books * A book of riches - full of stories as well as ideas, all brought together with a fine light touch -- Sarah Bakewell