Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

by Wolfram Eilenberger

Overview

A grand narrative of the intertwining lives of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ernst Cassirer, major philosophers whose ideas shaped the twentieth century

The year is 1919. The horror of the First World War is still fresh for the protagonists of Time of the Magicians, each of whom finds himself at a crucial juncture. Walter Benjamin, having survived the flu during the 1918 pandemic, is trying to flee his overbearing father and floundering in his academic career. Ludwig Wittgenstein, by contrast, has dramatically decided to divest himself of the monumental fortune he stands to inherit as a scion of one of the wealthiest industrial families in Europe, in search of absolute spiritual clarity. Meanwhile, Martin Heidegger, having managed to avoid combat in war by serving instead as a meteorologist, is carefully cultivating his career. Finally, Ernst Cassirer is working furiously in academia, applying himself intensely to his writing and the possibility of a career at Hamburg University. The stage is set for a great intellectual drama, which will unfold across the next decade. The lives and ideas of this extraordinary philosophical quartet will converge as they become world historical figures. But with the Second World War looming on the horizon, their fates will be very different.

Wolfram Eilenberger stylishly traces the paths of these remarkable and turbulent lives, which feature not only philosophy but some of the most important other figures of the century, including John Maynard Keynes, Hannah Arendt, and Bertrand Russell. In doing so, he tells a gripping story about four of history's most ambitious and passionate thinkers, and illuminates with rare clarity and economy their brilliant ideas, which all too often have been regarded as enigmatic or opaque.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780525559665
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/18/2020
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	20,934
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Wolfram Eilenberger is an internationally bestselling author and philosopher. He is the founding editor of Philosophie Magazin and hosts the television program Sternstunde Philosophie on the Swiss public broadcasting network SRF. In 2018, he published Time of the Magicians in Germany. The book instantly became a bestseller there, as well as in Italy and Spain, and won the prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger in France. It has been translated into more than twenty languages. Eilenberger has been a prolific contributor of essays and articles to many publications, among them Die Zeit, Der Spiegel, and Cicero, and has taught at the University of Toronto, Indiana University Bloomington, and Berlin University of the Arts.

Table of Contents

I Prologue: The Magicians 1

The Arrival of God

High Fliers

Maintaining One's Composure The Davos Myth

Human Questions

Without Foundation Two Visions

At a Crossroads

Where Is Benjamin? Fail Better

Does My Life Need a Goal?

The One-Man Republic

II Leaps: 1919 29

What to Do?

A Refuge

Critical Days

Romantic Theses New Self-Awareness

Flights

The Transformation

Ethical Acts

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

An Interesting Condition Exposed Flanks

A World Without a View

The Primal Scientist No Alibi

The New Realm

Fidelity to the Event German Virtues

Unloved

Electrified

III Languages: 1919-1920 61

Figuratively Speaking

Viennese Bridges

Poetic Precision Against the World

Three Dots in The Hague Pictures of Facts

The Barber

Russell on the Ladder

Why the World Does Not Exist

Under Pressure The Obscured Gaze

Lonely Together

Two Oddballs Worlds Ahead

The Breakthrough of Authenticity Something in Media

Flappers

The Task Radical Translation

Cult and Sound

Goethe in Hamburg The Fundamental Phenomenon

The Will to Multiplicity Onward

Does the Language Exist?

IV Culture: 1922-1923 115

A Hut of One's Own

Strange Callings

Existential Health Check

Stormy Weather

Wars of Attrition

Bad Neighbors Good Neighbors

Utopia on the Bookshelf

The Outcome of Myth The New Enlightenment

Across the River In the Maelstrom

The Third Man

Goethe in Weimar More Light

Freedom or Fate

Choice or Decision The Divorced Republic

Leap of Salvation Redeeming Transcendence

Ruthlessness Three-Quarters Understood

In Therapy

Top Down

V You: 1923-1925 163

The Idiot

It's Complicated

Hospitality From Hamburg to Bellevue

Snake Experiments Tunnel and Light

Weimar Topples

Mighty Fortresses Being an Event

You, Demon

In the Midst of Being To Think the Hardest Thing

Amor Mundi

Hunger Cures Goodbye Deutschland

Grapes and Almonds

New Beginnings

VI Freedom: 1925-1927 205

Red Stars

Critical Prologues

A Case for Adam Grief Work

Remembered Perception

Tristes Tropiques Critical Album

Palestine or Communism

Neighbors To Work

Exposing the Question The Time of Dasein Philosophizing with a Hammer: The Study of Equipment Sturm und Angst That Certain Something: Running Ahead into Death The Hamburg School

The Hidden Origin Plurality of Outcome

Self-Fashioning Through Openness The Fault in Our Stars

Out of the Mouths of Babes Engineers of Speech

A Little List

The Responsibility Principle A Fainting Fit

VII Arcades: 1926-1928 263

Technical Talent

For Gods Alone A Circle Without a Master

Much to Learn You Still Have Instability

Moscow or Bust

The Hell of Other People A Man Without a Framework

Party for One

High Seas In the Eye of the Storm

An Emergency in Frankfurt Individual and Republic

Building Work

Age of the Demon After Being

Foundation and Abyss Back to the Origin

Homecoming

Dizzy Heights

VIII Time: 1929 317

Slaloming

Among People

On the Eve

Relax! Verbal Storms: The Davos Debate

Licking Wounds Spring Awakenings

The Three-Hundred-Penny Opera The Doors

Breathless

Gaslight

The Self-Destructive Personality Hot Dogs

The Hiker

A Day Off Internal Difficulties

Back to the Everyday Naples in Cambridge

Useful Reminders The City of Words

Against the Wall

Epilogue 363

Acknowledgments 367

List of Works 369

Notes 373

Selected Bibliography 387

Photograph Credits 397

Index 401

Editorial Reviews

…everything in Time of the Magicians—ideas, narrative and phrasing (translated from the German into seamless English by Shaun Whiteside)—has been fused into a readable, resonant whole. Eilenberger's book begins in 1919 and ends in 1929, elegantly tracing the life and work of four figures who transformed philosophy in ways that were disparate and not infrequently at odds…Eilenberger is a terrific storyteller, unearthing vivid details that show how the philosophies of these men weren't the arid products of abstract speculation but vitally connected to their temperaments and experiences.

The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai

05/25/2020

Four intellectuals hash out puzzling new worldviews after WWI in this spirited yet murky historical study. Philosophie Magazin editor Eilenberger (Finnen von Sinnen) follows the evolving thoughts of four German-speaking philosophers through the 1920s: Ludwig Wittgenstein, who dissected the meaning of language (or lack thereof); Walter Benjamin, a philosophy PhD and journalist who theorized about art, technology, and urban experience; Martin Heidegger, whose Being and Time probed the impact of death and anxiety on the soul; and Heidegger’s antagonist, Ernst Cassirer, who philosophized about symbols and metaphysics. The author weaves in colorful biographical sketches—Wittgenstein gave away a fortune and became a schoolteacher; Benjamin dissipated himself in affairs, drugs, and misfired writing projects—but primarily focuses on common themes in their writings, such as the tension between freedom and determinism, and the drive to escape convention and lead an authentic life. In Whiteside’s serviceable translation, Eilenberger gamely tries to elucidate his subjects’ famously knotty ideas, but the results—“Man is the only creature that is open to the experience of nothingness at the ground of being,” he writes, paraphrasing Heidegger—often confirm just how difficult to parse those concepts were. Still, this comprehensive and well-informed treatment deserves credit for bringing four major philosophers down from the heights of abstraction. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 07/01/2020

In the decade 1919–29, four young philosophers would struggle to chart new ways out of the intellectual tailspin brought on by World War I and its aftermath. German journalist philosopher Eilenberger's 2018 Bavarian Book Prize-winning book astutely weaves the personal struggles, careers, loves, and philosophical products of four thinkers who profoundly shaped 20th-century philosophy: Ludwig Wittgenstein, the ascetic of Austria whose first book spawned a philosophical movement based on a fundamental misunderstanding of it; Walter Benjamin, the spendthrift radical critic, unable to keep his word or finish a project; Ernest Cassirer, carrying on traditional philosophical pursuits in language and symbolic forms; and this book's grown-up in the room, only to be upstaged by the young Martin Heidegger, willing to use others in his chase of academic status. Eilenberger's concise and clear explanations of some of the century's most confounding philosophical texts are illuminating. His research astutely draws on primary texts and the best secondary literature. VERDICT This book is a tapestry of contrasts and conjunctions; both colorful and elegant, juxtaposing smooth and rough in a narrative structure that surprises, explains, and compels readers ever forward. Highly recommended.—Steve Young, McHenry Cty. Coll., Crystal Lake, IL

Library Journal

★ 2020-04-09
A readable, expert introduction to some of the most abstruse yet influential philosophical thought of the 20th century.

No quartet of contemporaneous philosophers ever had a greater impact on popular thinking, as well as on formal thought, than the figures whom Eilenberger terms “magicians.” That word is the single slip-up (and a minor one) in this enthralling tale of four men whose fresh consideration of thought, sign, and language—variously termed phenomenology, semiotics, linguistics, and epistemology—revolutionized serious philosophical thought in the decade after World War I. Ably translated by Whiteside, Eilenberger’s book is the kind of limpid presentation of Continental philosophical expression rare in books about the subject. It’s an achievement that has already won plaudits and prizes abroad. That’s no doubt due to the author’s own professional standing as a philosopher, but it also owes much to his approach: a multilayered exploration of the lives and thoughts of four very different thinkers at a time when Western and Central Europe struggled to emerge from war and economic crisis before slipping into the horrors of Nazism. The imposing Ludwig Wittgenstein, the hapless Walter Benjamin, the always troubling Martin Heidegger, and the steady, placid Ernst Cassirer emerge from Eilenberger’s portrait as formidable minds attached to flawed personalities whose sometimes barely comprehensible formulations nevertheless transformed the way human understanding is now seen by philosophers. The book’s special value lies in greatly advancing accessibility to these men’s works and thought. So clear and sometimes jaunty is Eilenberger that no reader will miss out from understanding the narrative. One can complain only that he, too, rarely makes known his own views. Otherwise, his lucid presentation of his characters’ often hard-to-comprehend thinking and the muddy language in which they expressed it make this book invaluable for anyone seeking to learn about these extraordinary figures.

An exemplary work of scholarship that is comprehensible to everyone. (16-page b/w photo insert)

Kirkus Reviews

Splendid.” —Financial Times

"[Eilenberger] patiently draws these four intellectual magi out of the shadows of their writings, which often tend toward complete opacity. The result is not a book of academic philosophy but rather an intellectual history that largely succeeds in bringing philosophy to life." —The New York Times Book Review

"Wolfram 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. . . Eilenberger shows flair in knitting complex ideas into the fabric of his sages’ lives and times"—The Economist

"[A] vibrant group portrait of four philosophers during a turbulent decade . . . Eilenberger is a terrific storyteller, unearthing vivid details that show how the philosophies of these men weren’t the arid products of abstract speculation but vitally connected to their temperaments and experiences." —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
 
"[A] fascinating and accessible account . . . In his entertaining book, Mr. Eilenberger shows that his magicians’ thoughts are still worth collecting, even if, with hindsight, we can see that some performed too many intellectual conjuring tricks." —The Wall Street Journal
 
“A group portrait of four brilliant young philosophers in the aftermath of the first world war ... Eilenberger tells it with free-wheeling gusto.” —The Guardian
 
“A tremendous feat of scholarship, but more pertinently it is 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.” —The Times ( London)
 
“Eilenberger weaves together the biographies and the developing thought of the four philosophers with great bravura and wit. We get a strong sense of their thought emerging as a response to the enveloping chaos of the time, when all the old certainties were crumbling…It’s a riveting read that sheds light on a crucial period in European history and thought, with some uncanny parallels to our own time.” —The Telegraph

“Eilenberger clearly lays out the evolving theories of each philosopher for a non-specialist audience, embedding the philosophical discussion in their often-dramatic professional and romantic lives and the rapidly evolving social worlds that they shared. The result is an engrossing history which also acts as an introduction to post-WWI European philosophical thinking.” —Booklist 
 
“Fluently blending biography with intellectual history, Time of the Magicians reveals catastrophe as the mother of modern philosophy. It is hard to imagine a more bracing way to reflect on our own times.” —Pankaj Mishra

“[T]his comprehensive and well-informed treatment deserves credit for bringing four major philosophers down from the heights of abstraction.” —Publishers Weekly

“An exemplary work . . . [Eilenberger's] lucid presentation of his characters’ often hard-to-comprehend thinking and the muddy language in which they expressed it make this book invaluable for anyone seeking to learn about these extraordinary figures.” —Kirkus (starred review)

"Spirited [. . .] this comprehensive and well-informed treatment deserves credit for bringing four major philosophers down from the heights of abstraction." —Publishers Weekly

“A fascinating tour through the lives and thought of some of the most challenging philosophers of the twentieth century: Benjamin, Cassirer, and those two matching gnomic magi, Wittgenstein and Heidegger. It is a book of riches, full of stories as well as ideas, all brought together with a fine, light touch.” —Sarah Bakewell, author of How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
 
“Time of the Magicians is escapism at its ambitious best: a portrait of four fascinating personalities, a chronicle of a pivotal decade in world history, and an introduction to some of the 20th century's most important philosophers. Wolfram Eilenberger has written a must-read for those who love history, philosophy, or gripping storytelling.” —Yascha Mounk, author of The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger and How to Save It
 
“A tour de force . . . Eilenberger’s beautifully written history of the pivotal decade in 20th century metaphysics is as hard to put down as a good novel. Yet Time of the Magicians is more than first-rate history of philosophy. By weaving together these four philosophers’ works and lives, and drawing unexpected connections between their deepest concerns, Eilenberger unfolds new paths for philosophy itself.  This is an extraordinary achievement.” —Susan Neiman, author of Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

"In this meticulously researched narrative, Wolfram Eilenberger brings to life the intertwining fates of four of the 20th century's most influential thinkers, illuminating their ideas as well as helping to explain the era they inhabited. Packed with personal stories as well as erudition, this is a book that teaches us both how to live through a time of crisis, and how to think about it—skills we now need once again.” —Anne Applebaum, Pulitzer Prize winning-author of Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism and Gulag: A History 

"New times bring new disasters—and new disasters bring new ways of thinking. Wolfram Eilenberger's Time of the Magicians recalls an age when philosophers reinvented a world in full meltdown—a world that needed to be remade down to its very punctuation. He makes difficult concepts accessible without dumbing them down, and turns famous names into unforgettably human—all too human—characters.” —Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag: Her Life and Work

"Wolfram Eilenberger mixes history and biography to produce something truly unusual: a page-turning book about philosophy, told through the lives of four of its most controversial and confounding figures. Their lives were in many cases as chaotic as their work was profound, but he brings them all to life on the page with passion and clarity. Time of the Magicians is both an education and a delight." —Ruth Franklin, author of Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life

"A vivid, rich and beautifully narrated book. It describes a remarkable intellectual constellation—four different ways of life and four answers to the question: What is human?" — Rüdiger Safranski

  "Wolfram Eilenberger... saves the wonder of philosophy, takes away the fear of the incomprehensible. He does not take sides, but he simply let the different approaches coexist, this is his capacity! He makes it fun to read about every of each four philosophers." — Süddeutsche Zeitung

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