TABLE OF CONTENTS:

 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

I know Steve Oerkfitz isn’t a fan of philosophers–especially Kant–but the positive reviews of Time of The Magicians lead me to read this fascinating book. It’s not so much about each philosopher’s conceptions (although there is some of this included) but more about the strangeness of these men. Take Ludwig Wittgenstein for example. Wittgenstein thought that maybe three people in the world would understand his Tractatus logic-philosophicus. Wittgenstein gave away hundreds of millions to his family members and lived in poverty for the rest of his life.

Martin Heidegger may be the best known philosopher in this group, but not for his philosophy. Heidegger cozied up to the Nazis and had an affair with Hannah Arendt. Ernest Cassirer labored diligently at Hamburg University, but barely escaped Germany. Cassirer ended up teaching in the United States.

Walter Benjamin, a polymath with gambling and drug problems, fled for Spain when the Nazis took over Paris. “On the night of September 26, 1940, fleeing in fear of deportation by the Nazis, Benjamin committed suicide with morphine in a hotel in the Pyrenean town of Portbou, only a few hundred meters from the Spanish border.” (p. 364)