TIME OF THE MAGICIANS THE INVENTION OF MODERN THOUGHT 1919-1929

WOLFRAM EILENBERGER TRANS SHAUN WHITESIDE Allen Lane, 418pp, £25

Time of the Magicians is a group biography of four influential philosophers of the early years of the 20th century: Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ernst Cassirer. Writing in the Guardian, Jonathan Rée observed that being subjects of a group biography didn’t make them a group. They ‘had hardly anything in common apart from the fact that their mother-tongue was German’, and ‘if they had all ever met over Kaffee und Kuchen – which they certainly did not – they would probably have disagreed about everything’.

Eilenberger says that they captured the ‘spirit of the age’ and that the 1920s were a golden age of philosophy – but they went in different directions. Wittgenstein and Heidegger are the patron saints of two schools of philosophy barely on speaking terms, Benjamin has a ‘cultish’ following, and ‘as for poor old Cassirer, he seems to have no followers at all’.

Rée applauded the ‘freewheeling gusto’ with which Eilenberger tells his tale, but cavilled at the neat notion that in the Twenties these men were singing from the same philosophical hymn-sheet. At times the author was ‘reduced to tying his magicians together by means of biographical chatter’.

Oliver Moody in the Times had no such reservations, thinking the book – ‘a literary sensation in Germany’ – was ‘worthy of the hype’: ‘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’.