Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians *** 1/2

Like Herald of a Restless World, which I recently read, Time of the Magicians is a biography of early 20th-century philosophers that also seeks to capture the spirit of the times. The subtitle refers to "the decade that reinvented philosophy." The titular magicians are Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, and Martin Heidegger; the decade is 1919 to 1929.

Time of the Magicians improves on Herald of a Restless World by diving deeper into its subjects' ideas and, most importantly, by presenting them as idiosyncratic and compelling characters. However, Eilenberger failed to convince me that they, collectively or individually, "reinvented philosophy." Wittgenstein and Heidegger are surely influential figures, but they were inflection points within continuing traditions.

Despite Eilenberger's efforts to tie together the philosophies of his four protagonists, I didn't see them as asking the same questions, nor did I feel the importance of the issues they addressed. I remain mystified by Heidegger, but I can't fault the author for falling short on the impossible task of explaining Dasein. Philosophically, I was most intrigued by Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, despite Cassirer being presented as the old-school conservative of the bunch. 

A tangential point that I found interesting was about the Weimar Republic that ruled Germany at the time:

The republic itself, with its democratic form of government, was held in the dominant narrative to be foreign, imported from the histories of the victorious nations of the United States, France, and England... From this point of view the Weimar Constitution was not a gift but...a kind of permanent collateral damage from the outcome of the war.