Wolfram Eilenberger’s Time of the Magicians is an international bestseller, translated into more than twenty languages. This is a remarkable achievement for a book discussing the lives of four German-language philosophers in the decade 1919-1929. It is all the more remarkable in that though two of the thinkers are well-known—Heidegger and Wittgenstein—the other two are hardly household names, Ernst Cassirer and Walter Benjamin.
