Four German-speaking philosophers in search of a theme

How do you write a group biography of people who never actually formed a group? Such is the challenge Wolfram Eilenberger sets himself in a book about the philosophers Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Walter Benjamin and — the surprisingly unstarry fourth subject — Ernst Cassirer, an urbane and now nearly forgotten neo-Kantian who might have deserved the made-up title of ‘symbologist’, thus far reserved for the heroes of Dan Brown’s novels.

What these men have in common is that they spoke German and were philosophically active during the 1920s, but that is about it. Heidegger and Cassirer met and traded rhetorical blows at a celebrated philosophy conference in Davos; Benjamin was envious of Heidegger’s success and Wittgenstein at least had heard of him. But they were all ploughing very different furrows — unless you ascend to the highest levels of abstraction and say, along with Eilenberger, that they were all interested in human beings’ relationship with language. Well, sure. Aren’t we all?

The book starts at the end of its chronological period: in 1929, Wittgenstein receives his PhD at Cambridge, while Heidegger and Cassirer arrive at Davos, and Benjamin is ‘troubled by concerns of quite a different order’ — his girlfriend has just kicked him out. So the book’s structure is established, cutting between the lives of its four subjects with increasingly elaborate paraphrases of the concept of ‘meanwhile’. (At one point we switch from Benjamin worrying about money to Wittgenstein, who ‘was also preoccupied with his finances, albeit in a different way’.)

It is nonetheless an enjoyable read, partly because of the author’s love of gossipy detail and partly because he clearly adores the work of his subjects — particularly that of Wittgenstein and Benjamin, the latter of whom he is intent on defending for his ‘seemingly idiotic array of themes and interests’.