Book review: Time of the Magicians, by Wolfram Eilenberger

Some – well maybe a few readers – may have noticed that I have been somewhat less prominent over the past few weeks. Truth is, I have been hors de combat. After months of feeling grizzly and queasy, then dealing with the untimely death of my brother, I became unable to eat and yet grotesquely bloated. Having preached my sermon on the iron of Christ the King I was frogmarched to hospital where I was told that in two hours I was to have a lapendectomy for knotted intestines. It was a blessing in disguise.

Severed from my library I had to rely on nothing but memory, and I started to remember all the books I had read and loved this year but did not manage to review. There will be a larger variation on this theme next week on the quirkiest, weirdest, strangest and most avant-garde books of 2020. But the book that loomed quickest was Time Of The Magicians by Wolfram Eilenberger. I had actually read it in January in proof and had pencilled it in for a June review; then COVID-19 hit and the best laid plans etc. It is an exceptionally erudite and wry book was was already a bestseller in Europe. Its themes: Why be? What is death? Is to exist as a scalpel the same as to exist as the living flesh it cuts? Is language the key to the world or its shroud? What does meaning even mean?

Here comes the flourish. Eilenberger discusses all these through a decade in the lives of four of the most notoriously difficult and eccentric philosophers: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and Ernst Cassirer. The opening prologue has three of them – the more Bohemian Benjamin chose not to go – attend a conference at of all places Davos. Though there were serious contributions, there was also a skulking Wittgenstein, an ailing Cassirer wrapped in duvets and Heidegger showing off his skiing aplomb on the most treacherous runs.

Time of the Magicians, by Wolfram Eilenberger

These vignettes are gracefully done, but don’t distract from how high the stakes were. They were engaged in nothing short of a complete reconceptualization of philosophy. Here is the millionaire Heidegger giving it all away to become a rural schoolteacher and proclaiming that if you had ascended the ladder of his work you would realise how pointless it was. Here is Cassirer, like a latter-day Casaubon, attempting to finish his The Logic of the Cultural Sciences just as he had earlier argued that mathematics derives from nature and art from myth. Then here is Benjamin – shabby, feckless, saintly and a martyr, perhaps the most concerned of the four about how modernity is changing everything. Benjamin is a Marxist, Wittgenstein uninterested in politics, except his own aristocracy, Cassirer a stolid Social Democrat – and then there is Heidegger. Eilenberger has chosen his decade wisely, so there is no need to go too far into his Nazism. It broods in the background. Some of his quotes “Every man is born as many men and dies a single one” would not look out of place on a Gestapo cap. Yet he is indubitably the thinker who wrestled most.

We are all being told this will not be a normal Christmas. Well, make that true. Instead of watching a repeat of the Wizard of Oz spend time with these wizards. It may even help you with your 2021 resolutions.

Time of the Magicians, by Wolfram Eilenberger, Allen Lane, £20

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