Time of the Magicians

Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy

By: Wolfram Eilenberger, Shaun Whiteside - translator

Narrated by: Rhett Samuel Price

“[A] fascinating and accessible account . . . In his entertaining book, Mr. Eilenberger shows that his magicians’ thoughts are still worth collecting, even if, with hindsight, we can see that some performed too many intellectual conjuring tricks.” —Wall Street Journal

A grand narrative of the intertwining lives of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ernst Cassirer, major philosophers whose ideas shaped the twentieth century

The year is 1919. The horror of the First World War is fresh for the protagonists of Time of the Magicians, each of whom finds himself at a crucial juncture. Benjamin is trying to flee his overbearing father and floundering in his academic career, living hand to mouth as a critic. Wittgenstein, by contrast, has dramatically decided to divest himself of the monumental fortune he stands to inherit, in search of spiritual clarity. Meanwhile, Heidegger, having managed to avoid combat in war by serving as a meteorologist, is carefully cultivating his career. Finally, Cassirer is working furiously on the margins of academia, applying himself to his writing and the possibility of a career at Hamburg University. The stage is set for a great intellectual drama, which will unfold across the next decade. The lives and ideas of this extraordinary philosophical quartet will converge as they become world historical figures. But as the Second World War looms on the horizon, their fates will be very different.

Solid book with lousy narrator

The narrator has a pleasant voice but is weak in terms of matching his reading to the meaning and atrocious in terms of pronunciation. It's distracting enough that he hasn't a clue how to pronounce anything in French (e.g., "pain" as "pane", and even famous people's names get butchered, e.g., Rimbaud as rimbode and Baudelaire buda- lair), but what is really irritating is his mispronunciation of everyday English words. True, they are high-school- or university-level words, but surely a book with this subject matter demands a narrator for whom such words are familiar and quotidian. My focus was routinely interrupted by the nagging question "Why has this narrator been chosen for this book?" and the related question "Who among the readers of this book would make such errors?"

dense content, terrible narration

the narrator was almost comically bad, and the pronunciation basically random, in every one of the languages encountered

Narrator cannot read German

This is an awesome book! I really liked how history and philosophy were interwoven in the story. The narrator was excellent in English, but his German reading was unintelligible even for a native German speaker.

You had one job

The ideas presented in this book are world-changing, and the characters are unique and inspiring. Is it so hard to ask that the narrator know how to pronounce words in French and German if the publishers knew it would be heavy in European names?

Disappointed at the wonky voice

I read the book last fall, loved it, and wanted to hear it but can’t tolerate the annoying reading. And I hear he did more! Go figure!