An intellectual biography of Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Walter Benjamin. The German philosopher and publicist Wofram Eilenberger, founder and editor-in-chief of Philosophie Magazin, takes a look at one of the great decades of German-Austrian thought—the 1920s—examining not only the philosophical work, but also the lives of four “mages”: Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose fates intertwined in intricate ways amid the twists of a turbulent era between the two World Wars. The book is unlike any philosophy history textbook, unlike an academic study, and unlike a fictionalized biography, yet it combines traits of all those genres, convincingly illuminating life and thought through one another.