Wolfram Eilenberger (b. 1972)—a historian of ideas, publicist, former editor-in-chief of *Philosophie Magazin*, and program director of Europe’s largest philosophy festival, phil.cologne—examines one of the greatest eras of German-Austrian thought: the 1920s. With microscopic precision, he explores not only the philosophical work but also the lives of four "magicians"—Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Ludwig Wittgenstein—whose destinies became intricately intertwined with the turbulent events of the post-war decade. This impressive intellectual-historical panorama—unlike a standard history-of-philosophy textbook, an academic study, or a fictionalized biography—combines the best qualities of all these genres, inviting the reader into a laboratory of thought that gave birth to a host of modern philosophical movements. The book won the prestigious Bavarian Book Prize (2018) and the award for Best Foreign Book in France (2019).