The aim of this book is to explore the impact of the First World War on German philosophy through a series of analyses of the paths taken by central figures of the German 20th-century philosophical tradition in such a way that recognizes the complexity of the philosophical issues that animated their thinking, as well as the demands of wartime and its aftermath to which these thinkers responded: Hermann Cohen, Max Scheler, Martin Buber, Georg Simmel, Ernst Bloch, Gyorgy Lukacs, Franz Rosenzweig, Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger, and Edmund Husserl

On March 21, 1918, the German Army launched “Operation Michael” against British positions around Arras as the first stage of an offensive along the Western Front. Bolstered by reinforcements from the Eastern Front after the October 1917 Revolution and cessation of hostilities with Russia, the Kaiserschlacht, as it was called, represented a final gambit to win the war. A few days after the start of this titanic onslaught, Georg Simmel confided in a letter of March 25 to his friend Hermann Graf von Keyserling: “Now I am in the midst of very difficult ethical and metaphysical investigations […]” (G. Simmel, Briefe 1912–1918. Jugendbriefe. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2008). It was not only premature aging that conspired against reaping his philosophical harvest: Simmel had been diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. As he writes to his friend, he finds himself in “very bad health” and severely reduced in “intellectual energy.”