Rüdiger Safranski Book order

This sterling biography of Germany's greatest writer presents Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as if we are seeing him for the first time.

Having previously tackled Nietzsche and Schiller, renowned biographer Rüdiger Safranski sets his sights on the writer considered the Shakespeare of German literature. This sterling biography of Germanys greatest writer presents Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as if we are seeing him for the first time.

The renowned scholar Rüdiger Safranski's Romanticism: A German Affair both offers an accessible overview of Romanticism and, more critically, traces its lasting influence, for better and for ill, on German culture. Safranski begins with the eighteenthcentury Sturm und Drang movement, which would sow the seeds for Romanticism in Germany. While Romanticism was a broad artistic, literary, and intellectual movement, German thinkers were especially concerned with its strong philosophical-metaphysical and religious dimension. Safranski follows this spirit in its afterlife in the work of Heinrich Heine, Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, and through the later artistic upheavals of the twentieth century. He concludes by carefully considering Romanticism's possible influence in the rise of National Socialism and the student revolt of 1968. Romanticism: A German Affair is essential reading for anyone interested in the power of art, culture, and ideas in the life of a nation.

No other modern philosopher has proved as influential as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and none is as poorly understood. In the first new biography in decades, Rüdiger Safranski, one of the foremost living Nietzsche scholars, re-creates the anguished life of Nietzsche while simultaneously assessing the philosophical implications of his morality, religion, and art. Struggling to break away from the oppressive burdens of the past, Nietzsche invented a unique philosophy based on compulsive self-consciousness and constant self-revision. As groundbreaking as it will be long-lasting, this biography offers a brilliant, multifaceted portrait of a towering figure.

One of the century's greatest philosophers, Martin Heidegger, shaped modern thought yet grappled with profound failures, including his troubling alignment with Adolf Hitler. This biography explores Heidegger's life and philosophy, intertwining themes of good and evil, brilliance and blindness, against the backdrop of a tumultuous century. Raised in Catholic Germany, he initially pursued the priesthood but later abandoned it for academia, rising to prominence in the 1920s as a leading figure in German philosophy. Rüdiger Safranski details Heidegger's intellectual journey, highlighting his influences from Heraclitus, Plato, and Kant, while also addressing the conservative ideologies that emerged from Germany's post-World War I trauma. This account not only chronicles his philosophical contributions but also delves into the personal commitments and betrayals that marked his life. Safranski does not shy away from Heidegger's controversial role as a propagandist for the National Socialist regime, ensuring that this dark chapter does not overshadow his significant intellectual achievements. The biography offers a nuanced view of a complex figure whose legacy continues to provoke debate and reflection.

This richly detailed biography of a key figure in nineteenth-century philosophy pays equal attention to the life and to the work of Arthur Schopenhauer. Rudiger Safranski places this visionary skeptic in the context of his philosophical predecessors and contemporaries Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel--and explores the sources of his profound alienation from their "secularized religion of reason." He also provides a narrative of Schopenhauer's personal and family life that reads like a Romantic novel: the struggle to break free from a domineering father, the attempt to come to terms with his mother's literary and social success (she was a well-known writer and a member of Goethe's Weimar circle), the loneliness and despair when his major philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation, was ignored by the academy. Along the way Safranski portrays the rich culture of Goethe's Weimar, Hegel's Berlin, and other centers of German literary and intellectual life.When Schopenhauer first proposed his philosophy of "weeping and gnashing of teeth," during the heady "wild years" of Romantic idealism, it found few followers. After the disillusionments and failures of 1848, his work was rediscovered by philosophers and literary figures. Writers from Nietzsche to Samuel Beckett have responded to Schopenhauer's refusal to seek salvation through history.The first biography of Schopenhauer to appear in English in this century, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy succeeds in bringing to life an intriguing figure in philosophy and the intellectual battles of his time, whose consequences still shape our world.