Franz Kafka was an Austrian-Czech novelist and writer from Prague. He is widely regarded as a major figure of 20th-century literature; he wrote in German. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. It typically features isolated protagonists facing bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible socio-bureaucratic powers. It has been interpreted as exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity. His best known works include the novella The Metamorphosis and the novels The Trial and The Castle. The term Kafkaesque has entered English to describe absurd situations like those depicted in his writing.
Franz von Baader, born Benedikt Franz Xaver Baader, was a German Catholic philosopher, theologian, physician, and mining engineer. Resisting the empiricism of his day, he denounced most Western philosophy since Descartes as trending into atheism and has been considered a revival of the Scholastic school.
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders, though the friendship between Arendt and Benjamin outlasted her marriage to Anders. Both Arendt and Anders were students of Martin Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis.
Martin Buber was an Austrian-Israeli philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of existentialism centered on the distinction between the I–Thou relationship and the I–It relationship. Born in Vienna, Buber came from a family of observant Jews, but broke with Jewish custom to pursue secular studies in philosophy. He produced writings about Zionism and worked with various bodies within the Zionist movement extensively over a nearly 50-year period spanning his time in Europe and the Near East. In 1923, Buber wrote his famous essay on existence, Ich und Du, and in 1925 he began translating the Hebrew Bible into the German language.
Franz Rosenzweig was a German theologian, philosopher, and translator.
Milena Jesenská was a Czech journalist, writer, editor and translator. She is noted for her correspondence with the author Franz Kafka and was one of the first to translate his work from the German language. After the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia, she joined a resistance movement to help Jews and other refugees. She died in Ravensbrück, a Nazi prison camp.
Gershom Scholem was a German-born Israeli philosopher and historian. Widely regarded as the founder of modern academic study of the Kabbalah, Scholem was appointed the first professor of Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Salman Schocken or Shlomo Zalman Schocken was a German Jewish publisher, and co-founder of the large Kaufhaus Schocken chain of department stores in Germany. Stripped of his citizenship and forced to sell his company by the German government, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1934, where he purchased the newspaper Haaretz.
Franz Joseph Molitor, or Joseph Franz Molitor was a German writer and philosopher.
Nahum Norbert Glatzer was an Austrian and American scholar of Jewish history and philosophy from antiquity to mid 20th century.
Das Passagen-Werk or Arcades Project was an unfinished project of German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, written between 1927 and his death in 1940. An enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, it was especially concerned with Paris' iron-and-glass covered "arcades".
"The Village Schoolmaster", or "The Giant Mole" is an unfinished short story by Franz Kafka. The story, written in December 1914 and the beginning of 1915, was not published in Kafka's lifetime. It first appeared in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer. The first English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir was published by Martin Secker in London in 1933. It appeared in The Great Wall of China. Stories and Reflections.
Angelus Novus is a 1920 monoprint by the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, using the oil transfer method he invented. It is now in the collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
The Bücherei des Schocken Verlags sometimes informally referred to as beliebte Reihe der Schocken-Bücherei with its distinct, uniform style is widely considered "one of the most important manifestations of the spiritual life of Jews in Germany between 1933 and 1938".
"Theses on the Philosophy of History" or "On the Concept of History" is an essay written in early 1940 by German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin. It is one of Benjamin's best-known, and most controversial works.
Vivian Liska, born in New York City, United States is a professor of German literature and director of the Institute of Jewish Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. Since 2013 she is also distinguished visiting professor at Hebrew University, Jerusalem.
Werner Kraft was a German-Israeli literary scholar, writer and librarian.
One Way Street is an anthology of brief meditations by Walter Benjamin collected and published as a book in 1928. The reflections composing its cycle were mostly written coterminously with the drafting phase of his doctoral thesis The Origin of German Tragic Drama, during his personally transformative though ultimately failed romance with Asja Lācis. Many of the pieces that were published individually prior to their appearance as a collection first ran as feuilleton in newspapers—a critical, artistic, sometimes purely humorous or bizarre space-filling feature of newspaper formats in Europe at the time.
"On Language as Such and on the Language of Man" is the first of an uncompleted trilogy of essays articulating a metaphysics or post-metaphysics of language in and as the name of God, written by Walter Benjamin, in response to a series of questions raised by Gershom Scholem in a conversation that began at a villa in the German countryside at the end of the summer in 1916. The second fragment in this trilogy is "On the Mimetic Faculty," written from exile in 1932–1933. The piece "On Language" constitutes the earliest major artifact of Benjamin's thought, preceded only by a few speeches that he'd given in the debating society of Berlin's Jewish Youth Movement, and some articles he'd written for the banned antiwar student journal Der Anfäng.
"On the Mimetic Faculty" is the second of an uncompleted trilogy of essays articulating a metaphysics or post-metaphysics of language, written by Walter Benjamin in the months leading up to and immediately following the appointment of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany, the Reichstag Fire, and the inauguration of the Third Reich. It was sent as the postscript of a letter to his best friend, a Librarian of Ancient Manuscripts at Hebrew University and Master of Kabbalah in Jerusalem, Gershom Scholem.
