My Life in Germany Before and After 1933

Written in 1939, while Lowith was in exile in Japan and first published in Germany in 1986, this book is a philosopher's autobiography. It focuses on the years 1914-1939 - a crucial period in the growth of Hitler's Germany. It covers Lowith's youth in Germany, his emigration to Italy and from there to Japan, and his meeting with Martin Heidegger in Rome in 1936 - and includes philosophical-biographical vignettes of leading German intellectual figures of the day: the George circle, Oswald Spengler, Karl Barth and Carl Schmitt. At a personal level, the work represents the search by a German-Jewish intellectual for political and cultural identity in the Germany of Weimar and the Third Reich. As an historical document, it provides a valuable account of the whole intellectual and social ambience before and after 1933, and should be of interest to philosophers, intellectual historians, Germanists and all those interested in the problematic history of 20th-century German philosophy. Karl Lowith's other titles include "Meaning and History" (1949), "From Hegel to Nietzsche" (1964), and "Weber and Marx" (1982).