This book sets out a new reading of the much-neglected philosophy of Karl Jaspers. By questioning the common perception of Jaspers either as a proponent of irrationalist cultural philosophy or as an early, peripheral disciple of Martin Heidegger, it re-establishes him as a central figure in modern European philosophy. Giving particular consideration to his position in epistemological, metaphysical and political debate, the author argues that Jaspers's work deserves renewed consideration in a number of important discussions, particularly in hermeneutics, anthropological reflections on religion, the critique of idealism, and debates on the end of metaphysics.

Few themes resonate as powerfully in Heidegger as those connected to homecoming, homeland, and Heimat. This emphasis plays out most powerfully in Heidegger's reading of Hölderlin and his turn towards language, art, and poetizing as a way of thinking through the poet's relevance in the epoch of homelessness and the abandonment of the gods. As the first book-length study in English of the Heidegger-Hölderlin relation, Of an Alien Homecoming addresses the tension within Heidegger's work between his disastrous political commitments during the era of National Socialism and his attempts to open a path to a German future nurtured on Hölderlin's ideal of poetic dwelling. Charles Bambach reads this work on Hölderlin from 1934–1948 in conversation with the Black Notebooks and Heidegger's metapolitics, even as he uncovers an ethical dimension within Heidegger that pervades his reading of poetry. Throughout all of these various stages on Heidegger's thought path, Hölderlin remains the poet who poetizes the possibility of finding our lost home amidst the homelessness brought about in the epoch of technological thinking.

The history of modern Germany has all too readily been seen in terms of an historical process that inevitably led to the horrors of National Socialism. As there are no certitudes in life, however, so there are none in German history. In this book, historian Klemens von Klemperer focuses on what he terms the German Incertitudes--namely, the tensions between a realistic acceptance of disenchantment with the modern world, and an insistence upon reenchantment. Exploring this tension through a critical assessment of the ideas and writings of major German thinkers, von Klemperer seeks to account for both the achievements and the failings of German thought, society, and politics as responses to the challenge of modernity in the first half of the 20th century. In addition to individuals such as Nietzsche, Weber, Spengler, Jünger, Bonhoeffer, and Heidegger, the author considers broader movements and ideas such as the concept of Gemeinschaft and the German expressionists, all in the wider context of Western intellectual currents, Rather than belaboring presumed German deviance from the European norms, von Klemperer explores the reasons why the sense of crisis in the face of modernity was singularly acute among Germans, he traces a spectrum of reactions extending from an acceptance of modern disenchantment to the quest for reenchantment which found an extreme manifestation in National Socialism.

This important book not only examines changing notions of nationhood and their complicated relationship to the Nazi past but also charts the wider history of the development of German political thought since World War II, while critically reflecting on some of the continuing blind spots among German writers and thinkers.