It was a remarkable generation, and there has been nothing quite like it in modern history. I am referring to the German-Jewish thinkers born at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century: Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, Alfred Schutz, Leo Strauss, Gershom Scholem, Karl Löwith, Eric Auerbach, Hannah Arendt, and Hans Jonas (the list goes on and on). They were extraordinarily talented and trained in the best tradition of German Bildung. Many came from well-to-do assimilated Jewish families; they initially thought of themselves primarily as Germans, not as Jews. Fortunately, all of the above managed to escape from Nazi Germany. (Benjamin committed suicide in 1940, a day after being turned back from the Spanish border.) Most left Germany soon after Hitler seized power in 1933, although Scholem had already immigrated to Palestine in 1923. They were scattered throughout the world, but several made their way to the United States. What is most remarkable about this generation is the extent to which they shaped intellectual and cultural life throughout the world during the twentieth century—an influence that continues until the present.

Hans Jonas is better known today in Germany than he is in the Anglophone world. When The Imperative of Responsibility was published in Germany in 1979, it quickly became a best seller. It spoke directly to a generation searching for guidance about an ethics for a technological civilization that seemed to be running amok. One could tell the story of the horrors and glories of the short twentieth century through the life experiences of Hans Jonas.

Born in 1903 in Mönchengladbach, a German textile town (the Manchester of the Rhineland) where his father owned a factory, he received a classical education in the local Gymnasium. Like so many Jews of his generation destined for university life, he was drawn to Heidegger. As a student in Marburg, long before Heidegger had any association with the Nazis, Jonas first met Hannah Arendt who became a lifelong friend. As Arendt later wrote, the rumor had spread throughout Germany that thinking had come alive with Husserl's young assistant, Heidegger. Jonas studied both with Heidegger and the famous Protestant thinker, Rudolf Bultmann. But with Hitler's seizure of power in 1933, Jonas, who was already a Zionist, decided to leave Germany for Palestine. Before proceeding to Palestine, he spent some time in London (with his good friend Leo Strauss) in order to revise his great study of Gnosticism that was published in Göttingen in 1934. When he left Germany, he vowed never to return unless as a soldier in a conquering army. Life in Palestine was not easy; he had difficulty mastering Hebrew and was disappointed not to be offered a professorship at the newly founded Hebrew University. In Palestine he met and eventually married Lore Weiner. In 1939, when the Second World War broke out, Jonas wrote a passionate document (in German) addressed to his fellow Jews calling for them to fight against Hitler: “This is our hour, this is our war. … This is the war without which this evil cannot be crushed. … We have a primary right and a primary duty to wage it” (111). Jonas joined the British Army and was proud to wear the Star of David when the Jewish Brigade was founded in 1944. In 1945, after five years in the army, Jonas did return to Germany as a soldier of the victorious army. It was only then that he discovered that his mother had been murdered at Auschwitz. He also discovered that the first volume of his study of Gnosticism was being recognized for its brilliance and that the publisher had hidden copies away so that the Nazis would not destroy them. He visited Bultmann, but not Heidegger. Jonas could never forgive Heidegger for his “betrayal of philosophy” when he supported Hitler in 1933. During his war years, when faced with so much death, Jonas began to reflect seriously on the phenomenon of life. He sent back “didactic letters” (included in this memoir) to Lore where he outlined his views on the meaning of organic life. These letters are the germ of what eventually became his path-breaking book: The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (1966). When Jonas returned to Palestine, he hoped to return to a scholarly life, but it was not to be so. At the age of forty-five, he was drafted into the army of the newly formed state of Israel. Finally, in 1949 (through the intervention of Leo Strauss), he was offered a fellowship in Canada, which he readily accepted. Ironically, Jonas was finally offered a professorship at the Hebrew University in 1952, but declined. Gershom Scholem, who supported Jonas's candidacy for the professorship, was furious and accused Jonas of a “betrayal of Zionism.” This caused a significant break in their troubled friendship. In 1955, Jonas was invited to join the philosophy faculty of the New School for Social Research where he taught until his retirement in 1974. It was only at the age of seventy-six after he had retired that he published The Imperative of Responsibility (a book that he wrote in his mother tongue). Jonas remained active philosophically until his death in 1993. This is a skeletal outline of Jonas's life, but the full, fascinating, rich, and textured details are given in his Memoirs.

In 1983, on one of his many post–Second World War visits to Germany, Hans Jonas met Rachel Salamander and her partner, Stephan Sattler. Although eighty years old, Hans and Lore developed a close and warm friendship with the younger couple. In 1989 Rachel convinced Hans to allow her and Stephan to tape the stories and memories of his life. Their conversations filled thirty-three tapes. Christian Weise, who has already publish a superb account of Jonas, The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas: Jewish Dimensions, has sensitively edited these tapes and supplemented them with additional texts to round out the chronological sequence of the major events in Jonas's life. Because these are primarily transcripts of tapes, one can almost hear Jonas's clear, humane, and passionate voice as he recalls the details of his friendships with Leo Strauss, Gershom Scholem, and especially Hannah Arendt. He tells the painful story of his break with Arendt after she published Eichmann in Jerusalem. For two years, he refused to speak to Arendt until Lore brought about a reconciliation, although Hannah and Hans agreed never to talk about the Eichmann book. One of the many strands running through these memoirs is the story of his enduring love for Lore, his wife for fifty years. She has written a brief but moving introduction. There is a detailed discussion of his public repudiation of Heidegger and an account of his speculations about the concept of God after Auschwitz.

One of the paradoxes of Hans Jonas's life is that he is—except for a relatively small circle of admirers—so little known and appreciated in the Anglophone world. The reason why this is paradoxical is that, long before it became fashionable, Jonas was one of the few serious philosophers concerned with the deep meaning and preservation of life and one of the first thinkers to explore the new issues of medical ethics and bioethics. He was a guiding spirit of the famous Hastings Center, one of the major centers to be dedicated to medical and environmental ethics. Long before the recent concern with global warming, Jonas wrote about how industry and technology are destroying the planet and pose a serious threat to the continuation of life on earth. This is why a new ethic and a new imperative of responsibility for the fate of all life on earth are needed. One key reason why Jonas has been neglected for so long is that, in the best sense, he was a courageous speculative philosopher probing the foundations of substantive ethical norms at a time when the main trends in Anglophone philosophy were becoming more analytic, linguistic, and metaethical. Finally, we may be catching up with Jonas. With the growing realization that he was struggling with issues that have become our most urgent problems today, nothing would be more timely than a rediscovery of the richness, insight, humaneness, and relevance of this remarkable philosopher and human being.