Memoirs Hans Jonas Edited & annotated by Christian Wiese When Hans Jonas died in 1993 at the age of 89, he was revered among American scholars specializing in European philosophy, but his thought had not yet made great inroads among a wider public. In Germany, conversely, during the 1980s, Jonas was a veritable intellectual celebrity, owing to the runaway success of his 1979 book, The Imperative of Responsibility, an extra-ordinarily timely work that meditates on the ever-widening gap between humankind's enormous technological capacities and its diminished moral sensibilities. The book became something of a cultural shibboleth; Jonas himself became a celebrated public intellectual. For Jonas, this development must have been enormously gratifying. In the 1920s, Jonas studied philosophy with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger at the universities in Marburg and Freiburg, but the Nazi regime's early attempts at Aryanize the universities forced Jonas to leave Germany for London in 1933. He emigrated to Palestine in 1935 and eventually enlisted in the British Army's Jewish Brigade to fight against Hitlerism. Following the Israeli War of Independence, in which he also fought, he emigrated to the United States and took a position at the New School for Social Research in New York. He became part of a circle of friends around Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher, which included Adolph Lowe and Paul Tillich. Because Jonas's life spanned the entire twentieth century, this memoir provides nuanced pictures of a host of important historical moments – of German Jewry during the Weimar Republic, of German Zionism, of the Jewish emigrants in Palestine during the 1930s and 1940s, and of German Jewish emigre intellectuals in New York.[…] This memoir, a collection of heterogeneous unpublished materials - diaries, memoirs, letters, interviews, and public statements - has been shaped and organized by Christian Wiese, whose afterword links the Jewish dimensions of Jonas's biography and philosophy. CHRISTIAN WIESE is Director of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies and Professor in the History Department at Sussex University, U.K. He is the author of The Life and Thought of Hand Jonas: Jewish Dimensions, published in 2007 by Brandeis University Press.