The Spinoza Problem

‘This is the most intriguing novel I’ve read in many a year. Irvin Yalom has created a taut, deeply informative page turner. I enthusiastically recommend The Spinoza Problem.’
Sir Anthony Hopkins

In 1909, sixteen-year-old Alfred Rosenberg is called into his headmaster’s office for making anti-Semitic remarks. He is punished by having to memorise passages from the autobiography of Goethe — and is stunned to discover that his idol was a great admirer of the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

Spinoza himself was no stranger to punishment: accused of heresy, he was excommunicated from the Jewish community and banished from the only world he had ever known. Nevertheless, he became one of the most influential philosophers of his age.

Long after graduation, Rosenberg is possessed by the ‘Spinoza problem’: how could Goethe, the great German poet, have been inspired by a member of a race that Rosenberg considers inferior to his own? A race that, as he developed from anti-Semitic schoolboy to Nazi propagandist, he would become determined to destroy?

In his brilliant re-creation of the inner worlds of two men separated by 300 years — one dedicated to fashioning a moral philosophy, the other obsessed with the superiority of the Aryan race — internationally bestselling novelist Irvin D. Yalom explores the thin psychological line that separates genius and evil, and the lives of two men who changed the course of history.

Reviews

‘Irvin Yalom does a masterful job in bringing to life Spinoza and his philosophy and connecting it to the apocalyptic history of Nazi Germany and the persona of Alfred Rosenberg. It’s the sort of temporal alchemy and alchemy of science and fiction that Yalom does so well. The Spinoza Problem is engrossing, enlightening, disturbing and ultimately deeply satisfying.’
Abraham Verghese, author of CUTTING FOR STONE

‘Spinoza had no ‘real life’ outside his reading and writing: he lived in his brilliant mind. So how do you write about a philosopher — a writer beloved of Goethe, Schopenhauer, and so many other thinkers — who spent most of his time in thought? And how do you regard Spinoza — a Jew whose work helped to usher in the Enlightenment — if, indeed, you’re a Nazi? Irvin Yalom is just the writer to take on such a problem, and he solves it, with his own novelistic brilliance, in this vibrant book. In my view, Yalom is one of the most eclectic, wide-ranging, and dazzling writers of our time.’
Jay Parini author of THE LAST STATION and The PASSAGES OF H.M.

‘[The Spinoza Problem] is yet another example of how a psychiatrist’s stock in trade — the secrets spoken only in the therapist’s office — can be spun into gold by a gifted storyteller. And, like his previous work, The Spinoza Problem offers us a face-to-face encounter with a distant and lofty historical figure.’
Jonathan Kirsch, JewishJournal.com

About the Author

Irvin D. Yalom is Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine. The author of the definitive textbook The Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy, which has sold 700,000 copies in eighteen languages and is now in its fifth edition, he also wrote Existential Psychotherapy, a textbook for a course that did not exist at the time. Dr Yalom has written several trade books for the general reader, including a collection of therapy tales, Love’s Executioner, which was a New York Times best seller; the novels When Nietzsche Wept, also a best seller in the United States, Israel, Greece, Turkey, Argentina, Brazil, and Germany (where it sold more than a million copies); Momma and the Meaning of Life, a collection of true and fictionalised tales of therapy; The Gift of Therapy; and The Schopenhauer Cure. Dr Yalom has an active but part-time private practice in Palo Alto and San Francisco, California.