  Yorck's and Dilthey's awareness of an epochal shift, written some twenty years before World War I, could not fail to impress the generation of students who, in the aftermath of this European catastrophe, their predicament exacerbated by continued economic hardship and hyperinflation, returned to studying philosophy in the early 1920s. This may explain why, much later, in the 1980s, Gadamer would still speak of the enormous significance of the publication of the Dilthey–Yorck correspondence in 1923, calling it an “epoch-making moment” in its own  right (Gadamer 1995, p. 8). 