 In 1954, Susman published a collection of essays she had written in the period from 1921 to 1953. The anthology, titled Gestalten und Kreise (Figures and Circles), features interpretative studies on Jewish authors such as Moses Mendelssohn, Freud, Bergson, Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Kafka, and Karl Wolfskehl. The volume also included studies on other authors, such as Goethe and Nietzsche, as well as essays on Chassidism, Women’s Emancipation, and Anarchism. The essays exemplify Susman’s approach to doing philosophy, or her way of working, philosophically, by means of exploring the paradigmatic significance of historical constellations. Her method is a kind of deep reading focusing on how authors and their texts negotiate the challenges of the historical moment in which they live and write, and which they have come to exemplify. The book as a whole, Susman notes in her preface, is “an attempt to offer with the demise of an old world an entry point to a new one” (GK 5).