  Perhaps the most important early influence on Rosenzweig’s philosophical development was his cousin, Hans Ehrenberg, whom Rosenzweig would later claim was “my real teacher in philosophy.” Ehrenberg was a student of Wilhelm Windelband, and he was a notable figure in the rise of neo-Hegelianism which Windelband described, with a mixture of interest and surprise, in his 1910 landmark lecture, “Die Erneuerung des Hegelianismus.” The question of the possibility of a renewal of Hegelianism was at the heart of Ehrenberg’s attempt, early in 1910, to collect some of the brightest young intellectuals, historians, and scholars of philosophy from southwest Germany together in Baden-Baden for a series of symposia devoted to making “contemporary culture into the object of historical contemplation.” Rosenzweig shared in Ehrenberg’s enthusiasm in founding this “Baden-Baden Gesellschaft,” so much so that its subsequent failure had a dramatic effect on his own thinking. Rosenzweig apparently saw as the task of the Baden-Baden group the revival of a philosophical-historical consciousness that would rival what Hegel’s “Spirit” had meant for its age. Together, the young Rosenzweig believed, these up-and-coming intellectuals would reconcile in science their respective subjectivity with the objectivity of their time. They would take seriously the radical individuality of person and specialization of science that typified the age, and would at once forge the “unity” of such “ununifiables” in a holistic vision of knowledge and culture befitting the Zeitgeist. But the first, and what would end up being the only meeting of the society, appears to have been an abysmal failure precisely because the historians who came to the meeting—most of whom were, like Rosenzweig, students of Meinecke—could in no way stomach the kind of sweeping, metaphysical account of history leading up to the present that Rosenzweig sought to revive. The Baden-Baden Gesellschaft dissolved as quickly as it was formed.