Thoughts on the psychology of adventure sit alongside brilliantly written miniatures about the beauty of a handle, a ruin, or the Alps. A philosophy of fashion next to reflections on the question of where the impatient pace of the big city comes from and why everyone in Berlin always looks so blasé. It is the probing investigation of fragments, intermediate phenomena, the unfinished, and the seemingly trivial, with which Georg Simmel captures a glimpse of modern life and existence as a whole. Nowhere can this philosophical approach be better understood than in the selected essays of the influential commentator on the fleeting modernity and its crises. It is precisely the agility and openness of his thinking that make Simmel's relevance enduring.