More than with any other text, it can be said for a preface that the difficulty lies in leaving out everything that comes to mind after completing a book – and one would prefer to write only about that! – while still addressing a few key points that the author considers important for the readership. My interest in Heller arose from an academic context. In the early 1980s at FU Berlin, I came into contact with the philosophy of the Yugoslav "Praxis Group" through Svetozar Stojanovic, who gave several guest lectures at the Otto Suhr Institute. I was intrigued by their foundation of a humanistic Marxism: practice as a key concept, the self-creation of humanity, the connection between indirect and direct democracy, as well as the – albeit skeptical – handling of value-laden terms such as alienation.