Abstract
The article describes the thought of the Czech-German Jewish philosopher and psychologist Emil Utitz against the background of his experience in the Theresienstadt concentration camp. The goal is to first reconstruct Utitz' philosophy and then to show that his thought is permeated by the then popular philosophy of Hans Vaihinger, who considered the ability to act as though something is true even if we do not know that it is true to be a key human faculty.
The work of imagination, even an intensification of it in the conditions of the concentration camp, was central to Utitz' conception of life in Theresienstadt. Utitz' thought is reconstructed in an attempt to apply the work of imagination as interpreted by Vaihinger to this portion of twentieth century.
Specifically, I want to position Utitz' thought along two axes: first, along the axis of the Kantian philosophical tradition and, second, along the axis of the then common conception of the Holocaust experience as put forward by V. Frankl or H.
G. Adler.