The only English translation of a crucial interpretation of Nietzsche

First published in 1918, Ernst Bertram's Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology substantially shaped the image of Nietzsche for the generation between the wars. It won the Nietzsche Society's first prize and was admired by luminous contemporaries including André Gide, Hermann Hesse, Gottfried Benn, and Thomas Mann. Although translated into French in 1932, the book was never translated into English following the decline of Nietzsche's and Bertram's reputations after 1945. Now, with Nietzsche's importance for twentieth-century thought undisputed, the work by one of his most influential interpreters can at last be read in English.

Employing a perspectival technique inspired by Nietzsche himself, Bertram constructs a densely layered portrait of the thinker that shows him riven by deep and ultimately irresolvable cultural, historical, and psychological conflicts. At once lyrical and intensely probing, richly complex yet thematically coherent, Bertram's book is a masterpiece in a forgotten tradition of intellectual biography.

Translator's Introduction: Attempt at a Demythologization   xi
A Comment on the Notes   xxxvii
Acknowledgments   xxxix

Introduction: Legend   1
1. Ancestry   11
2. Knight, Death, and Devil   37
3. The German Becoming   56
4. Justice   79
5. Arion   88
6. Illness   107
7. Judas   121
8. Mask   134
9. Weimar   154
10. Napoleon   171
11. Jest, Cunning, and Vengeance   183
12. Anecdote   194
13. Indian Summer   203
14. Claude Lorrain   213
15. Venice   223
16. Portofino   231
17. Prophecy   231
18. Socrates   262
19. Eleusis   289
Notes   309
Chronology   365
Index   369