Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche The Philosopher of the Second Reich

Nietzsche presents himself as an untimely one who despised his fellow Germans and the powerful new Reich they had created in 1871. Posterity has for the most part accepted this facile self-portrait: more scholarly attention has been paid to this complex philosopher's connection with the Third Reich than with the Second. But when careful consideration is given to his critique of Platonism and to what Nietzsche actually wrote about Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, the Reich and its place in international relations (die Große Politik), his carefully cultivated pose of untimeliness is revealed to be an imposture. Instead, Nietzsche should be recognized as the paradigmatic philosopher of the Second Reich, the short-lived and equally complex German Empire that vanished in World War One. But Nietzsche is also a brilliant stylist and his seemingly disconnected aphorisms have made him notoriously difficult for scholars to analyze. Rather than write in accordance with the scholarly canons he despised, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is presented as a numbered series of 155 brief sections (provocatively titled in Nietzsche's own fashion) and then arranged in five discrete Books, a structure modeled on his 1881 Daybreak. Each section is built around a passage from Nietzsche's writings and is accompanied with a scholarly apparatus in the Endnotes. All of Nietzsche's books are considered in the context of the close and revealing relationship between Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (his father Ludwig, a Lutheran Pastor and zealous Prussian patriot, named his son after the King of Prussia) and the Second Reich.