This gave her almost 40 years to doctor texts and letters and manipulate the literary estate. It was such a success that a few years later she published a greatly expanded edition.Įlisabeth lived until 1935. But Elisabeth took fragments from here and there, concocted a book called The Will to Power and published it under her brother’s name. He scrawled a shopping list on the abandoned title page. Nietzsche was always very sparing in what he published, but he loved playing around with book titles. She published an unreliable biography of him and delayed publication of his autobiography, Ecce Homo, until she had deleted uncomplimentary references to herself. She did the same to his writing, rummaging about in his literary estate, cutting and pasting at will. On her brother’s death in 1900, Elisabeth didn’t think his death mask was sufficiently impressive, so she faked a second one. When it came to faking news, Elisabeth was a pioneer. ‘Is man God’s mistake, or is God man’s mistake?’ Photograph: Culture Club/Getty Images “ Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, that is the end of German philosophy,” he wrote, and “I will have all antisemites shot.” Growing up in Bismarck’s reich, there were three things Nietzsche hated: the big state, nationalism and antisemitism. Richard Spencer, a leader of America’s “alt-right”, claims to have been “red-pilled by Nietzsche”, while Jordan Peterson quotes extensively from him. There are three myths in particular that need dynamiting: that his politics were on the far right, he was a misogynist and he lacked a sense of humour. Highly relevant, yet his association with concepts such as the Übermensch, master morality, slave morality and, possibly most dangerous, the will to power, have also contributed to him being widely misinterpreted. Nietzsche was philosophy’s supreme iconoclast his sayings include “God is dead” and “There are no facts, only interpretations”.

F riedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin are the great triumvirate of 19th-century thinkers whose ideas still have huge impact today.

Frederick niche beyond good and evil