Nietzsche's Footfalls (eBook)

How strange that one of the finest books on Nietzsche should be a novel - Jason Wirth (Seattle University)

Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.

Nietzsche's Footfalls

During the final decade of Nietzsche's life, when he was mad, his sister created an archive in his name. She placed him upstairs as a living exhibit while she beavered away in the rooms beneath rewriting his work and establishing him as a great name in the new world of Nazi Germany. Her efforts gave him a 'posthumous existence' totally at odds with his own expressed desires.

This image is at the core of the book which deals with various posthumous lives, the way in which intentions change unexpectedly in a complex interwoven set of relationships some obvious, some less so: with his sister, Elizabeth who married an anti-semitic agitator called Förster and went out to Paraguay to found an Aryan colony and later, after he had committed suicide and her brother had gone mad, she returned to Germany and assiduously turned him into an icon for Nazi thinking. another with Richard Wagner who he began by loving and later rejected. Other paths also cross and recross.

The book also deals with Nietzsche's madness and how (madly) things change into their opposites, for example, how anti-anti-semitism can change into anti-semitism and Nazism, then into a reaction against the holocaust and then into a new kind of revisionism and denial.

Even though all the information here is true, it is written as a continuous meditation - as a work of imagination. The text is continuous and includes small biographies, philosophic meditations, summaries, quotes, some history plus descriptions. or his writings in unexpected ways.

The aim is to write a story of parallel posthumous existences and the way they all interrelate.