Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology(International Nietzsche Studies)

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.

Table of Contents:
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

About the Author :
Ernst Bertram (1884–1957) was a recognized scholar of German literature and culture, as well as an accomplished poet. Although Nietzsche remained his only monograph, he published numerous essays and several books of poetry. Robert E. Norton is a professor of German at the University of Notre Dame and the author of Secret Germany: Stefan George and His Circle.

Review :
"Robert E. Norton has done an admirable job in preparing this English translation of a provocative critical study of Nietzsche - an important link between Nietzsche's reception in the Weimar Period and the philosopher's cooptation by the Nazis in the 1930s. This translation is simply splendid - flowing, precise, and sensitive to nuance." Marion Faber, translator of Human, All Too Human and Beyond Good and Evil "Ernst Bertram's seminal work ... not only highlighted Nietzsche's own .revival of the mythical dimension as essential to creative human activity but also sought, in the heroizing of spirit of the Stephan George circle (with which Bertram was associated) to render Nietzsche himself into a latter-day prophet - a dynamic, living national myth." - Times Literary Supplement