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