Epilogue: Europe Discovers Nietzsche
Lebenephiloeophie catches on · Thomas Mann's experi-
ence of Nietzsche · Bergson, Max S che 1ery Georg Simmel ·
Zarathustra in the war · Ernst Bertram and knight, death,
and devil · Alfred Baeumler and the Heraclitean Nietzsche- Anti-anti-Semitism · On the trail of Nietzsche: Jaspers,
Heidegger, Adorno/Horkheimer, and Foucault · Dionysus
and power · A story without an end
ILE EUROPE^9 S top putrescence savoured / Bayreuth and
Epsom, Pau and Rome, / with hugs two hackney nags he favoured, /
until his landlord dragged him home."^1
Within months of Nietzsche's breakdown, the news had spread well
beyond Bayreuth, Epsom, Pau, and Rome. From high society to the
intellectual elite, everyone was discovering Nietzsche. In retrospect, his
grand finale of insanity lent his work an eerie ring of truth: evidendy, he
had penetrated so deeply into the secret of existence that he lost his
mind in the process. In a famous passage in The Gay Science; Nietzsche
(^1) Translation of Gottfried Benn's poem 'Turin" by Michael Hamburger, in
Gottfried Benn: Prose, Essays, Poems, ed. Volkmar Sander (New York:
Continuum, 1987), p. 217. —Translator
317