ABOUT THIS BOOK
Hitler, who most likely never read this book but had heard about it took Nietzsche’s concept of
Übermensch to a new direction. Thus Spoke Zarathustra remains one of Nietzsche’s most influential works and describes how the ancient Persian prophet, Zarathustra, descends from his to tell the world that God is dead and that the Superman (human embodiment of divinity) is his successor.
Written between 1883 and 1885, Thus Spoke Zarathustra dismantled the establishment of belief in the 19th century. It is a tragedy, a parody, a polemic, and the culmination of the German language. This foundational work of Western literature has been analysed, misunderstood, and analysed again through the centuries and still stood the test of time.
AUTHOR OF THE BOOK
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher, a cultural critic, and a philologist who published intensively in the 1870s and 1880s. His work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history for its uncompromising criticism of traditional European morality and religion, as well as of the conventional philosophical ideas and social and political pieties associated with modernity. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. Much of his criticism relies on psychological diagnoses that exposes false consciousness infecting people’s received ideas. Nietzsche’s writing spans philosophical polemics, poetry, cultural criticism, and fiction while displaying a fondness for aphorism and irony. Prominent elements of his philosophy include his radical critique of truth in favor of perspectivism; a genealogical critique of religion and Christian morality and a related theory of master–slave morality; the aesthetic affirmation of life in response to both the “death of God” and the profound crisis of nihilism.
