Countless attempts have been made to appropriate the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche for diverse cultural and political ends, but nowhere have these efforts been more sustained and of greater consequence than in Germany. Aschheim offers a magisterial chronicle of the philosopher's presence in German life and politics.

Steven E. Aschheim is Associate Professor of History at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He is the author of Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German-Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (1982).

"As Steven E. Aschheim recounts in this marvelous book, Nietzsche has meant over the past hundred years all things to all people."—Charles Larmore, The New Republic

"Admirable. . . . Aschheim has assembled a vast amount of information about the widely varying interpretations of Nietzsche in Germany."—James Joll, The New York Review of Books

"A model of academic scholarship—highly informative yet accessible even to the lay reader. . . . Especially insightful is Aschheim's balanced treatment of whether Nietzsche can be seen to have been a proto-Nazi or whether the Nazi's claiming him as such is justified."—Library Journal

"One of the most important works of German and European intellectual history published in years. . . . It will be welcomed by intellectual historians as a long overdue history of the multivalent reception and reworking of Nietzsche."—Jeffrey Herf, author of Reactionary Modernism