Nietzsche, Friedrich - Erich Heller (essay date 1965)
Erich Heller (essay date 1965)
[A German-born American critic and educator, Heller has written extensively on modern German literature and culture in such books as The Disinherited Mind (1952), Franz Kafka (1969), and Thomas Mann: The Ironic German (1979). In the following essay from his The Importance of Nietzsche, Heller asserts that the central idea in Nietzsche's philosophy is the death of God, from which stemmed his prophetic insight that the nihilistic drive of modern science and politics would unleash technological warfare and destruction on an unprecedented scale.]
In 1873, two years after Bismarck's Prussia had defeated France, a young German who happened to live in Switzerland and taught classical philology in the University of Basle wrote a treatise concerned with "the German mind." It was an inspired diatribe against, above all, the German notion of Kultur and against the philistine readiness to believe...
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