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.

|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| Winner of the American Translators Association's Ungar German Translation Award, 2011. — American Translators Association
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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.