The actress Andrea Ummenberger is currently putting Nietzsche on stage in Halle with a solo play. In a captivating evening at the theatre, the audience can experience the thinker as he possibly was, at least in the interpretation of Austrian writer Alexander Widner, during his last years: not necessarily mentally abducted, but rather insane and in permanent conflict with his sister, his mother — and last but not least his home country. A self-proclaimed fool who rebels against the tight shackles of German small-mindedness and dreams of the South and liberated sensuality. Ummenberger shows us a Nietzsche who still has something to say to us today; not a brilliant idol, but rather a complex anti-hero who asks important questions.

At first glance, Dieter Bohlen and Friedrich Nietzsche have as little connection as Marie Antoinette with Rosa Luxemburg or Napoleon with Angela Merkel — but a second reveals greater affinities than one might suspect. In any case, this unlike synopsis enables a new perspective — on Bohlen and on Nietzsche in equal measure. “Pairing the strangest and separating the next”¹, in the following text, our regular author Christian Saehrendt undertakes a truly Nietzschean search for clues on the tracks of the “titan” of German pop, which to this day polarizes like only a few celebrities in the German-speaking world — this, too, a line of connection between philosopher and musician.