It is well known that Nietzsche had a hard time with women. His sexual orientation and activity are still riddled with mystery and speculation today. Time and again, this question inspired artists of both genders to create provocatively mocking representations. Can he possibly be described as an “incel”? As an involuntary bachelor, in the spirit of today's debate about the misogynistic “incel movement”? Christian Saehrendt explores this question and tries to shed light on Nietzsche's complicated relationship with the “second sex.”

“Techno” — the show of the same name at the Swiss National Museum in Zurich, with traveling exhibitions by the Goethe-Institut and publications in German-speaking countries is currently honoring a once-subcultural movement that became a mass phenomenon in the 1990s with the Berlin Love Parade and continues to live on in Zurich's Street Parade today. Did techno offer (or offer) the Dionysian cultural experience that Nietzsche celebrated in his writings? Would Nietzsche have been a raver?

Richard Wagner lived on Lake Lucerne for six years. In April 1866, he was able to rent the Landhaus of the Lucerne patrician family Am Rhyn, which had been built in a beautiful scenic location on the Tribschenhorn. Nietzsche had been a frequent guest there at that time and enjoyed the family connection. For him, it was an episode that shaped him throughout his life, so that the confrontation with Wagner — in its entire range from unconditional adoration to rude rejection — can perhaps even be regarded as the heart of his thinking. Today, the building houses the Richard Wagner Museum. His current special exhibition focuses on the composer's anti-Semitism.

“Keep a stiff upper lip,” they say in England when you want to call on your interlocutor to persevere in the face of danger and to maintain an upright posture. Advice that is certainly often helpful. Such a stoic position must be sought all the more as an academic outsider who, on the one hand, sets himself apart from the scientific mainstream, but on the other hand is also dependent on his recognition. Nietzsche himself, but also many of his admirers, found himself in such a delicate situation. Based on several such outsider figures (in addition to Nietzsche himself, such as Julius Langbehn and Paul de Lagarde), Christian Saehrendt develops a typology of the (perhaps not always quite so) “brilliant isolation” of academic nonconformism.

The Inn River rises at an altitude of just under 2,500 m in southeastern Switzerland, in the canton of Graubünden. Over a distance of 80 km, it first flows through a high-mountain valley called the Engadin. Here, not far from the sophisticated spa town of St. Moritz, it crosses two small lakes, Lake Sils and Lake Silvaplana, between which lies the idyllic mountain village of Sils Maria. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche spent several summers in this exquisite landscape and was inspired by it to write some of his most important works. Christian Saehrendt set out to search for clues at what is perhaps the most important “pilgrimage site” on the Nietzsche scene.

In the following article, Christian Saehrendt gives a brief insight into the work of one of the most controversial but also most influential Nietzsche interpreters of the 20th century: the German philosopher Oswald Spengler (1880—1936). The author of The fall of the West (1917/22) is considered one of the most important representatives of the “Conservative Revolution,” an intellectual movement that was significantly involved in the cultural destabilization of the Weimar Republic before 1933. Largely forgotten in Germany, it continues to be eagerly received in a global context, such as in Russia.

Like hardly any other philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche has left his mark on popular culture — less in the pleasing mainstream entertainment, but more in subcultures and in artistic positions that are considered “edgy” and “dark.” In this “underworld,” Nietzsche's aphorisms, catchphrases, slogans and invectives are widely used — for example in the musical genres of heavy metal, hardcore and punk focused on social and aesthetic provocation. What is the reason for that?

For hardly any other philosopher, music was as important as it was for Nietzsche. “Without music, life would be a mistake”¹, he wrote. Christian Saehrendt goes for Nietzsche PopArts The question of how this high appreciation of sound art was manifested in his life and work. He talks about Nietzsche's own compositions as well as one of the most iconic aspects of his life: his friendship with Richard Wagner. He shows that the music for Nietzsche is almost erotic It was important — and in this respect he was not so “out of date” at all, but a typical child of his time.

Our regular author Christian Saehrendt reports in his contribution to the series “What does Nietzsche mean to me? “about how he discovered Nietzsche as a teenager and has regarded himself as a fan of the philosopher ever since — precisely because of his contrariness.

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