Exactly 250 years ago, on the 4^th of July 1776, thirteen North American British colonies declared their independence from the mother country, soon thereafter forming one of the first modern democratic republics of the world, the United States of America. We took this anniversary as an occasion to speak with the Canadian Nietzsche scholar Willow Verkerk about the different approaches to Nietzsche in Europe and North America. To what extent is this thinker, so deeply embedded in European culture, read differently “here” to “there”? What does this tell about general cultural differences between Europe and its erstwhile colonies on the other side of the ocean? And what did Nietzsche himself think about the “New World”?

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Time and again, our blog is dedicated to overlooked figures from the Nietzscheverse. The Leipzig Anglist Elmar Schenkel went deep into the archives for us in order to introduce you to an almost unknown figure of French-language Nietzsche reception: the “taxi philosopher” Jean-Baptiste Botul, who lived from 1896 to 1947 and not only came into contact with numerous prominent figures of his time on his trips through Paris, but developed also, in conversations with them, his very own Nietzsche interpretation, which, due to its subversive explosive power, has been stored in the poison cabinet by the mainstream of Nietzsche research to the present day. If Nietzsche was, in his own words, “dynamite,” then Botul is a rocket of the Force de frappe, still awaiting detonation — a stroke of luck?