Nietzsche was repeatedly elevated to a figurehead by right-wing theorists and politicians. From Mussolini and Hitler to the AfD — Nietzsche is repeatedly seized when it comes to confronting modern society with a radical reactionary alternative. Nietzsche was particularly fascinating to intellectual right-wingers, such as authors like Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, who formed a cultural prelude to the advent of National Socialism in the 1920s, even though they later partially distanced themselves from it. People also often talk about the “Conservative Revolution”¹.

What do these authors draw from Nietzsche and to what extent do they read him one-sidedly and overlook other potentials in his work? Our author Paul Stephan spoke about this with philosopher Robert Hugo Ziegler.

“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?