

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.


Last year, curator and art historian Barbara Straka published a two-volume monograph entitled Nietzsche forever? Friedrich Nietzsches Transfigurationen in der zeitgenössischen Kunst (Nietzsche Forever? Friedrich Nietzsche's Transfigurations in Contemporary Art), in which she explains Nietzsche's significance for the visual arts of the present day. After Michael Meyer-Albert dedicated a two-part review to her work in recent weeks (part 1, part 2), here follows an interview conducted by our author Jonas Pohler with the author in Potsdam. He discussed her book with her, but also about the not always easy relationship between philosophy and contemporary art.


Nietzsche certainly did not have any children and is also not particularly friendly about the subject of fatherhood in his work. For him, the free spirit is a childless man; raising children is the task of women. At the same time, he repeatedly uses the child as a metaphor for the liberated spirit, as an anticipation of the Übermensch. Is he perhaps able to inspire today's fathers after all? And can you be a father and a Nietzschean at the same time? Henry Holland and Paul Stephan, both fathers, discussed this question.
We also published the complete, unabridged discussion on the Halcyonic Association for Radical Philosophy YouTube channel (Part 1, part 2).