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.

“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?

Vitalii Mudrakov is one of Ukraine's leading Nietzsche experts. Due to the war, he and his family currently live in Germany. Paul Stephan talked to him in detail about some aspects of the rich Ukrainian reception of Nietzsche in the context of the country's independent cultural history, which has often been ignored. It shows that Nietzsche's liberal thinking repeatedly inspired central protagonists of Ukrainian culture in their struggle for an independent nation free from Habsburg, Tsarist or Soviet foreign rule — and today again the struggle for their own self-assertion in the face of the Russian invasion.