The diagnosis of our time: not heroic barbarians, but selfie warriors. This essay, which won the second place at this year's Kingfisher Award (link), explores Nietzsche's vision of the”stronger type”¹ and shows how it is turned into its opposite in a narcissistic culture — apocalypse as a pose, the Other as a blind spot. But instead of the big break, another option opens up: a “barbaric ethic” of refusal, of ambivalence, of relationship. Who are the true barbarians of the 21st century — and do we need them anyway?

On August 25, we published an interview, conducted by our author Paul Stephan, with the AI tool Chat GPT (link). In it, he asked the software, among other things, to write him an essay on the question of this year's Kingfisher Award: “Where are the barbarians of the 21st century? “(link). As an experiment, we presented the text to the five-person jury of the award, consisting of Lukas Meisner, Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann, Theodor Schild, Natalie Schulte and Paul Stephan himself — and it was surprisingly well received: In the preliminary round, it achieved fourth place on points and would therefore have made it into the shortlist by a hair. Only Natalie Schulte had drawn suspicion and presented the text to an AI checker, which, however, did not recognize it. — Would you have thought the text was human?

The essays from this year's winners will be published in the coming weeks. Did they do it better than AI, as we believe?

We deliberately refrained from editing the text, but published it exactly as the program spit it out for us. The article image is also from it.

As a part of this experiment, the subsequent translation has also been done by ChatGPT itself and we publish it without any alterations.

“Resentment” is one of the guiding concepts of Nietzsche's philosophy and perhaps even its most effective. In his new book The cold rage. Resentment theory and practice (Marburg 2024, Büchner-Verlag), Jürgen Grosse argues that since the 18th century, more or less all political or social movements have been those of resentment. Our main author Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann has read it and presents major theses below.

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“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.

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.

From October 12 to 15, the annual meeting of the Friedrich-Nietzsche Society took place in Naumburg. Numerous experts from all over the world came together to explore the various causes of Nietzsche's impact in the first decades following his mental collapse. The spiritual struggles over Nietzsche repeatedly referred to the real struggles of the past — and those of our present.