“So how does the monumental contemplation of the past, the study of the classic and rare of earlier times, benefit the present day? He deduces from this that the great thing that was there once was in any case possible once and will therefore probably be possible again [.]

On the Benefits and Disadvantages of History for Life, § 2

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I. Übernietzsche

In his first publication The birth of tragedy (1872) Nietzsche still represented a pathetic understanding of art, as a result “only as aesthetic phenomenon [...] existence and the world forever warranted”¹ be. The operas of his idol Richard Wagner were intended to bring about a rebirth of the tragic myth of antiquity, a comprehensive cultural revolution under the banner of the double-faced power of Dionysian and Apollonian. Nietzsche's philosophical art now consisted in liberating a new concept of art from this late Romantic aestheticism. In an emancipatory “art of living”² Should we, the “free spirits” become “poets of our lives”³ and learn to philosophically glorify our own being — and “in the smallest and most mundane first” (ibid.) — through the appearance of life-affirming perspectives.

Nietzsche thus invented an understanding of truth as art, which was intended to vitalize Europe as an intensified enlightenment. Precisely because the truth is too hard to be lived, it is true to keep it at a distance. For Europe, this means that even though the gods may be dead, we have the cunning cockiness of ideas to make life friendly with life. In this respect, successful art can be measured by whether it enriches life by transfiguring it in such a way that it remains motivated to value life. It is interesting to ask how the philosopher of appearances appears in the main medium of appearances.

It is the claim of Barbara Straka's book Nietzsche Forever?, which was published by Schwabe-Verlag in 2025, to depict Nietzsche's reception of art after the Second World War.⁴ As an art historian and former curator, she sets herself apart from the history of reception before 1945, which was determined by the will to monumentalize that Nietzsche's sister embodied in her manipulative marketing as estate administrator. Analogous to the cult of Wagner, which Nietzsche renounced philosophically productively from 1876, he himself became a mythical heroic cult object and, spiritually reneged since 1889, from 1897 until his death in 1900 as a “living exhibit” (p. 21) in the Weimar Nietzsche Archive. He was mystified as a Christ-like Antichrist, as a philosophical prophet of nihilism, as a Germanic thinker of superman in the sense of fascism. Nietzsche became Übernietzsche.

Straka states that these reductive revaluations of Nietzsche's philosophy of revaluations have an effect. Nietzsche appeared as the thinker for Hitler's actions. Only the complete text-critical edition by the two Italian philologists Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari in the 1960s allowed an unobstructed look at Nietzsche's works and a gradual removal of the taboo of this supposedly proto-fascist thinker. After all, it took a generation for the effects of the history of manipulative reception to recede so far into the background that, starting in 1980, Nietzsche was gradually and always ambivalently rediscovered as a “free spirit” for art.

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II. Transfigurations of the Nietzsche Image

Straka's book provides an overview of art's diverse engagement with Nietzsche beyond cult and Hitler, with reference to her subject, alleging a “failure of art history in dealing with the subject” (p. 46). Straka methodically analyses the work of 220 artists — primarily from the years 1980 to 2000 — sorted into 14 thematic clusters (for example: Nietzsche's physiognomy, his travels, his loneliness), each of which she illustrates with exemplary works. However, it is also pointed out that the immense increase in production of the art market since the 1970s, the expansion of the art zone through globalization and the lack of digital archiving of works before 1990 have fundamentally affected the exemplary documentation of art history after 1945.

Nevertheless, with regard to Nietzsche in contemporary art, it is clear for Straka that it is above all the change of inspirational source that influenced Nietzsche's image. Away from the concrete image of Nietzsche in the genre of portrait towards the images that evoke Nietzsche's work and life. It is these “transfigurations” that Straka wants to highlight.

The impact of Nietzsche's thinking on art — particularly of So Spoke Zarathustra, The Happy Science, Ecce Homo and the literary Dionysus Dithyrambi — is eminent for Straka: “Without Nietzsche's writings, yet fundamental statements on art and aesthetics, which played an inspiring role for modern and contemporary art, recent art history would probably have taken a different course.” (p. 10) She adds at the end of her book: “For the arts, their theory formation and development in the 20th and 21st century, the legacy of the most controversial of philosophers is likely to have taken a different course.” (p. 10) She adds at the end of her book: “For the arts, their theory formation and development in the 20th and 21st century, the legacy of the most controversial of philosophers is likely to have taken a different course.” (p. 10) She adds at the end of her book: “For the arts, their theory formation and development in the 20th and 21st century, the legacy of the most controversial of philosophers yet be undisputed.” (p. 726)

Straka differentiates roughly between three phases of Nietzsche's reception: “As an object of the visual arts, Friedrich Nietzsche's portrait has experienced an unprecedented process of construction (around and after 1900), of deconstruction (after 1945) and reconstruction (since the 1980s).” (p. 628)

The last phase of the new construction had an increased impact with the Internet. Nietzsche “not only became popular, but also became a pop idol and superstar.” (p. 628) Straka's differentiation of the various forms of the Nietzsche pop phenomenon is instructive:

1. Nietzsche funny — the joke figure (professor, bookworm, owl, clumsy, anti-hero, misogynist); 2. Over-Nietzsche — the superman (saint, action hero, savior, fighter, athlete); 3. Nietzsche now — the human-all-too-human contemporary (teacher, helper, friend, advisor); 4. Nietzsche cool — the idol (pop star, superstar); 5. Nietzsche cute — the cute (doll, dwarf, toy, devotional items); 6. Tiny Nietzsche — the tiny (baby, toddler).⁵

As diversely trivialized, Nietzsche becomes a human being. In it, Übernietzsche is inoculated with normality so much that he shrinks and comes on equal footing with the “last people.” Straka points out this culturally critical “phenomenon of (too) humanising” (p. 663), but also notes that “the final phase of deconstructing the former cult image of Nietzsche” (ibid.) could be realized in this delta of typologies. The story of Nietzsche's reception in the arts ends with a plural neutralization of the former cultic monumentality and thus opens the horizon for a wide variety of creative approaches.

In her analyses, Straka pays particular attention to the possibility of whether, as a result of Nietzsche's now liberated reception, art could play a mediating role between philosophy and the general public. Art as a more cosmopolitan sister of Nietzsche who popularized the true heroism of Nietzsche's cheerful heroism beyond myth and banality? After the Völkisches, not the popular but still more popular Nietzsche? Straka mentions that the Nietzsche House in Sils Maria was the most likely to achieve this utopian task (see p. 727).

Straka's book succeeded in turning the sheer incomprehensible extent of Nietzsche's reception in contemporary art into plausible thematic overviews. It thus presents a standard work against which any future examination of this topic will have to be measured. The richly illustrated book impresses with comprehensive knowledge of the art market and Nietzsche's world of ideas, which gains depth of focus through extensive quotations and vivid details.

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The second part of the article will follow shortly.

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Article Image

Aat Verhoog: Three Riders (including Nietzsche) (1970; spring)

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Sources

Straka, Barbara: Nietzsche Forever? Friedrich Nietzsche's Transfigurations in contemporary art. Basel 2025.

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Footnotes

1: The birth of tragedy, paragraph 5.

2: Human, all-too-human II, The Wanderer and His Shadow, Aph 266.

3: The gay science, Aph 299.

4: The body text of this book is quoted below.

5: P. 662.