Introduction

Summary

Although very few copies of Friedrich Nietzsche’s published works were sold during the productive part of his life prior to his mental collapse in 1889 at the age of 44, in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth century he quickly became the best-known and most influential German writer and thinker. This was especially, but not exclusively, so in German-speaking countries, where he gained fame primarily as a ferocious critic of Christianity, religion in general, traditional morality, and liberal democratic and socialist politics. He then quickly also became well known internationally as one of the first “avant-garde” philosophers – more, in his own words, an “artist, shaman and seducer” than a traditional philosopher. And he did not lack confidence.