The Superman Century Nietzsche’s Übermensch, Weimar Germany, and the Making of the Nazi Aryan Ideal

A lonely philosopher dreamed of a new kind of human being: free, fearless, and answerable to no one. Within fifty years, that dream had been claimed by feminists and Zionists, artists and pastors, soldiers in the trenches, and finally by Adolf Hitler.The Superman Century follows one idea through the most turbulent decades of modern Europe: from Nietzsche’s mountain solitude to the mud of the Western Front, from the cabarets and crises of Weimar to the parade grounds of the Third Reich. Along the way, the Übermensch changed shape again and again. It moved from the individual to the crowd, and from the spirit to the blood.Nothing about the ending was fated. Ideas do not march on their own, and this book shows the people who chose to carry this one, and what it cost the world when they did.A gripping history of how a philosophy of freedom became a doctrine of hatred, and a warning about the stories nations tell themselves about who they are.