Nietzsche and the German Tradition

The essays collected in this volume are selected papers from the 7th Annual Conference of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society, which was held at the University of St Andrews in September 1997. The three distinct but related issues examined in this book are centrally important to the search for Nietzsche’s intellectual and cultural roots. The first concerns Nietzsche’s attitudes to his German cultural tradition, the second is Nietzsche’s view of his German present, and the final issue is the extent to which dealing with Nietzsche and his legacies has itself become a tradition since his death in 1900. Implicitly or explicitly, the contributors reveal Nietzsche’s ambivalent, double-edged attitude to tradition. All the essays collected here take account of the latest developments in Nietzsche scholarship and, together, make an important contribution both to understanding the ways in which Nietzsche problematises tradition and to recognising the difficulties, and opportunities, arising from the Nietzschean tradition(s) of the last hundred years.