FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE (1844–1900) IS A FIGURE from the mid-nineteenth century whose influence reached well into the twentieth century and extends beyond, into our own time. Both his professional (and professorial) beginnings and his tragic personal end condition our perception of his philosophical achievement: his appointment, at the extremely young age of twenty-four, to a chair of classical philology, and his final decade of insanity, following his mental collapse in 1889. From a body of writings that went virtually unnoticed when they were first published has arisen a tradition of commentary and analysis that sometimes threatens almost to obscure Nietzsche's philosophical achievement, so extensive has the secondary literature become.

Indeed, Nietzsche has in some ways become so much part of our mental furniture that it would be easy to underestimate the impact of his thought. But according to the German Modernist poet Gottfried Benn (1886–1956), everything that his generation “had discussed, had thought out inside itself, one might say: suffered, one might also say: done to death — all that had already been expressed and exhausted in Nietzsche, had found definitive formulation; all the rest was mere exegesis” (Eigentlich hat alles, was meine Generation diskutierte, innerlich sich auseinanderdachte, man kann sagen: erlitt, man kann auch sagen: breittrat — alles das hatte sich bereits bei Nietzsche ausgesprochen und erschöpft, definitive Formulierung gefunden). To the members of Benn's Nietzsche-influenced generation one might reckon many figures.