ABSTRACT
Tolerance? Away with it and with all the other mildew virtues that grow in the dank ruins of the temple of the Judaeo-Christian God. Pity and charity, denial of the unregenerated will and love of your neighbour? Subterfuges, all of them, hide-outs of the weak and ‘underprivileged’ (‘die Schlechtweggekommenen’) in body and soul. The brazen Nietzschean message heralds a new age, the age of modern wars, racism and genocide, that seems wholly disconnected from the age to which these studies have been devoted. And the German student-soldiers of the First World War, who are reported to have carried Goethe’s and Mörike’s poems in one pocket of their knapsacks and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra in the other, belong to a generation that never recovered from the conflict of divided allegiances.
