ABSTRACT
The author travels to eastern German schools and universities during 1994; he/she witnessed a strange yet long-awaited event: the return of Friedrich Nietzsche, probably the greatest European philosopher of the last century, to eastern German cultural life. Nietzsche had been turned into something close to an official mouthpiece for Nazi propaganda in the Third Reich. During the 1930s, Hitler had visited the Nietzsche Archives in Weimar seven times and befriended the philosopher's sister, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche. When the Russians occupied eastern Germany in 1945, the Archives were immediately shut down and Nietzsche's works were removed from libraries and bookstores. This chapter focuses on the Nietzsche ferment through the author encounters at both his birthplace and in the city of his death, suggesting variously how older and younger Germans of the New Germanies approach Nietzsche's complicated legacy. Nietzsche was read one way by the Nazis, the same way by the Soviets, and has survived or been resurrected by unification.
