Abstract
“Kämpfer gegen seine Zeit”: Alfred Baeumler’s reading of Nietzsche and National Socialism. Since 1933, National Socialist thinkers promoted an ideological exploitation of Friedrich Nietzsche and his works, portraying him as the precursor and pioneering ideologue of the National Socialist Party. This article wants to point out the prominent role of Alfred Baeumler in this process. Baeumler produced an edition of Nietzsche’s works expounding an interpretation which led to Nietzsche’s installment as chief ideologue of National Socialism. Set against the earlier reception of Nietzsche, which is indebted to decadence aesthetics, Baeumler presented Nietzsche as a philosopher of ‘heroic realism’ who revolted against his own time and bourgeois civil society. Baeumler’s influential interpretation, which he started to develop as early as 1929, construes Nietzsche’s philosophy as being defined by combat, severity and war, while strongly centred on the concept of ‘will to power’.
