Abstract
Zarathustra roaming the Obersalzberg: Ernst Niekisch’s reception of Nietzsche after 1945. Even for ‘conservative revolutionary’ standards, Ernst Niekisch oscillated heavily between the political left and right. His reception of Nietzsche is a case in point. While the young Niekisch admired Nietzsche as a thinker of inequality and a prophet of relentlessness, after 1945 he blamed him for the very same qualities. Niekisch was in fact one of the founding fathers of the GDR interpretation of Nietzsche as a trailblazer of fascism. His ideological development regarding Nietzsche thus sheds light on the relation between the Conservative Revolution’s sympathetic simplification of Nietzsche’s thought and the hostile simplification maintained in the GDR.
