"If Nietzsche’s image reached its nadir during the Second World War, when Hitler presented Mussolini with a bound edition of his works and the historian Crane Brinton wrote a book asserting he would have been “a good Nazi,” a resurrection was soon to come. The German émigré and Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann almost single-handedly revived his standing with his many translations and forceful reminder that Nietzsche hated anti-Semites and German nationalists as well as woolly-headed romantics. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche was a late flower of the Enlightenment, a tough-minded rationalist with the courage to face the Darwinian revelation that there is no purpose to nature or to our existence. The true task of the overman was to overcome himself, not others, and to do so by sculpturing his impulses and thoughts and inheritances into a willed unity that could be called “style.”"
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Academics from the United StatesAcademics from GermanyEducators from the United StatesExistentialistsPhilosophers from Germany
Original Language: English
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Sources
Alexander Star, in "What Friedrich Nietzsche Did to America" by Alexander Star, in The New York Times (13 January 2012) a review of American Nietzsche : A History of an Icon and His Ideas (2012) by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen; another edition of the review was presented as "The Overman" in Sunday Book Review (15 January 2012)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Walter_Kaufmann_(philosopher)
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Walter Kaufmann (philosopher)
Walter Arnold Kaufmann (1 July 1921 – 4 September 1980) was a German-American philosopher, translator, and poet, most famous as a translator and scholar of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.
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