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This is the original German text of Friedrich Nietzsche's most famous book. After ten years of solitude in the mountains, the prophet Zarathustra comes down…
This is the original German text of Friedrich Nietzsche's most famous book. After ten years of solitude in the mountains, the prophet Zarathustra comes down to preach to humankind, and in a series of speeches, parables and songs he teaches the death of God, the Übermensch who will create new values, and the eternal recurrence of all things. Nietzsche wrote it in a deliberately elevated style that echoes Luther's German Bible, full of images and wordplay, from the three transformations of the spirit, camel, lion and child, to the tightrope walker who falls in the market place.
Context and significance
Nietzsche wrote the four parts between 1883 and 1885, partly in Rapallo and Sils-Maria, and printed the fourth privately in a few dozen copies. Richard Strauss's tone poem of 1896, famous from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, took its title from it. Readers who prefer English can turn to the translation Thus Spake Zarathustra.
About the author
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), the son of a Lutheran pastor, was appointed professor of classical philology at Basel at only twenty-four. His friendship with the composer Richard Wagner shaped his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, and its bitter end shaped much of what followed. Ill health forced him to resign in 1879, and he spent ten restless years in Swiss and Italian lodgings, writing book after book.
In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and his later works he questioned morality, religion and truth itself. He collapsed in Turin in 1889 and never recovered; his sister later bent his work toward nationalist causes he had despised. Few philosophers have been so influential, or so often misread.