American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

As Kaufmann later expressed his zeal for Nietzsche’s redemptive possibilities for midcentury philosophy in his introduction to The Portable Nietzsche (1954), “Nietzsche is the … best bridge between positivism and existentialism.” With “German and Romance philosophy and Anglo-American ‘analysis’ … completely out of touch with each other,” Kaufmann argued that Nietzsche could help reestablish “some bond between what are now two completely divergent branches of modern thought.” He did not miss the irony that “Nietzsche, once stupidly denounced as the mind that caused the First World War, might well become a major aid to international understanding.”