American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Though Gladden’s view of Nietzsche as a Hebrew prophet was not unfamiliar to liberal Protestants, now, during the war, it ran counter to the growing perceptions of him as a prophet of German egotism, primitivism, and militarism. However, it exemplified the tendency among readers to comprehend the philosopher in terms familiar to the American moral imagination. Nietzsche’s transformation from a Polish aristocrat, to a modern-day Jesus, to a blood-and-iron imperialist testifies to the creative ways in which American interpreters naturalized his Übermensch into American thinking. Thus, while wartime speculations about Nietzsche’s Germanness had the immediate effect of establishing him as a German thinker in the American mind, they demonstrated how American interpreters appropriated Nietzsche by making him both radically Other and crucially important for articulating the problems of modern thought and morality. To Each His Own Übermensch