ne of Germany’s most famous philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche, has just gone mad at the height of his career. He’s in a clinic in Jena when his former student, Hans Meister, goes to visit him, alarmed at the silence of the man who was never at a loss for words. Is he feigning madness?
But what about those crazed fits, reminding one of his rabid, Dionysian dancing in Turin, Italy, where he’d spent his last days, a man feverishly driven to complete his revaluation of all values, the high point of his philosophical oeuvre?
Herr Meister, a former student and disciple of Nietzsche, is obsessively, half madly, driven to understand what has happened to his former professor, whom he has long hoped would help him complete his failed dissertation on nihilism.
Now, with a notebook Nietzsche recently sent him, outlining future projects, Meister cannot resist stealing his ideas in an effort to become the new Nietzsche.
Meanwhile, he fruitlessly pursues two women, one whose strict Christian morals rule him out and a second, who is half deranged from a mad philosopher husband, now dead.
in the Fall of 2024.
