Somebody recently asked me what was Germany "going through" during the peak of Friedrich Nietzsche's literary productivity. I thought it was an oddly worded question, but I'll answer it anyway. Nietzsche was born in 1844 and died in 1900, his years of flourishing were the 1880s, the decade of THE GAY SCIENCE, THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL, THE CASE OF WAGNER, etc. The end of that decade saw his descent into incoherence and madness. For social/political context, let's back up a bit. In 1871 Prussia, under the leadership of the Hohenzollern family and their minister, Otto von Bismarck, declared the creation of the German Empire, comprising the northern German-speaking states (Austria was deliberately excluded). This was what would later be known as the Second Reich, following upon the death of the Holy Roman Empire early in the 19th century, the so-called First Reich. The 1870s as a whole is remembered for the Kulturkampf , a deliberate at...