MARX, WAGNER, NIETZSCHE - WORLD IN UPHEAVAL

A triumvirate that shaped more than one epoch

Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche – these three thinkers had a profound influence on the 19th and 20th centuries. As contemporaries who alternately admired, rejected or ignored each other, they shaped an era of enormous scientific diversity and social change. Their antagonisms and contradictions lead to the heart of the development of Germany. Herfried Münkler follows these three fascinating figures and evokes an entire era. He describes the surprising parallels in the lives of Marx and Wagner: their participation in the 1848 revolution, flight, expulsion and exile, a period of great turmoil and then the creation of an outstanding work, the formation of a large group of followers and the difficult responsibility for what their followers made of these works. Nietzsche, who was a little younger, is a philosophical event; like Marx, he shapes generations. All three go beyond the boundaries of the bourgeois conventions of their time and create something new – which then becomes a different, an unexpected reality. Nineteenth century Germany, which was so rich, so promising, passes into an age of extremes, of political catastrophes. An exciting book about three great thinkers, the beginning of the modern world and, not least, the German mentality.