Herfried Münkler

Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche – these three thinkers had a profound influence on both the 19th and 20th centuries. As contemporaries who alternately confronted each other with veneration, rejection or ignorance, they shaped a period of enormous scientific diversity and social dynamism. Their antagonisms and contradictions lead to the heart of German development.

Herfried Münkler follows these three fascinating figures, evoking an entire era. He describes the startling parallels in the lives of Marx and Wagner: participation in the 1848 revolution, flight, expulsion, and exile, many turmoils, and yet the creation of a towering body of work, the formation of a large following, and the difficult responsibility for what that following made of the drafts. Nietzsche, the slightly younger, is then a philosophical event; like Marx, he shapes generations. All three explode the conventions of the bourgeois world, create something new – but which then becomes a different, unexpected reality: The so promising, rich German 19th century transitions into the age of extremes, of political catastrophes. – An exciting book about three great thinkers, the signature of the modern world and, not least, the mentality of the Germans.

Prof. Dr. Herfried Münkler is one of Germany’s most renowned political scientists and holds the Chair for the Theory of Politics at the Humboldt University in Berlin.