My title names a triangle. One side is the relationship between George and Nietzsche. Though they never met, George felt the effect of Nietzsche's writings, as did a whole generation of German writers and thinkers. More than that, as I shall argue, George saw himself as a prophet succeeding and surpassing Nietzsche, and I shall ask which elements of Nietzsche's prophecies George absorbed into his own prescriptions for the future of Germany. Another side of the triangle, though one that can receive only brief discussion here, is the controversial relation between Nietzsche and the Nazis. Was the Third Reich an attempt to put Nietzschean ideas into practice, or were the Nazis too ignorant to have picked up more than a few crude distortions of Nietzsche's thought? The third side represents the problem that worries all George scholars: what is the relationship between George and Nazism? Is there any evidence that the poet, who died in the first year of the Third Reich, approved of it or even supported it? Independently of such evidence, can or must George's prophetic poetry, his denunciations of Germany, and his authoritarian control over his circle be seen as anticipating aspects of the Third Reich?

For most of his life Nietzsche was a relatively obscure figure whose philosophical and aphoristic works found few readers. Ironically, his fame began to spread only around 1890, after he had suffered a complete mental collapse. Until his death in 1900 he lived in the care of his family, communicating only on a childish level and unaware that his works were being read avidly by the younger generation throughout Germany and soon throughout Europe. His appeal lay in his challenge to conventional ideas, the stimulus he offered to independent thought, and the sheer diversity of his reflections. As Steven Aschheim has shown, Nietzsche's writings are so multi-faceted, not to say self-contradictory, that they could be appropriated by virtually anyone with an urge for radical renewal. Thus he was adopted as a hero by such opposed avant-gardes as the Expressionists (including those who, like Gottfried Benn, would later gravitate to the far right), the apocalyptic Munich “Kosmiker” dominated by Ludwig Klages, and the elitist circle that George would assemble.