Read an Excerpt

Nova Apocalypsis Nietzsche's reputation has always thrived on its appeal to the anomalous, that 'transgression against a secret, unfamiliar rule of the game.' Against a European age of optimism in science and technology; of material and territorial expansion (usually at the expense of Asia and Africa); and of a triumphant tone in philosophical biology that, for the first time, tore the natural world out of the phantasm of divine origins and into the idea, dialectical or otherwise, of endless progress - he offered little more than complete disgust. His term for all this apparent progress was nihilism. This is what attracted Stefan George, Nietzsche's first populariser, to his anachronistic, 'untimely' aesthetic. Nova Apocalypsis is, in its brutal doggerel, atypical of George's melancholic, introspective and highly lyrical Stimmung. It is a howl of rage which, while lamenting the fall of the Christian religion and the insectoid communion that consummates itself in its dust, also uncompromisingly cribs its imagery from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In this poem, we are not told who the God of the Flies, a familiar, biblical image of the Devil, might be - we are just left with the sinister image of the larval hatching of his reign. However, a companion piece to this poem (both of which were written in 1907), entitled der Widerchrist, is more explicit. Here we encounter the Lord of the Vermin, who creates things from dirt that look just like gold; and proclaims himself to be greater than the dying Endchrist in his willingness to attribute the miraculating forces of production to himself, as material wealth lures the mad massing Volk to squander what remains of all yesteryear's charms, before dying like swine in a burning farmyard, as the call of the Last Judgement sounds. In spite of all the apocalyptic, biblical imagery, George's real lament is for the mechanization of the German language under the Kaiserreich (1871 - 1918). The voice of the God of the Flies is both the embodiment of rapidly advancing capitalism and, probably, that of the Kaiser. ..... from the translator's introduction