Thus Spoke Zarathustra

by Friedrich Nietzsche Narrated by Saul Reichlin

Overview

Brought to you by Penguin.

This Penguin Classic is performed by Saul Reichlin, known for their roles in War and Peace and Miss Marple. This definitive recording includes an introduction by R.J. Hollingdale, also read by Saul Reichlin.

Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary thinkers in Western philosophy, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra remains his most influential work. It describes how the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead and that the Superman, the human embodiment of divinity, is his successor. With blazing intensity, Nietzsche argues that the meaning of existence is not to be found in religious pieties or meek submission, but in an all-powerful life force: passionate, chaotic and free.

© R.J. Hollingdale 1961, 1969 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Product Details

BN ID:	2940177800042
Publisher:	Random House UK
Publication date:	02/25/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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

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