Friedrich Nietzsche's (1844–1900) work was falsified by his sister Elisabeth Förster Nietzsche, two years his junior; he never wrote the posthumously published book The Will to Power. But it was this text, among others, that drove his entire oeuvre into the hands of the National Socialists, who used it as if it were a modular system.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, was concerned with something else, namely overturning the traditional structure of philosophy of his time and replacing it with a new concept. ‘I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus; I would rather be a satyr than a saint.’ The god of intoxication is the true philosopher; for him, the essence of life is that it is lived. For Nietzsche, the history of civilisation represents a tremendous aberration, whereas the Dionysian world of ideas is a force that dissolves norms and frees us from Christian ‘slave morality’. Thus, the ‘superhuman’ can be conceived as a distant utopia: a human being who transcends himself, conscious of his higher reason but also of his own cruelties, and who can therefore attain a true state of humanity.

The production focuses on Nietzsche and his ideas as a clairvoyant frenzy that still points to the future today: ‘One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.’ read less