Übermensch

• 1. Introduction

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  The Übermensch sits at the heart of Friedrich Nietzsche's 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and it has been misread, weaponized, and reclaimed ever since. Nietzsche did not invent a hero. He invented a question: what would it mean for humanity to set itself a genuinely life-affirming goal, one rooted in this world rather than in promises of a world beyond? Through his fictional prophet Zarathustra, Nietzsche offered an answer that would be praised by anarchists, distorted by Nazis, confused with a comic-book hero, and debated by translators for over a century. How did a single philosophical concept travel so far from its origins? And what did Nietzsche actually mean?

• 2. The Translation Problem

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  Alexander Tille made the first English translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in 1896, rendering Übermensch as "Beyond-Man." That choice did not stick. Thomas Common's 1909 translation reached for a different word: "Superman," borrowed directly from George Bernard Shaw's 1903 stage play Man and Superman.

  Walter Kaufmann, writing in the 1950s, attacked that decision from two angles. First, the English prefix "super" does not carry the same weight as the German über, even though in Latin, super does mean "above" or "beyond." Second, and more damagingly, Common's word choice allowed readers to conflate Nietzsche's idea with the comic-book character Superman. Kaufmann preferred "overman" as the translation, and many scholars followed him.

  The German word itself resists any single English equivalent. The prefix über can suggest superiority, transcendence, excess, or intensity depending on context. Mensch, meanwhile, refers to a human being in general, not a male specifically, despite a persistent and erroneous belief to the contrary. Some scholars today simply use the German word rather than attempt a translation that inevitably narrows the concept.

  A phrase like "superior humans" might track Nietzsche's intent more closely, but even that carries baggage. The debate over terminology is not merely academic; the word chosen shapes the idea received, and the idea received shapes how it gets used.

• 3. This World, Not the Next

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  Zarathustra frames the Übermensch as a direct rebuke of Christianity's orientation toward another world. Christian doctrine, as Zarathustra reads it, required inventing an immortal soul separate from the physical body. That separation led to asceticism: the abnegation and mortification of the body as a path to spiritual purity.

  Nietzsche rejected this split entirely. Zarathustra links the Übermensch to the body and treats the soul not as something distinct from the body but simply as an aspect of it. The earthly life is not a waiting room for something better; it is the only life there is, and it demands values adequate to that fact.

  This-worldliness also required confronting what Nietzsche called the death of God. The phrase does not celebrate atheism as a philosophical position. It describes a cultural event: the moment when the concept of God could no longer credibly supply values for human life. Nietzsche called this a reevaluation of values, a phrase that would later resonate with anarchist thinkers as well.

  The Übermensch is the figure capable of creating new values without falling back on the same instincts that produced the old ones. Those new values would have to be motivated by love of this world and of life, not by reaction against life. For Nietzsche, the Christian value system was reactive and destructive in that specific sense, and the new values the Übermensch would forge would be life-affirming and creative instead.

• 4. Aspiration and Its Opposite

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  Zarathustra introduces the Übermensch not as an existing person but as a goal. All human life would derive meaning from how it contributed to a new generation of human beings capable of embodying this ideal. Zarathustra gives a stark example: the aspiration of a woman would be to give birth to an Übermensch, and her relationships with men would be judged by that standard.

  Zarathustra sets the Übermensch against a contrasting figure he calls the "last man," a character who appears only in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The last man represents egalitarian modernity: comfortable, risk-averse, and hostile to aspiration. Where the Übermensch reaches toward self-mastery and the creation of new values, the last man settles. Zarathustra presents this as a smothering of the human spirit.

  Rüdiger Safranski notes that some commentators have linked the Übermensch to a program of eugenics, reading the concept as a call for biological intervention in human development. Safranski himself describes the Übermensch as pointing toward a higher biological type reached through artificial selection, while simultaneously functioning as an ideal for anyone creative and strong enough to master the full range of human potential. The philosopher Laurence Lampert has suggested that in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the eternal recurrence ultimately displaces the Übermensch as the central object of serious aspiration.

• 5. Nietzsche's Own Words

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  In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche pushed back hard against any reading of the Übermensch that softened it into an idealistic or humanitarian concept. He wrote: "The word Übermensch designates a type of supreme achievement, as opposed to 'modern' men, 'good' men, Christians, and other nihilists." He added: "When I whispered into the ears of some people that they were better off looking for a Cesare Borgia than a Parsifal, they did not believe their ears."

  The mention of Cesare Borgia is deliberate. Safranski argues that for Nietzsche, the Italian Renaissance embodied something close to the Übermensch ideal: a combination of ruthless warrior pride and artistic brilliance that he saw as a creative and powerful mode of human existence. The Übermensch in this reading is not gentle or democratic. It is an artist-tyrant, someone who has mastered both good and evil rather than fleeing from one toward the other.

  Nietzsche's own biography complicates any attempt to use him as a nationalist symbol. In his final years, already suffering severe mental decline, he reportedly came to believe he was Polish, not German. He was quoted saying, "I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman, without a single drop of bad blood, certainly not German blood." He claimed that both he and Germany owed their greatness to Polish blood, and he reportedly said he would have all antisemites shot.

• 6. Elisabeth's Distortion

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  Nietzsche died long before Adolf Hitler came to power, yet a racial version of the Übermensch became a philosophical cornerstone for Nazi ideology. The distance between Nietzsche's text and Nazi doctrine is enormous. Hitler and the Nazi propaganda apparatus did not even use the term Übermensch explicitly. Nietzsche himself was critical of antisemitism and German nationalism.

  The person most responsible for the gap between what Nietzsche wrote and how he was received was his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. After her brother's mental collapse, Elisabeth took control of his literary estate and manipulated his words to fit the worldview she shared with her husband, Bernhard Förster. Förster was a prominent German nationalist and antisemite who co-founded the Deutscher Volksverein, the German People's League, in 1881 with Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg.

  The Nazi concept of a master race also spawned the term Untermenschen, meaning inferior humans, as a label for those to be dominated and enslaved. That term does not originate with Nietzsche. The appropriation required ignoring Nietzsche's explicit rejection of nationalism and antisemitism, and it was Elisabeth's editorial work that smoothed the way for that selective reading.

• 7. Anarchism's Claim

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  While the far right was appropriating Nietzsche, a very different political tradition was also drawing on his work. Spencer Sunshine has described the multiple points of contact between Nietzsche's thought and anarchist politics: his hatred of the state, his contempt for the herd mentality of mass social behavior, his anti-Christianity, his distrust of both the market and the state as forces shaping cultural life.

  The American anarchist Emma Goldman, in the preface to her collection Anarchism and Other Essays, defended Nietzsche against critics within anarchism who reduced him to a single hostile phrase. She argued that his vision of the Übermensch also called for a social condition that would not produce weakness and servitude.

  Murray Bookchin described Salvador Seguí, a prominent Catalan CNT member, as an admirer of Nietzschean individualism. In his 1973 introduction to Sam Dolgoff's The Anarchist Collectives, Bookchin went further, framing the reconstruction of society by workers as a Nietzschean project. He wrote that workers must see themselves as creative personalities rather than proletarians, and that the entire process demanded what he called, using Nietzsche's own phrase, a total transvaluation of values as applied to production, consumption, and personal life.

  The anarchist readings were in many ways closer to Nietzsche's anti-nationalist and anti-state instincts than the Nazi appropriation ever was. Nietzsche's insistence on life-affirmation, creativity, and the rejection of both master and slave as categories found more honest interpreters among those who read him as a resource for liberation rather than domination.