t takes a strong philosopher to assume control of a preposition and propel it into a foreign language. That is what Friedrich Nietzsche did with the word über. In German, it can mean “over,” “beyond,” or “about.” You are reading an essay über Nietzsche. As a prefix, über is sometimes equivalent to the English “super”—übernatürlich is “supernatural”—but it has less of an aggrandizing effect. Nietzsche altered the destiny of the word when, in the eighteen-eighties, he began speaking of the Übermensch, which has been translated as “superman,” “superhuman,” and “overman.” Scholars still debate what Nietzsche had in mind. A physically stronger being? A spiritual aristocrat? A kind of cyborg? “Overperson” might be the most literal equivalent in English, although it is unlikely that DC Comics would have sold many comic books using that title.
In 1903, three years after Nietzsche’s death, George Bernard Shaw published his play “Man and Superman,” in which he equated the Übermensch with an overflowing “Life Force.” Three decades later, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two Cleveland teen-agers, created the first “Super-Man” story, depicting the character not as a caped hero but as a bald, telepathic villain bent on “total annihilation.” Super-Man soon reëmerged as a muscle-bound defender of the good, and during the Second World War he jumped into the fight against the Nazis. It’s unclear whether Siegel and Shuster knew of Nietzsche in 1933, but the word “superman” hardly existed in English before the philosopher’s ideas began to spread.
As Nietzsche worked his wiles on generations of English-speaking college students, the word Übermensch increasingly stood on its own, and “über” slipped into English as a prefix. In the nineteen-eighties, Spy described the Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz as an “über-agent.” The umlaut-free car-sharing service Uber, originally known as UberCab, is a related development, hinting at Silicon Valley fantasies of world domination. In the late twentieth century, the word “super” rebounded into German as all-purpose slang for “very”; if you wish to describe something as really, really cool, you say that it is super super toll. Somewhere, Nietzsche is laughing hysterically while screaming in anguish.
The adventures of “super” and “über” are a case study in the inescapability of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which has affected everyday discourse and modern political reality like no body of thought before it. Countless books on Nietzsche are published in dozens of languages each year, linking him to every imaginable zone of life and culture. One can read about the French Nietzsche, the American Nietzsche, the pragmatic Nietzsche, the analytic Nietzsche, the feminist Nietzsche, the gay Nietzsche, the black Nietzsche, the environmentalist Nietzsche. Lurking amid the crowd of avatars is the proto-fascist Nietzsche—the proponent of pitilessness, hardness, and the will to power who is cited approvingly by such far-right gurus as Alain de Benoist, Richard Spencer, and Aleksandr Dugin. Can a philosopher who has sown such confusion be said to possess a coherent identity? Or, as Bertrand Russell once argued, is Nietzsche merely a literary phenomenon?
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