Nietzsche was one of the most revolutionary and subversive thinkers in Western philosophy, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra remains his most famous and 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. Nietzsche's utterance 'God is dead', his insistence that the meaning of life is to be found in purely human terms, and his doctrine of the Superman and the will to power were all later seized upon and unrecognizably twisted by, among others, Nazi intellectuals. With blazing intensity and poetic brilliance, Nietzsche argues that the meaning of existence is not to be found in religious pieties or meek submission to authority, but in an all-powerful life force: passionate, chaotic and free.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Prussia in 1844 and died in 1900. He was raised from the age of five by his mother. In 1869 he was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, where he taught until 1879. His ideas were appropriated by the Fascists, who turned his theories into social realities that he had never intended.