What Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’ means to Americans | Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

http://www.guardian.co.uk

What Nietzsche’s ‘God is dead’ means to Americans | Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Nietzschean high-school killers have obscured the interpretation of ‘God is dead’ as an opening, not a closing, of mindsA little over a year ago when the news broke that a lone gunman had shot Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 bystanders at a meet-and-greet in a grocery store parking lot, friends and colleagues turned to me, mixing accusation and pity, and asked: “Nietzsche? ” I wasn’t surprised by the immediate assumption that Jared Lee Loughner, the 22-year-old college dropout, who had unleashed his fury in a shower of bullets, must have been a Nietzsche reader and self-fashioned Übermensch.

published date:Thu, 09 Feb 2012 10:01:15 GMT
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