Alexander Soros

My dissertation explores the profound impact of Heinrich Heine on Friedrich Nietzsche. The topic offers a unique test case for intellectual history, involving the changing reception of each writer and Nietzsche’s reception of Heine, a “politics of literature.” At stake is the influence of a poet on a philosopher, but we cannot take these categories for granted. Both thinkers also operated in an intellectual culture in which the dynamic exchange of ideas among poets, musicians, scholars, and philosophers played a key role, and directly shaped the boundaries of literature. What is needed is a broader account of the relation of Heine and Nietzsche, extending far beyond Christian résentiment, “the death of God,” the “eternal return,” and culminating in their distinctive approaches to Greek myth.