Friedrich Nietzsche: I am Dynamite

A portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche, moustache and all, calmly smoking a lit stick of dynamite as if it were a cigar, above the words I am Dynamite. It takes his own self-description literally – the quiet, half-blind ex-professor who expected his books to blow up two thousand years of morality.

In Ecce Homo, at the start of the final chapter, Why I Am a Destiny, written in autumn 1888. Nietzsche writes that one day his name will be linked to a crisis like no other on earth, the deepest collision of conscience – and adds, I am not a man, I am dynamite. He means his revaluation of all values, not violence.

Ecce Homo is Nietzsche’s intellectual autobiography, written in 1888 shortly before his collapse and first published in 1908. Its title quotes Pilate’s words Behold the man, and its chapters carry deliberately outrageous titles such as Why I Am So Wise and Why I Write Such Good Books. It reviews each of his works and presents him as the destroyer of conventional morality.

The phrase appears in The Gay Science (1882), most famously in the parable of the madman (section 125). Nietzsche is not offering a proof that God does not exist; he is diagnosing a cultural event. Belief in the Christian God has become unbelievable in modern Europe, and with it the foundation of our morality is collapsing, leaving the threat of nihilism.

The Übermensch, often rendered overman or superman, is introduced in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885) as the goal humanity should strive towards after the death of God. The overman creates his own values instead of borrowing them from religion or tradition and affirms life fully, including its suffering. It is an ideal of self-overcoming, not a biological master race.

On 3 January 1889 Nietzsche suffered a mental collapse in Turin; a popular but poorly documented story says he embraced a horse being whipped in the street. In the following days he sent strange letters signed Dionysus or The Crucified. He never recovered and lived on in his mother’s and then his sister’s care until his death in Weimar on 25 August 1900. The cause is still debated.

No. Nietzsche died in 1900 and openly despised antisemitism and German nationalism; it was one reason for his break with Wagner and with his sister’s antisemitic husband. After his collapse his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche controlled his archive, assembled The Will to Power from his notes and later courted the Nazis, which badly distorted his reputation.

Many readers start with Twilight of the Idols (1889), a short, punchy overview of his late thought, or Beyond Good and Evil (1886). On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) is his most systematic book and a favourite in philosophy courses. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is his most famous work, but its poetic style makes it a harder first read.

The I am Dynamite design works for anyone who has underlined Nietzsche in a library book or argued about him past midnight. It comes as a classic t-shirt, sweatshirt, premium hoodie, mug and sticker, so it suits birthdays, graduations and office desks alike – a portrait that makes people ask, and a quote worth explaining.