The Antichrist

A complete list to date of this series of popular reprints, bound uniformly with a design and endpapers by Claude Bragdon, may be found at the back of this volume. One book will appear each month, numbered for convenience in ordering. THE ANTICHRIST by F. W. NIETZSCHE Translated from the German with an introduction by H. L. MENCKEN New York ALFRED A. KNOPF COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. Pocket Book Edition, Published September, 1923 Second Printing, November, 1924 Set up, electrotyped, and printed by the Vail-Ballou Press, Binghamton, N. Y. Paper manufactured by W. C. Hamilton & Sons, Miquon, Pa., and furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York. MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. CONTENTS PAGE Introduction by H. L. Mencken 7 Author’s Preface 37 The Antichrist 41 INTRODUCTION Save for his raucous, rhapsodical autobiography, “Ecce Homo,” “The Antichrist” is the last thing that Nietzsche ever wrote, and so it may be accepted as a statement of some of his most salient ideas in their final form. Notes for it had been accumulating for years and it was to have constituted the first volume of his long-projected magnum opus , “The Will to Power.” His full plan for this work, as originally drawn up, was as follows: Vol. I. The Antichrist: an Attempt at a Criticism of Christianity. Vol. II. The Free Spirit: a Criticism of Philosophy as a Nihilistic Movement. Vol. III. The Immoralist: a Criticism of Morality, the Most Fatal Form of Ignorance. Vol. IV. Dionysus: the Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence. The first sketches for “The Will to Power” were made in 1884, soon after the publication of the first three parts of “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” and thereafter, for four years, Nietzsche piled up notes. They were written at all the places he visited on his endless travels in search of health—at Nice, at Venice, at Sils-Maria in the Engadine (for long his favourite resort), at Cannobio, at Zürich, at Genoa, at Chur, at Leipzig. Several times his work was interrupted by other books, first by “Beyond Good and Evil,” then by “The Genealogy of Morals” (written in twenty days), then by his Wagner pamphlets. Almost as often he changed his plan. Once he decided to expand “The Will to Power” to ten volumes, with “An Attempt at a New Interpretation of the World” as a general sub-title. Again he adopted the sub-title…