Nietzsche als Enkel der Lutherischen Reformation: Dürers Ritter, Tod und Teufel als Sinnbild des nordischen Christentums

Nietzsche as Grandson of the Lutheran Reformation. Dürer’s Knight, Death, and the Devil as a Symbol of Nordic Christianity. This essay is focused on the chapter Knight, Death, and the Devil of Ernst Bertram’s book Nietzsche. Versuch einer Mythologie (1918). According to Bertram, Nietzsche, as disciple of Schopenhauer and Wagner, read Dürer’s engraving as a symbol of his own existence. In Dürer’s vision, the knight symbolizes Lutheran conception of the Cristian man, for whom life is a battle in the name of courage and bravery, against corruption, temptation and worldliness: that is, against death and devil. Bertram therefore defines Nietzsche as the “grandson of the Lutheran Reformation”, and, in the same time, he introduces the notion of a typical German vision of Christianity as a virile, active “Christianity of the North”. The present study tries to put into question Bertram’s point of view and to highlight some issues regarding Nietzschean critique of the Reformation and the Lutheran perspective in contrast with the vital impulses of the Renaissance.