Abstract

Wagner and Nietzsche exerted a profound influence on the new German literary and artistic movements around the turn of the century, after the decay of naturalism and its replacement by impressionism, aestheticism, new mysticism, Neoromantik and Jugendstil. The paper outlines various aspects of this parallel reception with a special emphasis on the shift of meaning or «transvaluation» of Nietzsche's philosophical message in the context of the new literary climate around the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Within this same literary climate, however, the young Thomas Mann and Hugo von Hofmannsthal had a different, but somehow similar reading and critical approach.