Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche - these three thinkers profoundly influenced both the 19th and 20th centuries. As contemporaries who faced each other with admiration, rejection, or indifference, they shaped a time of immense scientific diversity and societal dynamism. Their antagonisms and contradictions lead to the heart of German development. Herfried Münkler follows these three fascinating figures, thereby awakening an entire era. He describes the astonishing parallels in the lives of Marx and Wagner: their involvement in the 1848 Revolution, flight, expulsion, and exile, various upheavals, and ultimately the creation of a remarkable body of work, the formation of a large following, and the difficult responsibility for what this following made of their ideas. Nietzsche, the slightly younger figure, is then a philosophical phenomenon; like Marx, he shapes generations. All three break the conventions of the bourgeois world, creating something new - which then transforms into a different, unexpected reality: the promising, rich German 19th century gives way to an age of extremes and political catastrophes. An exciting book about three great thinkers, the signature of the modern world, and, not least, the mentality of the Germans.