Theodor Lessing (1872-1933), who came from a wealthy Jewish family, studied medicine, philosophy, psychology, and literature, and since 1907 he had been a private lecturer in philosophy at the Technical University of Hanover. His critical portrait of Hindenburg, published in 1925, made him a target of hatred among völkisch and nationalist circles. In 1933, Lessing emigrated and fell victim to a Nazi assassination attempt in the Czech spa town of Marienbad the same year. His study on Nietzsche, also published in 1925, is a literary biography of the tragic "shatterer of all that is familiar," but above all, it presents the various, often divergent lines of development in Nietzsche's thought.