I am apologetic and a bit embarrassed at having
oversimplified Mark Lindsay's question about the 
possibility that Bonhoeffer's understanding of Nietzsche
might have been affected by the increasing brutality of
National Socialism.

Rightly or wrongly, I have never interpreted Nietzsche's
extravagant statements about the superman or the blond
beast, to mention only two examples, literally . Rather
I have taken them to be expressionistic distortions
which serve to illuminate certain realities of our 
social and spiritual existence. I have tried to understand
the character defect in Nietzsche which made it difficult
or impossible for him to form bonds to others, and I am
sensitive to the desperate loneliness to which this flaw
in his personality subjected him. I suspect that Nietzsche
never recovered from the emotional illness which forced
him in his youth to forsake his professorship in Basle,
and consequently I read his prose-poetry with the clinical
equanimity that befits my profession.

It is not necessary to agree with or to endorse Nietzsche's
radical criticism of Christianity and the culture which 
Christianity created. But he who has taken this criticism
seriously and has thought it through, as I suspect Bonhoeffer
did, will be rewarded with a faith which is both more versatile
and more profound.

Nothing is gained, and I think much is lost, by demonizing
Nietzsche. He was human, as are we, - and it can be argued
that the clarity with which he saw the faults of German culture
in the second half of the nineteenth century was an apparition
with which he could not cope. Nietzsche, like Shakespeare's
Hamlet, was haunted by a vision. His "azure isolation" was akin
to Hamlet's loneliness after he had seen his father's ghost.
Hamlet also was overburdened with insights with which he could
not cope, and was plunged into a despair which ultimatly destroyed
not only him but his community as well.