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Nietzsche is depicted in an oversimplified way as a kind of tortured brute, and Otto Dix' late return to Christianity is rather exaggerated.
Dix remained interested in many topics until late in his life. While he radiates more empathy than Nietzsche, the one constant in Dix' art is that he never spared any feelings or aesthetic sensibilities. This urge to remain true to oneself and shed all masks is something he may have found reflected and elavated in Nietzsche's writing, even if he ultimately discovered that some of Nietzsche's admiration of fierceness was a peacetime naivety.
Dix' painting "Flandern", 1936:
https://ais.badische-zeitung.de/piece/09/68/b1/9d/157856157-...
Now that I've read a lot more philosophical texts, I realize that both of the big philosophical camps--Anglo-American Analytic Philosophy and Continental Philosophy--rarely mention Nietzsche. Nietzsche seems to be the philosopher that non-philosophers turn to and often cite.
https://philpapers.org/asearch.pl?strict=1&searchStr=Nietzsc...
Also, some pretty substantial continental philosophers wrote about Nietzsche. Heidegger wrote a ton about him. Foucault used his genealogical method. Deleuze, Derrida, etc. all wrote a lot.
Heck, half of the big Continental names wrote books on Nietzsche:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nietzsche_and_Philosophy
https://sunypress.edu/Books/O/On-Nietzsche
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo276199...
Analytic philosophy indeed didn't write much about Nietzsche, but I don't know why they would have. Very different subject matter and style.
Nietzsche has paragraphs that could be studied and independently thought about without even reading the rest of the book/chapter. You can crack open beyond good and evil and just start reading a random page.
I still would argue his thought is far more groundbreaking than any contemporaries
Yes, but after reading BGE, I felt like I had to read all his other books to really understand what he was saying (and others too, Kant, Spinoza, etc). And then re-read BGE.
Also Walter Kauffman's on him is very good. Working through that now.
it depends on which chapters/sections though, some are more accessible than others.
one book I enjoyed is:
"The Mask of Enlightenment" by stanley rosen. I read that along Zarathustra
If people really are interested in philosophy, I strongly suggest studying the more "classical" philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Kant, Frege, Husserl, Heidegger, etc. Nietzsche's writings I would label more as literature and not philosophy. When I reread BGE, standing on its own I find it entertaining, but his readings and understanding of past philosophers were quite wrong.
Anecdotally, in my eight years of studying texts with people who are professional philosophers and meeting regularly with them in discussions, I would say Nietzsche's name was mentioned maybe twice, and both times by individuals who were quite new to philosophy. Nietzsche is just not that interesting philosophically.
Recommending the greeks and Frege in one breath immediately outs you, and shows your philosophy knowledge for what it is, dog shit. You shouldn't be recommending anything about philosophy to anybody. There is absolutely zero reason to study ancient philosophy unless you're interested in HISTORY of philosophy specifically. What Frege, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and other modernists did to 'philosophy' was short of completely reinventing the field from scratch. The connection to antique philosophy is non-existent because there are no tools in Greek discourses relevant to philosophical investigation. It didn't stop even the most stringent analytics to manufacture said connection out of 'romantic' notions, but really there's no geneology to speak of. Plato is closer to Archilochus than Frege, so much so he's almost verging on a joke (philosophically speaking.) It's doubly funny you throwing shade on Nietzsche, who himself was 'romantically' obsessed with the Greeks for no good reason.
You're right that Nietzsche is ultimately, of devil's party, a poet, but that has very little bearing vis-a-vis academic philosophy.
(Hate to have to add this caveat and acquiesce to the Reddit-ification of HN, but: caveat lector, the above statement is not an endorsement)
I do think that maybe more recent work in continental schools (perhaps rightly) de-emphasize him as part of a larger turn away from the "postmodern" more broadly vs what was trendy in the 90s.
I don't think he is very deep. He is popular now among the alt-right because he thought Christianity was perverted because it glorified the weak instead of the strong.
Hegseth though is hiding on a military base instead of being at the front, so I guess he is weak ...
No one reads "Also sprach Zarathustra" in Germany. It is only famous because of Richard Staruss' symphonic poem, which ties into the point that others made: Nietzsche had various influences, but should not be used for policy decisions. Which is probably the reason this Dix article was published during the first Trump years.