The Antichrist

Der Antichrist* was the last book Friedrich Nietzsche completed before his mental collapse of January 1889, written in a state of feverish concentration in Sils-Maria and Turin in the autumn of 1888. The argument is unmistakable: Christianity, Nietzsche holds, is the spiritual culmination of a long history of resentment by the weak against the strong, and its moral and metaphysical inheritance has corrupted European civilization at its roots.

This edition reproduces the 1920 English translation by H. L. Mencken, the first complete English version, including Mencken's substantial introduction explaining the textual situation. A short editor's preface places the book in its biographical and editorial context.