III.

Influence

An acclaimed poet, Nietzsche exerted much influence on German literature, as well as on French literature and theology. His concepts have been discussed and elaborated upon by such individuals as the German philosophers Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger, the German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, the German-American theologian Paul Tillich, and the French writers Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Nietzsche’s proclamation “God is dead” was seized upon by the post-World War II radical theologians, the Americans Thomas J. J. Altizer and Paul van Buren, in their attempts to make Christianity relevant in the 1960s and 1970s. See also Existentialism.