The book, first published in German in 1996, brings this turbulent relationship vividly to life. Joachim Kohler shows for the first time how their traumatized childhoods bound Nietzsche and Cosima in submission to the demonic, aging Wagner, how Nietzsche was enticed into the Bayreuth labyrinth, entrapped in its culture wars and used as a tool in its sectarianism and antisemitism. The book sheds new light on Nietzsche's early writings, revealing them subverted by Wagner to parade his own ideas of German superiority, of the domination of the masses by a few chosen geniuses, and of the supremacy of art and aesthetics over morals and humanity. The sources of Nietzsche's "Superman" and "Will to Power" arc traced to the pre-fascist ideology of Richard and Cosima Wagner, an ideology later uncomprehendingly idolized by Hitler's Reich.