Nietzsche, Hitler, and Modernism

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During the height of the Modernist movement, two radicals emerged that would arguably change the course of the future. Nietzsche, in his book titled Thus Spoke Zarathustra, coined the "Übermensch", or "overman", meaning the one who is willing to risk all for the sake of enhancement of humanity. This is in contrast to the "last man", or "one whose sole desire is his own comfort and is incapable of creating anything beyond oneself in any form". Adolf Hitler then used the principles of the Übermensch to form his idea of the "master race", igniting the Holocaust. 

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As Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe stated, this "dealt a mortal blow to modernism. It shattered the modernist dreeam and defiled the impulse that sustained modern art." While progressive modernism sought to improve all of humankind, Hitler twisted both this and Nietzsche's philosophy into an excuse for genocide.

With the consequences of modernism fully evident by the end of World War II, primarily the industrialization of warfare, modernism began to gradually dissipate beneath the rise of the Atomic Age, a direct result of the war it followed.