One of the most incendiary lines of Allan Bloom s Closing of the American Mind was that the America of the late 1980s was a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic. Today we might well drop the Disney characterization and just go straight to Weimar America (though Disney may be complicit in that story). Bloom s comment came back to mind when delving into Stefan Zweig s slim 1925 book on Nietzsche. (Apropos