When careful consideration is given to Nietzsche's critique of Platonism and to what he wrote about Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, and to Germany's place in ';international relations' (die Groe Politik), the philosopher's carefully cultivated ';pose of untimeliness' is revealed to be an imposture. As William H. F. Altman demonstrates, Nietzsche should be recognized as the paradigmatic philosopher of the Second Reich, the short-lived and equally complex German Empire that vanished in World War One. Since Nietzsche is a brilliant stylist whose seemingly disconnected aphorisms have made him notoriously difficult for scholars to analyze, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is presented in Nietzsche's own style in a series of 155 brief sections arranged in five discrete ';Books,' a structure modeled on Daybreak. All of Nietzsche's books are considered in the context of the close and revealing relationship between ';Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche' (named by his patriotic father after the King of Prussia) and the Second Reich. In ';Preface to ';A German Trilogy,'' Altman joins this book to two others already published by Lexington Books: Martin Heidegger and the First World War: Being and Time as Funeral Oration and The German Stranger: Leo Strauss and National Socialism.