Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche, three thinkers who left their mark in the 19th and 20th centuries. Contemporaries who honored, rejected, or ignored each other, they stamped an era of scientific polyphony and explosive social dynamics. Their rivalries and confrontations lie at the core of developments in Germany, and beyond, during that time.

Herfried Munkler tracks these giants of the spirit by placing them within the vast mural of their era. He describes the striking parallel in the lives of Marx and Wagner: their involvement in the revolution of 1848, their flight, persecution, and exile, the creation of a significant work that attracted a correspondingly significant number of followers, as well as the fate of that work in the hands of its administrators.

Nietzsche, slightly younger, is a unique philosophical entity in his own right, with a powerful imprint on subsequent generations. Marx, Wagner, Nietzsche: all three broke the conventions of the bourgeois world and created something new, which in turn gestated a new reality.

Through their lives, similarities, contrasts, and disagreements, Munkler brilliantly depicts the hopeful German 19th century, which culminated in the century of extremes and political disasters. He illustrates this "world in turmoil," which birthed the modern world.