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Both Leopold and Loeb were outstandingly intelligent, and although their personalities were very different they shared a number of traits. One of these was an almost incredible level of arrogance. Both of them seem to have believed themselves to be on a higher level than the “normal” people who surrounded them, and their feelings of superiority led them towards a philosophy that they thought described them perfectly. The identity they adopted was that of the Übermensch, the “ideal being” described by Friedrich Nietzsche.
Many politicians and others have claimed inspiration from the works of Nietzsche, but in many ways he was a vehemently anti-political thinker. Above all else Nietzsche was an individualist, and he despised those who followed an organized system of thought as lacking imagination and integrity. He disliked organized religion - especially Christianity, which he saw as being focused on “other-worldly” rewards at the expense of self-improvement in the real world - and had a complex view of morality. He also strongly criticized anti-Semitism, which was a powerful force in his native Germany and common in the USA of the 1920s.
Between 1883 and 1885 Nietzsche published the four volumes of Also Sprach Zarathustra, a philosophical novel that expanded his earlier idea of the Übermensch. Although Übermensch is often translated into English as superman the original German word is more nuanced and can also be translated as beyond human or over human. In the novel Nietzsche argued that “God is dead,” in the sense that the concept of God could no longer be used as a source of values, and that Christianity’s idea of an eternal soul devalues life and is destructive. In contrast the Übermensch unifies soul and body in a single entity and is focused on achievements in life. Nietzsche saw the Übermensch as devoting his or her energies to constructive goals, but it was an easy idea to misinterpret. For two young men as self-obsessed as Loeb and Leopold this philosophy, with its implications of superiority, was irresistible and they ran with it in an appalling direction. They decided that they could prove their status as Nietzschean supermen by committing the perfect crime.
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