While the terms "nihilism" (Nihilismus) and "nihilist" (nihilistisch) are deployed in the majority of Nietzsche's works from Beyond Good and Evil (1886) to Ecce Homo (written in 1888), the privilege accorded to the concept of nihilism by the editors of The Will to Power (1901; expanded edition, 1906) is undoubtedly the principal reason for its being taken to lie at the heart of Nietzsche's later thought in the reception of his work in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. It was, however, above all the politico-philosophical status of the concept of nihilism within the field of cultural critique that led to its centrality in the appropriation of Nietzsche's thought by the ideologues of National Socialism, principally through the stewardship of Alfred Baeumler, professor of philosophy in Berlin from 1933 to 1945 and author of Nietzsche the Philosopher and Politician (1931). It is precisely as a countering of this National Socialist appropriation of Nietzsche — and, in particular, his thinking of nihilism — that Martin Heidegger characterizes his own major engagement with Nietzsche's thought from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s;