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21 Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844– 1934

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21 Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844– 1934 21 Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844– 1934 Misconstruing His Personality Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, at Röcken, 90 years ago (thus in 1844). It is a curious thought that he who unquestionably probed most deeply into the human psyche beneath the surface of civilization could have been among us still as a greybeard, and as such privy to the world war, the Treaty of Versailles, the subsequent turmoil in Europe, and, finally, to have witnessed the events in Germany in 1933 that have been linked to his name, as though these didn’t belie everything this “good European” stood for: opposed to the racial psychosis, steeped in the French culture of Diderot and Stendhal, and preacher of an “unrelenting, thorough, and fundamental mistrust toward himself.” It may be a good thing after all that in 1889, near the end of a heroic life of extreme mental exertion, Nietzsche succumbed to something people tend to refer to, crudely, as insanity. There are those who have tried to use this against the thinker Nietzsche, as though it were possible to sully the significance of his ideas by this slide into madness. I see things differently. That a lucid mind such as Nietzsche’s, in works like Twilight of the Gods, The Antichrist and Ecce Homo, clearly composed on the brink of destruction and yet intellectually perfectly sound, was destined, at some point, to slip into its absolute opposite actual- ly proves the opposite, testifying to the unswerving integrity with which Ni- etzsche grappled with his problems. To have wished for a slow decline of this Dionysian prophet would have been wrong. This collapse, this catastrophe at the close of a life devoted to intellectual pursuits, is the proper end befitting Nietzsche. “Fallen in the line of duty,” interacting with the world like a child for another ten years until his officially recorded death in 1900, undoubtedly spared him — horror of horrors — from looking on helplessly as intellectual lightweights and demagogues usurped and twisted his words and ideas in an- thologies and passed them onto the masses as caricatures. The well- known bust by the sculptor Klinger,1 who portrayed Nietzsche with a bulbous nose and arrogant eyes, is indicative of the misrepresen- tation of his persona. They treated him, as he himself once said, “as an appendage of his off- putting mustache,” that is to say, as a prophet of the “blonde Bestie” and animal instincts. One would have to be a very bad 1 Max Klinger (1857– 1920). The bust dates from 1902. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004426627_023 1934 85 psychologist indeed, as well as completely ignorant about Nietzsche’s life, to put any stock in such a characterization. Everything Nietzsche wrote, in- cluding The Will to Power, where he expresses himself in words that might give rise to a grotesque misunderstanding of the “Übermensch” as a “muscu- lar pleb,” is an unadulterated brief for human dignity, for “a life of the spirit,” albeit detached from the old slogans and arid conventions that threaten to throttle the spirit. … Nietzsche’s Race Problem … Nietzsche always emphatically maintained that Europe’s “popular” racial question has its roots in fraud … He not only witnessed the mixing of races on this small continent, he also foresaw the unification of Europe as a mat- ter of course, and with typical ferocity assailed the “Kleinstaaterei” [territo- rial fragmentation] espoused by Bismarck’s “Realpolitik.” Thus, whenever Nietzsche speaks of race, it is in the context of a racial composite in a united Europe [emphasis in the original]: the Übermensch can only spring from the masses. In flagrant contradiction to the theories of German National Social- ism, for Nietzsche race is the hallmark of a “Master Morality” [Herrenmoral], not the exaltation of one part of Europe over another, least of all on the basis of a bogus theory of evolution. What Nietzsche had to say specifically about German “blood” is well known … A citation from a letter to his friend Franz Overbeck suffices. This irresponsible race which has all the great misadventures of culture on its conscience and at every decisive moment in history took a “differ- ent” route — the Reformation at the time of the Renaissance; Kantian philosophy after England and France had expended a great deal of effort to arrive at a scientific mode of thinking; “War of liberation” upon the appearance of Napoleon, the only individual up till now strong enough to create a politically and economically unified Europe — today this Ger- many is pursuing “das Reich,” the recrudescence of small- state thinking and cultural atomism, at a moment in time when the all- important ques- tion of value is being raised for the first time. Whether or not you agree with this observation (it is but one random sam- ple among many of Nietzsche’s relationship to Germany!), no one in his right mind would champion the writer of this letter as the father of National Socialism..
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