against the Cross, 12
The documentary in the image above was made in 1999, not 2019, as the title says. In fact, when it was released and I watched it I was living in Manchester. It is worth watching it again for the images show many of the places we have been mentioning in this series. The dramatised images of Nietzsche’s dreadful loneliness remind me of ‘the lands of perpetual winter’ far north of the Wall in George R.R. Martin’s fiction.
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In the same year as the great premiere of the Bayreuth opera house, Nietzsche began writing Human, All Too Human. This work breaks with his previous style: for the first time, he experiments with short, penetrating aphorisms as an instrument for writing and communicating deep, incisive thought (he would write even more clearly in the last year of his lucid life).
Nietzsche applied for a leave of absence from the university due to illness. He took a year’s leave and went to Sorrento, one of the world’s beautiful coasts with a mild climate, where he spent the winter with Malwilda von Meysenburg, Paul Ree and other friends.
Ree was Nietzsche’s Jewish friend, which Cosima would eventually interpret as the betrayal of Judas, and that was the year of Nietzsche’s last conversation with Wagner. Although Nietzsche appreciated Ree, he always retained his reservations, so that with the Jew he never used the you of a friend. In German—as in Spanish—there is a fundamental difference that English lacks. Sie (usted in Spanish) is used when we speak to strangers and du (tú in Spanish) when we speak to people we know very well.
The sabbatical year showed Nietzsche that his ailments were not, as he perhaps believed, a psychosomatic conversion of his tedious academic activities as his acute attacks continued. The aetiology remained mysterious, and surely his malady had deeper roots than mere academic tedium, but Nietzsche still couldn’t find the right therapy.
The group of friends at the kindly Malwilda’s house read the freethinkers, Voltaire and Diderot, although Albert Brenner wrote with astonishment: ‘Rarely did the New Testament bring joy and comfort to unbelievers’. Epistolary, Malwilda confided to Cosima that Nietzsche disliked the Spanish writer Pedro Calderón de la Barca for his religiosity during the evening readings.
Elisabeth, like Cosima, had a better instinct for the Jewish question than her philosopher brother. For example, she was scandalised that her mother entered into an epistolary relationship with Ree. To my way of thinking, this means that intellectual sophistication should by no means be the yardstick for measuring the goodness of a philosophical system. Great philosophical cathedrals have been built on foundations of clay, and a plump and to some extent silly woman like Elisabeth could be much wiser in matters of Jewry than her sophisticated brother. This is a phenomenon I have encountered in life—a simple uncle turned out to be much wiser than another uncle with a high IQ—, but it was only until the third book of my autobiography that I matured in this matter, after decades of abject blindness.
In his sabbatical year in search of a cure, Nietzsche, already four years ill, began to discover that he was healthiest when he was alone. The first edition of his book, Human, All Too Human, was dedicated to Voltaire and its publication was planned for the centenary anniversary of his death on 30 May 1778 (in subsequent revised and expanded editions Nietzsche would remove the dedication to him). In early 1878 Nietzsche received Wagner’s libretto of Parsifal, and as a first cross-crossing of swords with his father figure, Nietzsche sent him Human, All Too Human.
Wagner, like Cosima, had become devout and saw himself as a descendant of Luther. Sending the new book without any accompanying words (perhaps only Nietzsche’s signature) was a major affront because the author criticised religious life and moral perceptions. The situation was made worse because Ernst Schmeitzner, who published both Wagner and Nietzsche, was threatened by Wagner that he would take the Bayreuther Blätter out of print. But Schmeitzner didn’t hold his tongue. He called the Wagners ‘hypocrites, they stink of church; Mrs Wagner goes to church, he goes to church too, though not much’ and added that ‘Wagner had knelt before the cross’. Wagner, for his part, considered it a terrible thing to take religion away from the German people.
This is where the paradoxes begin. Since he was seeking therapy for his ills, Nietzsche was doing himself a cathartic good by initiating a critique of Christianity—with which he had scores to settle from his cloistered time in Pforta—albeit in the form of aphorisms for the time being. But he was flatly wrong on the Jewish question, which he mentions in section 475 of Human, All Too Human. Here the musician was right that the Jews should be expelled from Germany, as Cosima admits in her diary: a position not uncommon among 19th-century patriots. (We can compare it to the situation in the United States today: rustic Christians like Nick Fuentes and company are wiser on the JQ than the more cultured or sophisticated atheists.)
Nietzsche, who after publication received a bust of Voltaire in the mail as a gift from a Parisian, feared he would be excommunicated in Bayreuth, as he let Peter Gast know, but thanks to the publication of his book he felt greatly rejuvenated. ‘If you felt what I feel since I have fixed my ideal of life’, Nietzsche wrote to Rhode, ‘the fresh, pure air of height… you might be very, very glad of your friend’. But to the German palate Human, All Too Human seemed harsher than that of the French Enlightenment, even to his friends.
Nietzsche was wrong in his new book to say that art should make way for science. In this Wagner was right, and our horrendously technological, scientistic century shows that the positivism of the new Nietzsche betrayed the earlier Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy. Wagner, for his part, wanted a return to Jesus Christ in a world without chemistry. He was right about chemistry (the fire of Prometheus shouldn’t have been given to the Europeans so prematurely, we see what would happen in the First World War!). But he was wrong about Jesus Christ. That’s why I said that this is where the great paradoxes begin as far as the split between Wagner and Nietzsche is concerned. Each was right on some points and wrong on others.
Cosima, in her correspondence with Elisabeth who wanted to mediate the conflict, wrote that she still loved the Nietzsche of former times, but that the author of Human, All Too Human was in an unhealthy state, and she ended her letter with the words: ‘May you soon show signs of life again, and may we keep our affection, despite all the trials… This is what your Cosima wishes you, in embracing you’.