A few hours ago I listened to a programme I’d heard a dozen years ago: Carolyn Yeager’s interview with (now retired) blogger Severus Niflson, ‘The Heretics’ Hour: Are White Males Hooked on Weakness?’ I found it fascinating to listen to again because it shows how I’ve matured since then.
Like me, Severus Niflson grew up in Latin America but unlike me he was educated in the United States from his teenage years. As he confesses in the interview, his aim is not so much to communicate with white people in general but with white nationalists, who have to listen to some things. What I liked most about the interview is that the image Severus gives us is that of an Aryan man with his sword: the symbol of the defender of his people. If the warrior loses the sword, or if he dies, we are toast because no one will defend us anymore.
Severus talks about white nationalists in a way that is not as harsh as I do (because I believe that, in the collective Aryan unconscious, the white man, the nationalist included, has already thrown away his sword).
Severus says something very true: if we detect that even among the leaders of white nationalism some have been seduced by ethnosuicidal hedonism, through material comfort and entertainment culture, we have a problem. Already a dozen years ago, on 12 June 2012 to be exact, in my notebook about this programme I had written down that I loved the following sentences of Severus:
The more comfortable you are, the more detached from reality… You have to be careful of comfort… You have to be aware of it… We are in love of these things [cell phones, etc.], willing to give [genes and land] for them… Our generations are not connected to reality. This is the danger of modern capitalism… [Regarding Jews:] It is our fault too because we are buying [their stuff]… Our modern society is obsessed with entertainment… Most people at 40 are immature… Entertainment is escape like children… If our own leadership [has fallen] to this type of consumerism, then we have a problem.
Emphasis added. Severus talks about an interview that year with a Christian Identity supporter; Carolyn touches on anti-feminism in The Daily Stormer, and Severus responds by talking politely about patriarchy. There was a moment where Severus said that he doesn’t care about the religion of the racialist he’s arguing with and acknowledged, when talking about Catholicism that, if a racialist Catholic prioritises race over his faith, s/he wouldn’t be a true Catholic (even if that hypothetical interlocutor claims to be Christian).
And here is the issue where I now see things more maturely! The problem is that many Christians on the racial right if forced to choose between two masters, race and faith, are willing to sacrifice the former. When I first got into white nationalism I hadn’t noticed this phenomenon. Now that I have been observing it all these years, and posting many entries exemplifying it with concrete cases, it seems to me that it evokes that gospel passage that it is impossible to love two masters: the man with sword and the crucified rabbi.
At the end of the programme, Severus recommends three books:
The False Assumptions of Democracy by Anthony Ludovici
Patriarchia: The Natural Power of Kings by Robert Filmer
Ludovici’s is recommended for those American white nationalists who still believe in their project of nation and, especially, in democracy: a system that is based, as Ludovici demonstrated, on the incredible stupidity of accepting the Divine Right of majorities.
Before saying a thing or two about the social impact on the educated sectors of Germany of Nietzsche’s first book, I would like to collect in this and the next entry some revealing anecdotes from the years outlined in the previous entry.
Given that the Nietzsche who would become popular was the philosopher—the hermit Nietzsche, taciturn, myopic and sullen—it is difficult to imagine him cheerful in 1867 when he enjoyed, as he put it, a ‘strong march on foot’ with his faithful friend Rhode: a march in the woods and mountains of Bohemia and Bavaria. Nietzsche had procured sturdy double-soled boots and the experience, which freed him at least for a few days from his academic duties, had Munich and Salzburg as their destination, although they made their way as far as Nuremberg, mostly on foot.
It is also difficult to imagine the philologist gunner whistling Offenbach tunes in the morning, or that the chronic ailments I spoke of vanished that happy season, despite the horse accident as mentioned earlier. The medical examination deduced that he had torn his pectoral muscles, and during therapy, several cups were filled with pus; the sternum was affected and Nietzsche confesses that he had to learn to walk again. Nietzsche’s volume of notes during his convalescence covers many pages, where the philosophical concerns that were to take possession of his soul are absent.
As a professor of classical philology, Nietzsche now earned a decent salary at the University of Basel. For someone born in a humble village, this was like winning the lottery. His mother wrote to him euphorically:
My dear Fritz:
Professor of 800 thalers’ salary! It was too much, my good son and I could not calm my heart in any other way than by immediately sending a telegram to Volkmann in Pforta.
Then I wrote to the good mother, the guardian, the Sidonchen, the Ehrenbergs, Miss von Grimmenstein and the Schenks in Weimar. In the meantime, Mrs Wenkel and Mrs Pinder came to congratulate us, at about 6 p.m. I took my letters to the post office, 25 pages in all, and communicated my joy first of all to the Luthers, who burst into shouts of joy; they called the old privy councillor, and all burst into tears, and heartily congratulated you, as well as Mrs. Haarseim, Mrs. Keil, Mrs. Grohmann with her daughter, Mrs. privy councillor Lepsius, who always shouted: My good son Fritz, as well as Mrs. Von Busch.
And what a beautiful city, said the Keils, the Pinders and old Luther: the university at the top and the Rhine below.
The dream of Nietzsche’s father, who saw it as a prodigy that his firstborn would be born when the king’s birthday bells were ringing, seemed fulfilled. His academic success reinforced the fantasy that Nietzsche would be a genius and probably contributed to that familiar wine going to his head over the years.
And what did his mentor Ritschl have to say? He wrote a eulogy in his reply letter to Wilhelm Vischer, who was envious of the uncouth, medium-sized, light-brown-haired colleague who did not yet dress elegantly. Ritschl wrote:
The man doesn’t even have a doctorate, but only because the obligatory five-year period since completing the baccalaureate (incidentally, taken at Schulpforta) has not yet fully elapsed. Otherwise, he would already have had one. I want to formulate my judgement in a few words, and neither you nor Büchler, Ribbeck, Bernays, Usener [all disciples of Ritschl] or tutti quanti should take it badly.
With as many young people as, for more than thirty-nine years, I have seen being trained before my eyes I have never met, nor have I tried to promote in my speciality according to my possibilities, a lad who so early and so young was as mature as this Nietzsche. The papers for the Rheinisches Museum he wrote in the second and third year of his academic three-year term! He is the first one I have accepted in collaboration while still a student. God willing, he will live a long life. I prophesy that one day he will be at the forefront of German philology.
He is only twenty-four years old; he is strong, vigorous, healthy, bizarre in body and character, made to please similar temperaments. Moreover, he possesses an enviable facility for calm as well as skilful and clear exposition in free expression. He is the idol and unwitting guide of the whole world of young philologists here in Leipzig, quite numerous, who cannot wait to hear him as a teacher.
You will say that I am describing a kind of phenomenon. Well, he is, and a kind and modest one at that. Also, a talented musician, which is irrelevant here. But I have not yet met any active authority who in a similar case has dared to go beyond the formal inadequacy, and I offer my entire philological and scholarly reputation as a guarantee that the thing will have a happy outcome.
No matter how much of a nose for academic talent Professor Ritschl might boast, he never imagined that his protégée was a time bomb that would blow apart the cloistering he had been suffering from since childhood. Instead of the grey monotony of Pforta that continued in Bonn, Leipzig and now Basel, Nietzsche would end his last sane days singing to the God Dionysus. The very intense blue sky seen in the islands of ancient Hellas, to which Nietzsche always aspired, evokes another flight from the gloomy skies of the north to the limpid south.
Vincent van Gogh, who lived within Nietzsche’s lifespan, was also the son of an austere and humble, though Dutch, Protestant pastor.
Unlike Nietzsche, Vincent would become a Protestant pastor for a time, at the age of twenty-six, and go as a missionary to a mining region of Belgium in search of the crucified of the time: a sort of St. Francis in a Protestant version. Only after prolonged self-mortifications would Brother Vincent abandon this black period of his life—literally black, as he watched the poor miners leaving the mines covered in charcoal—and flee in search of the enlightened landscapes of Arles (Nietzsche would do something similar, but not in the South of France but in Italy).
For the first eighteen months or so after his political emergence in 1919, Hitler seems to have conceived of the revival of Germany as a long-term process, in which he would play a supporting role, and which he might not live to witness himself. Even after his shift from Trommler to Fuhrer in mid 1921, he advocated a steady process of ideological transformation rather than an insurrectionary takeover. During this period Hitler was an attentiste, waiting for his propaganda and the march of events to turn the German population in his direction. ‘People are still far too well off,’ he remarked to Hanfstaengl, ‘only when things are really bad will they flock to us.’
In the second half of 1922, however, in the first of many temporal shifts in Hitler’s career, he began to envisage a much shorter timeline. A new urgency crept into his rhetoric and actions; evolutionary languor gave way to revolutionary fervour. Germany, he argued, needed a ‘dictator’, that is, ‘a man who if necessary can go over blood and corpses’. His regime ‘could then be replaced by a form of government similar to that of the Lord Protector’, which in turn could be followed by a monarchy. This recourse to English history, which gives a sense of Hitler’s range of historical reference, was a clever pitch for conservative backing for a coup which would give him dictatorial power, but held out the prospect of an evolution via a German Cromwell and a General Monk to the restoration of the monarchy. Driving this process was Hitler’s growing conviction not only that he alone could save the country, but that a perfect storm of domestic challenges and external threats made it imperative that he do so soon. Time was speeding up. Germany was out of joint, and Hitler was more and more convinced that only he could put things right.
A student philological organization in Leipzig. Nietzsche stands third from left facing Ernst Windisch, who is looking down.
The 19th century represented an awakening of a sector of the population in German-speaking countries to the Jewish question. As a man in tune with his times, Nietzsche would even write to his mother that he had finally found a brewery ‘where you don’t have to swallow melted butter and Jewish facades’. With his typical aristocratic tendency, the young Nietzsche considered all commerce unworthy, not just Jewish commerce. The proletariat was alien to him. He always believed that an uprising of the working class would destroy the world, so it had to be opposed.
For, having studied classical philology, Nietzsche had read directly the Greek writers of the ancient world, who weren’t infected by secular cross-worship in the sense of worshipping the crucified in turn. It was precisely the century in which Nietzsche lived that Doré, Dostoyevsky and Marx saw the horrors to which the Industrial Revolution had brought London and Manchester, times when ‘the crucified’ par excellence was the worker.
The decade before the photograph above, Count Gobineau had published his essay on the inequality of the human races, and Darwin on the origin of species. Those books written in French and English respectively ought to have been the best influences for the young philologist who knew so well the Greco-Roman classics and thus the scale of values before the advent of Judeo-Christianity. But Nietzsche would be impressed by what was then fashionable in German.
He read David Friedrich Strauss’ Life of Jesus. I have complained a lot on this site that much of the racial right is ignorant of the textual criticism that Germans have been making of the New Testament since the Enlightenment. The special edition of Strauss’ book that Nietzsche bought had been precisely the one that had appeared in German bookstores at a reasonable price for freethinkers of limited means. Nietzsche made the mistake of wanting to convey to a silly woman, Elisabeth, the reasons for his recent apostasy, now endorsed by the book in vogue at the time, while his sister replied to his letter confused and saddened by this typical turn of a 19th-century freethinking.
But Strauss wasn’t the most important influence on Nietzsche. In an antiquarian bookshop, he found Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and began to leaf through it. He bought it and took it home to read. Later he would read Parerga and Paralipomena.
Except for Kant, Schopenhauer rejected the philosophers of classic German idealism, and showed Nietzsche what criticism of a nation’s culture is: university philosophy serves the State and the Church since it is from them that the philosopher receives his livelihood (Schopenhauer is somewhat hypocritical in this matter, since The World as Will and Representation begins with a very dull two hundred Kantian pages that could also fall under such category). The young Nietzsche had found an educator, but more than Schopenhauer’s doctrine, what was decisive was the attitude of the philosopher who not only opposed Hegel and company but presented himself to the world as a pessimistic and solitary hero.
That Nietzsche’s group worshipped the rebellious philosopher is evident from the fact that every year a group of Schopenhauerians celebrated his birth by drinking to the memory of their late master at a bacchanalian dinner. These were years in which the subject of Richard Wagner was also the order of the day, the talk of Leipzig. Werner Ross tells us: ‘The approach to Wagner is the most important event in Nietzsche’s entire biography. It surpasses in intensity and scope even his appointment as professor at the University of Basel’.
Wagner belonged to the section of Europeans aware of the Jewish problem and had written a book on the subject, but he needed fighters for his musical cause. Sophie Ritschl, the sister of Nietzsche’s teacher, took advantage of a whirlwind visit by Wagner to Leipzig to arrange an interview between Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche—a great honour for the latter. Everything seemed calculated to recruit the young genius to the Wagnerian cause!
On 8 November 1868 Nietzsche met Wagner, to whose music he was fully converted. He would never forget those days in which he felt himself treated as an equal of the greatest genius of the age.
But we must take into consideration the time we are talking about. When I saw Wagner’s first masterpiece, Tannhäuser, I was shocked that the Goddess Venus was defeated by invoking the voice of the Virgin Mary. While it is true that Wagner played with pre-Christian myths, he never broke with his Lutheran origins as drastically as Nietzsche would over the years. Nonetheless, when Nietzsche attended concerts playing the overtures to Tristan and The Master-Singers of Nuremberg, he wrote to his friend Rohde: ‘I cannot keep calm before this music: every fibre, every nerve stirs in me, and it is a long time since I have had such a feeling of rapture as when listening to the above overture’. (The same could be said of the impressions that the lad I was decades ago had!)
On 13 February 1869, the University of Basel appointed Nietzsche professor of classical philology: an astonishing case, for he was not even a doctor. This was mainly due to the influence of his teacher Ritschl, now indirectly involved in recruiting his pupil to the Wagnerian cause. On 23 March the University of Leipzig awarded Nietzsche a doctor’s degree, without examination or thesis, based on papers published in Ritschl’s Rheinisches Museum. On 13 April Nietzsche abandoned his German (Prussian) citizenship and became Swiss.
Wagner invited Nietzsche to ‘talk about music and philosophy’ and the young man naturally accepted. On 17 May he visited Wagner for the first time in Tribschen and was captivated. Wagner was ‘a fabulously lively and fiery man, who speaks very fast, is very witty and brings joy to a meeting’.
On 28 May Nietzsche gave the inaugural address of his professorship: Homer and Classical Philology and met the Renaissance scholar Jacob Burckhardt. In 1870 he continued his classes, lectures and philological studies, and in April he was appointed full professor: the year in which The Valkyrie was premiered in Munich. On 8 August he asked the university for permission to take part in the Franco-Prussian war, which was granted, but only as a nurse. Ironically, Nietzsche became seriously ill with dysentery. In October, he returned to Basel and began his important friendship with the theologian Franz Overbeck.
In 1871 Nietzsche began to write The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music: a plea for Wagner or proclamation that, through his music, the glorious days of ancient Greek values would return. (In this Nietzsche wasn’t wrong, as the next century Hitler would intuit; and the dream would have crystallised had he won the war.)
Early in 1872, The Birth of Tragedy was published, the book with which Nietzsche first introduced himself to the public at large. It was well received by his friends, but poorly received by the philologists in the profession. For this reason, Nietzsche even entertained the idea of leaving his chair in Basel to carry Wagner’s gospel as an itinerant preacher. The young philologist had become enchanted by the man who had been born in the same year as his father and, as Nietzsche himself would much later reveal in one of his letters of madness, also by Cosima Wagner.
In April Wagner left Tribschen, and on 22 May Nietzsche attended the laying of the foundation stone of the Wagnerian theatre in Bayreuth. These were the times of his greatest interest in Wagner, and he met Malwilda von Meysenburg through Wagnerian circles. At this time Nietzsche also composed the Manfried Meditation for piano four hands.
There was an important shift in Hitler’s spatial thinking around 1922, however. He came to see eastward expansion as the solution. ‘In terms of foreign policy,’ Hitler said in December 1922, ‘Germany should prepare for a purely continental policy’ and ‘avoid violating British interests’. ‘One should try to destroy Russia with the help of Britain,’ he continued. ‘Russia,’ Hitler went on, ‘would provide sufficient soil for German settlers and a wide area of activity for German industry.’ Though he had not yet alighted on the phrase Lebensraum, a further major plank of Hitler’s thinking, the need for territorial enlargement to the east in order to secure the food supply of the German people and staunch the haemorrhage of emigration, was now in place. This was a policy primarily driven by fear and emulation of Anglo-America rather than anxiety about eastern communism or a desire to eliminate the Jews living there…
Hitler had said much less than one might expect about the Soviet Union, and his fear of communism was dwarfed by that of capitalism. Even more remarkably, though there were some routine scatter-gun imprecations against the Poles in specific contexts to do with disputed territories in the east, he had shown no signs of a blanket hostility towards Slavs in general or the Russian people in particular. What later became the Lebensraum conception was visible, but only in outline. His intellectual formation was not yet complete.
His authority in the party, by contrast, was now well established.
Nietzsche had to argue with his mother over his resolution not to continue his theological studies, i.e., to prepare for the career of parish priest.
In Bonn, Nietzsche finally experienced his first breaths of freedom. He no longer had to comply with the rigorous rules of dress, or the obligation to attend religious services in what had been, de facto, the Schulpforta convent for kids. Moreover, Bonn was so far from his mother’s home that he couldn’t even afford to spend Christmas at home. The difference between Bonn and the sullen family life in Naumburg couldn’t have been greater for the young student who attended parties, something inconceivable in Schulpforta.
Nietzsche, who came to live very close to Beethoven’s birthplace, visited Schumann’s grave. His friend Paul Deussen, who was the same age (but who would outlive him by almost twenty years) told the anecdote that Nietzsche didn’t accept the services of prostitutes when they took him to a brothel during one of his escapades in Cologne. More than adolescent sex, music was his girlfriend. As the teenage Hitler would later do, he attended concerts and the opera despite their financial hardship.
A letter to Deussen opens a psychological window into how the young Nietzsche first discovered the late atavistic effects of pagan festivities:
The entire population of the city lived for three days in total debauchery… There was complete freedom to visit and to receive visitors, even to kiss. Breakfast was ready in every home, accompanied by wine and punch; joking and laughing, drinking a glass, and then the round went on… When they arrived at the house of a slaughterer, the party had passed through the window, which was easy, since in the Rhineland houses have very low windows… The students kissed the splendid girl leaning out of the window and left through the front door. In the meantime, the father objected to the custom of wearing masks and wanted to prevent the parade. That’s why I was called. I carried the rather stout man outside and closed the entrance, then collected up my kiss and the procession moved on.
It was a time when the young Nietzsche already wore a moustache, though by no means the bristling wig with which, after his death, his face became iconic. He was such a gregarious young man that in addition to the opera he attended the theatre with friends. No one could have suspected that he would eventually become a hermit. So little noticed was the normie Nietzsche among lads of his age that, except Deussen, no member of the ‘Franconia’ association to which he belonged remembered anything about him when he was already famous. Nietzsche’s German biographers swim in information and documents about his life, to the extent that even some of his class notebooks have come into the public light for centuries to come.
If, to his mother’s chagrin, Nietzsche had abandoned his theological studies after one semester and started studying classical philology with Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, the following year, in October 1865, following his teacher Ritschl, he went to the University of Leipzig. Nietzsche’s experiences in Leipzig are recounted in a colourful account, Retrospect of My Two Years in Leipzig. When he enrolled in the faculty of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, a century had already passed since Goethe had done so.
With his mentor Ritschl Nietzsche again showed himself industrious: a model student as he had been at Pforta. Ritschl gave his favourite pupil heavy assignments, such as extracting and collating ancient texts and indexing the issues of the Rheinisches Museum für Philologie. In 1866 Nietzsche gave his first lecture at the Philological Association and befriended the student Erwin Rohde, who was to become his best friend. This was the time of the war between Prussia and Austria, in which Prussia emerged victorious although Nietzsche, a Prussian in Leipzig, objected to the city becoming immediately Prussian. But the young scholar writes about that year: ‘I often longed to be torn away from my monotonous labours’.
On 9 October 1867, Nietzsche began his military service with a cavalry regiment. These were terrible times on the other side of the Atlantic, when the Mexican Indian Benito Juárez had Emperor Maximilian shot in Mexico. (In sharp contrast to today’s traitorous white Mexicans who admire Juárez, my great-great-grandfather José María Tort y Vivó, a Catalan living in Mexico mentioned by José Zorrilla in Recuerdo del Tiempo Viejo, was a staunch supporter of Maximilian of Habsburg.)
In March 1868 Nietzsche suffered a fall from a horse, but the period of convalescence served as an opportunity to approach philosophy and in October he finished his military service. Once again: terrible things were happening on the other side of the Atlantic. Blacks were granted the right to vote in the United States because of the triumphant Christian ethics of the Yankee Puritans (at a time when Jewry hadn’t yet taken over the media). But by then the twenty-three-year-old young man already bears the name of Nietzsche.
Hitler sometimes liked to say that the hard part was reviving Germany domestically; thereafter, dealing with her foreign enemies would be easy. In reality, he was under no illusions.
A nationalist revival would make Germany ‘capable of making an alliance’ again, but this was only a necessary, not a sufficient condition to secure her position in the world. That would require actual allies. Temperamentally, Hitler was not averse to a Russian alliance, preferably without the communists, but if necessary with them. ‘We must try to connect to the national [and] anti-Semitic Russia,’ he demanded, ‘not to the Soviets.’
That said, in August 1920, nineteen years before the Hitler-Stalin Pact, he remarked that he would ‘ally not only with Bolshevism but even with the devil in order to move against France and Britain’. He feared, however, that this attempt to break free through a Russo-German pact would simply be crushed by the British and French. A British alliance was far more desirable, if that country could be kept out of the hands of the Jews.
Instead, Hitler looked further afield, at least conceptually. He hoped that he could confront the forces of international financial capitalism with the united front of the ‘International of the productive’, to mobilize ‘voices for the defence of the rights of the productive peoples’. Germany would spearhead this effort, by purifying itself first. Hitler demanded no less than a pan-Aryan international anti-Semitic front. Inverting the Communist Manifesto’s famous slogan, he announced: ‘not proletarians of all countries unite, but anti-Semites of all countries unite!” Aryans and anti-Semites of all peoples,’ he elaborated, ‘unite to fight against the Jewish race of exploiters and oppressors of all peoples.’ He repeated these injunctions in various forms on many occasions throughout the early 1920s, and indeed beyond. Though Hitler never suggested that Nazism was ‘for export’, he was clear from the beginning that his programme required a high degree of international cooperation among international anti-Semites to compensate for Germany’s weakness.
In the long run he believed that none of this would make any difference unless Germany solved the question of ‘space’.
When one delves deeply into Nietzsche’s biography, curious anecdotes come to light that would be hard to imagine for those who are only familiar with his late writings.
Much has been said, for example, about the friendship between Richard Wagner and Nietzsche. But few know that Wagner was born in 1813: the year Nietzsche’s father was born. When Nietzsche was a little boy playing with his sister Elisabeth with tin soldiers and the porcelain figure ‘Squirrel King’ was executing rebels, the revolutionary Wagner was in serious trouble with the king and his life was spared because he was a conductor. The still-small Nietzsche was on the side of the rulers in his Christian kingdom. There were to be no revolutions.
When Nietzsche would later write about his life, he didn’t remember his home in Röcken except for the image of the parish priest, the father, whom he continued to idealise even after he had finished The Antichrist. Indeed, since his father had died when Nietzsche was four years old, the memories of Prussian discipline the priest had meted out to him, in which the little boy would furiously retreat to the toilet to rage alone, were left out of his memory (his mother would later tell some anecdotes about her young son’s life). The idealisation of the parish priest was such that, in the words of Werner Ross, ‘Nietzsche was to merge with his father to form a single figure with him’.
In the family it was taken for granted that little Fritz would become a clergyman like his father. His mother, who put him to bed, told him: ‘If you go on like this, I’ll have to carry you to bed in my arms until you study theology’. Fritz was an obedient child who knew several Bible passages and religious songs by heart so that his schoolmates called him ‘the little shepherd’, who was impressed above all by religious music.
But since the pietistic oppression was a thorn his body began to rebel. In 1856, when Fritz was already a dozen years old, he began to suffer from head and eye ailments. Although he received special holidays for this reason, from that age he would always suffer from these psychosomatic complaints (which would only be alleviated thirty-two years later, with the catharsis of writing several books in a few months, including The Antichrist).
The young Fritz would sneak into the cathedral to watch the rehearsals of the Requiem and was shocked to hear the Dies Irae. At the age of fourteen he entered the famous school in Pforta, where he received an excellent humanistic education and his love of music increased, although he continued to suffer from severe headaches.
Schulpforta near Naumburg in Germany, a boarding school system for advantaged pupils.
At Schulpforta he even attempted a Mass for solo, choir and orchestra, and at the age of sixteen, he sketched a Misere for five voices. At seventeen the parson’s son was ready to die to meet Jesus, and when another of his friends trained in Prussian education (broken in like a horse I’d better say!) received the conformation, he wrote: ‘with the earnest promise you enter the line of adult Christians who are held worthy of our Saviour’s most precious legacy’.
Nevertheless, the first signs of rebellion, albeit still unconsciously, began to spontaneously sprout in his seventeenth year. In the Easter holidays of 1862, the student Nietzsche wrote to the union of his friends, under the title Fate and History, a prophetic declaration: ‘But, as soon as it would be possible to overthrow the entire past of the world with a strong will, we would enter the roll of the independent Gods’.
Schulpforta’s severe discipline had been a kind of convent to train not only Nietzsche but also the rest of the inmates, but the adolescent Nietzsche, always at the head of the class and lacking an esprit de corps, was such a good boy that in cases of insubordination he sided with the teachers.
In his thick volume (866 pages in the edition I have) Ross comments that the letters of the pupil Nietzsche are empty of content, in the sense that his inner life was still hermetically sealed off from him. Nevertheless, when the lad Nietzsche left Schulpforta on 7 September 1864, close to his twentieth birthday, and the following month went to study theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn, thanks to his Prussian education he already had the resources for a premature doctorate.
Before I continue with the biography of the philosopher who ended his career spectacularly (by becoming mad!) with his magnum opus whose subtitle reads ‘Curse on Christianity’, I would like to make a few reflections.
First of all, for many of my visitors, Nietzsche seems distant in time. Not to me. I lived for several seasons with my paternal grandmother and, as I confess in a passage in one of the books of my trilogy, the biggest mistake of my entire life was to have left my sweet grandmother’s home to return to my parents (where the teenager I was would end up being destroyed by them). I’m not going to talk about the biographical details in this post, but among my relatives, my paternal grandmother represents what came closest to becoming my lifeline.
Now, my grandmother, who passed away in 1987, was born in 1888. That means that the span of her life coincides with almost a dozen years of Nietzsche’s life, who died in 1900. Since my memories of when I lived with her are very vivid, and no one else but the two of us lived in her house, from the point of view of my biography Nietzsche doesn’t seem so distant, especially since the first books I read by him, Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist precisely, I bought precisely when I lived with my grandma in a bookshop very close to her house.
Nietzsche seems very distant to the new generations but much more distant to me are, say, sports and soap operas: my siblings and I never saw them on TV when we were kids because those were different times (now everyone watches them).
Another thing I wanted to talk about is that I’m putting together a new PDF of articles by various authors that I’ve been reproducing on this site over the last few years. I made an exception for an old 2011 article by Michael O’Meara: the most lucid white nationalist since William Pierce died. O’Meara, now retired (is he still alive?) wasn’t only a true intellectual, in the sense of being bilingual and highly cultured. He also had a deep penetration to grasp the whys and wherefores of white decline beyond the Judeo-reductionism in vogue in many quarters of today’s racial right. True, he had a flaw. As a good American of Irish descent, he was sympathetic to Christianity. Nevertheless, in the anthology I have begun to assemble, I feel compelled to include a couple of his essays.
It is unfortunate that Lulu Press, Inc. will only allow me to continue publishing my autobiographical trilogy but not my anthologies in English where I include authors like O’Meara and many others. PDFs like the one I now put together deserve to be on our bookshelves, not just on our hard drives. I didn’t want to spend a week of my life learning how to use the software of another platform similar to Lulu Press, like IngramSpark because a racialist book publisher warned me that any of those self-publishing book platforms can terminate your account for political incorrectness. The alternative, the publisher told me, is to find a printer in my town and sell those books directly to interested parties.
But that requires funds! The week before I fantasised about having a studio where we could dub the Führer’s spoken word into English. Something similar could be said for the parallel fantasy of having our own publishing house…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in the small town of Röcken, near Lützen in Thuringia. Formerly part of the kingdom of Saxony, it was annexed to Prussia in 1815. Nietzsche was the first-born son of the local Protestant pastor, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche (pictured above), who at the age of thirty had married a woman of seventeen. A year after the wedding, Friedrich was born, followed a couple of years later by his sister Elisabeth (Nietzsche’s younger brother was born afterwards, but died at the age of two). What is important to report is that, among the ancestors of the future philosopher, on both the paternal and maternal sides, there were several generations of theologians.
The main biographies on which I will rely for this biographical series are the very voluminous treatises by Curt Paul Janz and Werner Ross. The latter, who unlike Janz writes with humour, mentions that exactly at the moment when Nietzsche was born the bells were ringing for the king’s birthday service. The parson’s eyes filled with tears as he uttered: ‘My son, on this earth you shall be called Friedrich Wilhelm in memory of my royal benefactor, for you were born on his birthday’. He added that his son would be so-called because that is what Luther’s Bible said. Friedrich Wilhelm IV, by the way, was no friend of the ideals of the French Revolution. Although benevolent, through the Holy Alliance he longed for a return to feudal times even with knights, orders and castles.
Little Friedrich Wilhelm was instilled from the outset with the messianic consciousness of being a son of the medieval king and a son of God. To use my language, I would say that Nietzsche was a slave to parental introjects. So much so that, decades later, when he suddenly fell into a state of psychosis and his friend Overbeck came to his rescue in Turin, he realised that only by telling the disturbed man that royal receptions awaited him, did Nietzsche obey to leave Italy. And when somewhat later Langbehn accompanied Nietzsche on his walks in the asylum at Jena in Germany, he said: ‘He is a child and a king; he must be treated as the son of a king that he is. That is the only correct method’.
But in this psychological study I’m getting too far ahead of myself. Let’s go back to his childhood. The thing is that, like Kant, Nietzsche was brought up in pietism. But Kant’s defence mechanism was to shut down all his emotions and he tried to do philosophy as a sort of Mr Spock through pure reason, like a soulless computer. Nietzsche’s defence mechanism against severe pietism would be the diametrical opposite: the mythopoetic explosion of emotions, as we shall see in this series. What we must now tell is that the little Nietzsche was not allowed, in such a Prussian upbringing, to vent his emotions, let alone his anger. Janz’s multi-volume biography informs us of this:
As soon as the eldest son began to talk a little, the father took to spending some of his free time with him. The child did not disturb him in his study cabinet, where, as the mother writes, gazed ‘Silently and thoughtfully’ at the father while he worked. But it was when the father ‘fantasised’ at the piano that the child was most enthusiastic. Already at the age of one year, little Fritz, as everyone called him, would sit in his pram on such occasions and pay attention to his father, completely silent and without taking his eyes off him. However, it cannot be said that during these early years, he was always a good and obedient child. When something did not seem right to him, he would lie on the ground and kick his little legs furiously. The father, it seems, proceeded against this with great energy, despite which the child must have continued for a long time to cling to his stubbornness whenever he was denied anything he wanted; but he no longer rebelled, but, without a word, retired to some quiet corner or to the lavatory, where he bore his anger alone.
Unlike what Alice Miller wrote about little Fritz in The Untouched Key, Janz didn’t suspect that the severe pietistic upbringing might have been abusive.
When Nietzsche was four years old his father died, perhaps of a stroke (it is not clear that the Nietzsche family’s claim that this was due to his falling down the stairs is true). The family moved to Naumburg and Fritz found himself, from then on, as the only male in a household of women: his mother, grandmother, two aunts and younger sister.
The adult women were to teach pious Christian virtues to little Fritz.
Severus talks about white nationalists in a way that is not as harsh as I do (because I believe that, in the collective Aryan unconscious, the white man, the nationalist included, has already thrown away his sword).
