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Category: Friedrich Nietzsche

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Friedrich Nietzsche Stefan Zweig

Crusade

against the Cross, 14

Heinrich Köselitz (‘Peter Gast’)

While it is true that Nietzsche was unable to detect the Jewish subversion that many in the 19th century could already detect, he was able to see, like no other, the subversion that had come from Judaism through Christianity. As Stefan Zweig wrote in the most lyrical essay ever written on the plummeting of the anguished eagle:

Nietzsche came to see that the malevolent thing was Christianity with its belief in a life beyond the tomb; that this was the principle which cast a shadow upon the modern world. ‘Evil-smelling Judaism, a compost of rabbinism and superstition’, had ruined and supressed the sensuality and merriment of the world. For fifty generations it had served to dope and demoralise mankind, to paralyse all that had previously constituted the vital force of the universe. But now (and suddenly he sees the mission of his life) a crusade against the Cross must begin to reconquer the holy places of man’s realm and existence upon this earth.

By embarking on a crusade, Nietzsche underwent the most radical change of his life from 1880 onwards. The previous year he had turned thirty-five, and he had always had the superstition that he would go into a mental tailspin just as his father had gone at the age of thirty-six.

Nietzsche was a little-known author: a marginal figure considered talented, but too eccentric for German speakers. But he discovered that it was precisely in the most painful periods of his existence that his philosophical productivity increased: what we now call a psychological defence mechanism. By way of super-compensation for what was happening to him, he began to believe that he needed to leave for posterity an epoch-making legacy now that the Judeo-Christian god was dead.

These were the times when Cosima had decided that Nietzsche had committed a sin against the Holy Ghost, i.e. that he couldn’t be forgiven, and when Peter Gast wrote from Venice that he had to guide his friend Nietzsche through the streets like a blind man. Headaches continued to ravage him. Nietzsche himself wrote: ‘On five occasions I pleaded, as a doctor, for death’.

He sought refuge in the high mountains. He had to search long and hard before he found a suitable place: Sils im Engadin/Segl, also known as Sils-Maria, in the Swiss canton of Graubünden: whose name will henceforth be inseparably linked to his own because of the time he spent there, despite the terrible fatigue that such a journey entailed for a half-blind. At 1,830 metres above sea level, Sils-Maria was sometimes snowy and cold even in the middle of summer, and Nietzsche had to endure something that he found fatal: many storms. It is curious that he later he researched in Genoa where there might be an ideal place without clouds and storms—Nietzsche couldn’t bear an eternally cloudy sky—and even entertained the idea of moving to Oaxaca in Mexico for its clear, cloudless skies and the sun he longed for.

To his only apostle at this point, Peter Gast, Nietzsche wrote: ‘There is nothing that can make up for the loss, in recent years, of Wagner’s sympathy for me. How often I dream of him, and always in our comforting meetings!’ He had been abandoned by all his friends, who could no longer tolerate the freedom of his thought, the new viewpoint of the eagle who looked down on Europe from on high. Only the faithful Peter Gast was left to him.

As I have said, Nietzsche was a man against his time: a fact he could never digest and he spewed it out in his somatic attacks. That was why, like a wayward defence mechanism, with open arms he accepted the pain and sang his hymn of saying ‘yes’ to life. If he discovered that his illness served as a sting to his philosophising and that it was thanks to it that he left Basel, then the disease with its birth pains freed him so that his Zarathustra could be born. ‘Only pain gives knowledge’, he intones in poetic prose. ‘Only pain liberates the spirit, only pain forces us to descend into the depths of our being’.

A martyr by contraries, he was not put to the torture because of a faith which had already become established in his mind. No, it was out of torment, it was when he was upon the rack, that he formulated his creed… Thus he ran over and over again to the fiery whirlwind of pain and submits to the torments so as to recapture ‘the enchanting sensation of good health’.

No sooner had he grasped the meaning of his illness and enjoyed the voluptuous delight of health than he wished to transform it into an apostolate… He desired further and more agonizing martyrdom… and in the excess of his enthusiasm… he goes out raising that flag without realising that it is the one that, at the same time, draws the bow that is going to shoot him the deadly arrow.

But the philosophy of Amor fati was deceptive magic for an eagle that sees everything! I have already said so on this site when trying to communicate with a racialist whom I treated one week in London (a young man who had previously been committed to a mental institution and is now serving a prison sentence).

If we look at Nietzsche’s life not as today’s bio-reductionists want to see it, but as the all-too-human human he was, we will see that with the fall that really happened to him—though not in his 36th year but in his 44th—we come upon a fact. With madness his ills disappeared, so I deduce that they were psychosomatic. Nietzsche himself had used, in speaking of himself, the metaphor of a machine that was about to explode: something that undoubtedly referred to his future insanity.

Werner Ross tells us in his biography: ‘Insanity, therefore, is no longer an organic disease’. It was something almost premeditated in pursuit of a posthumous resurrection I would dare to add, so that the man against his time would miraculously become, after the psychotic outbreak, a man of his time.

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Friedrich Nietzsche Richard Wagner

Crusade

against the Cross, 13

If I were to write a cold but informative article, I would say that by 1879 Nietzsche’s health worsened with headaches, eye pains and continuous vomiting.

On 2 May he called in sick and gave up his professorship in Basel. He travelled for the first time to the Upper Engadine, where he spent his summers from that year onwards. He spent the winter in Naumburg with his family. In the early 1880s, he went to Riva on Lake Garda and later to Venice, where he studied Christianity intensively. Nietzsche spent August in Marienbad and the next couple of months in Naumburg. He then spent his first harsh winter in Genoa and in November published The Wanderer and His Shadow (added to Human, All Too Human). In 1881 he published The Dawn of Day and spent his first summer in Sils-Maria. In August he was assailed by the thought of the eternal return and in October he heard Bizet’s Carmen.

But I don’t like the informative style of encyclopaedias: it robs us of the real person and his inner experiences. The real Nietzsche then wrote things like ‘I can’t read, I can’t deal with people’. This flesh-and-blood Nietzsche implored his friend Overbeck, the theologian, to visit him: his wish was granted. Nietzsche’s joy was unbelievably great, as Overbeck later recounted.

These were times when Nietzsche had already established his mode of work as walking in solitude for several hours until his best thoughts came to him, which he would catch on the fly from his walks in his notebook. Rhode had distanced himself from the philosopher, but not from the person, the friend; and the pains in his eyes meant that even his mother had to read books to him on his visits to Naumburg.

Nietzsche was very depressed by the climate in his hometown. ‘Unfortunately, this year the autumn in Naumburg has turned out so cloudy and wet’, he wrote, where he continued to have horrible attacks of vomiting. ‘I can only endure the existence of walking, which here, in this snow and cold, is impossible for me’. To Overbeck, he wrote: ‘Last year I had 118 attacks’. But what is relevant for us was still the Wagner case, who, about his former friend, wrote in his notes: ‘Again one must be surprised at this apostasy’. On 19 October 1879, Wagner wrote to Overbeck:

How would it be possible to forget this great friend, separated from me?… It grieves me to have to be so totally excluded from taking part in Nietzsche’s life and notes. Would it be immodest of me to beg you cordially to send me some news about our friend?

A week later the report of Nietzsche’s disconsolate state reached him. At the end of December Wagner dares to read The Wanderer and his Shadow and even reads some passages to Cosima. ‘To have nothing but derision for so lofty and sympathetic a figure as Christ!’, Richard exclaimed angrily.

The old composer was by then already in poor health, and like Nietzsche, he was burdened by the ‘permanently grey Bayreuth winter sky’, so he went to Italy for the winters. Nietzsche, for his part, spent four months with his new assistant, nicknamed Peter Gast, who read aloud to him: times for his book The Dawn of Day, which in some ways prefigures The Antichrist as far as the critique of compassion is concerned. (To try to understand Nietzsche we have to contextualise his philosophy in the present, where neo-Christian compassion taken to the extreme has led us to normalise pathologies such as those suffered by trans people: unwise levels of compassion that we have been calling ‘deranged altruism’. And the same can be said of Christian and neo-Christian love for marginalised black people: unbridled compassion.)

Like Wagner, even in 1881 Nietzsche also still loved his former friend, to the extent of confessing to close friends that if Wagner invited him to the premiere of Parsifal he would go to Bayreuth. But Wagner was repulsed by the whole course taken by Nietzsche. It is worth looking into the matter a little because the case has certain similarities with my tortuous relationship with the American racial right, and there is something I would like to clarify about the Jewish question.

First, while Nietzsche wanted to push for a supranational European spirit, Wagner believed in the Germanic character as a culturising force.

Here, Wagner was right, while Nietzsche didn’t seem to realise that the ethnic factor is fundamental. American racialists, from this comparison, are closer to Nietzsche than to Wagner because, unlike German National Socialism, American anti-Nordicists imagine a supranational Europe, all united under the banner of a chimaera they call ‘white nationalism’. Sebastian Ronin, the Canadian critic of the American racial right, was right to say that all nationalism is ethno-nationalism (just as Wagner and later Hitler believed as far as Germany and Austria were concerned). It follows that it makes no sense to grant amnesty to the mudbloods of the Mediterranean who have ceased to be properly white (or the mudbloods of Portugal, Russia, etc.).

Secondly, this is precisely why Wagner saw the emergence of the Jewish element as a threat when Nietzsche fantasised that Jewish capital would finance his anti-Christian works! Wagner supported the anti-Semite Adolf Stöcker, of whom Nietzsche would go so far as to write years later, when he lost his mind, that he should be shot!

Today, the impossibility of the collective Aryan unconscious to make a political movement in which, say, Swedes and Sicilians feel perfectly brotherly to the extent of making both a single empire, gives the lie to the precepts of so-called white nationalism in the US. Although Richard Wagner knelt before the cross, he was right on this point and Nietzsche was wrong. The Germanic race does matter, as does a healthy anti-Semitism.

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Friedrich Nietzsche Richard Wagner

Crusade

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.
 

______ 卐 ______

 
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’.

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Friedrich Nietzsche Richard Wagner

Crusade

against the Cross, 11

Cosima Wagner was already a determined Christian. In Bayreuth, during the quiet winter evenings of 1875, she and her husband Richard immersed themselves in August Gfrörer’s Geschichte des Urchristenthums (History of Early Christianity). Although the Wagners were wise on the Jewish question, like today’s white nationalists, the couple simply ignored David Strauss’s book that had helped Nietzsche so much to take an important step on the road to apostasy.

Gfrörer still presented the Bible romantically, and the modern criticism of the New Testament didn’t affect the Wagner couple in the least. In Cosima’s diary, one can even guess a sort of concordat of this pair in matters of religion: Christian faith and Schopenhauer’s philosophy. (Can you see why I am repulsed by those first two hundred pages of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, which a quarter of a century ago I bought in Manchester by the way, where the young philosopher presents the reader with the abstruse Kantian metaphysics—a neo-theology in my view?)

Richard Wagner would crown his life with a Christian work, Parsifal, about which I have written several posts on this site. The Parsifal project had been in Wagner’s mind since 1857, of which he wrote: ‘A warm, sunny Good Friday inspired me with Parsifal’, taken from the chivalric folklore about the mythical figure of Parzival. (Musically it is, of his operas, the one I like best: so much so that I used to listen to it when driving thanks to the compact discs of Georg Solti’s conducting the Vienna Philharmonic.)

Looking at the matter through Savitri Devi’s eyes, we discover that Wagner was ‘a man of his time’ and Nietzsche ‘a man against his time’. While the Wagners entertained celebrities in their home—the emperor’s son, several archdukes and beautiful ladies of high society—Nietzsche reluctantly followed his lessons.

For him, friendships were sacred. In Leipzig, he had befriended Heinrich Romundt (1845-1919), another classical philologist. Of his friends, Romundt was the closest to Nietzsche after Rhode and Gersdorff. But unlike Nietzsche, Romundt began to follow in Kant’s footsteps, got a professorship in Basel, and unexpectedly wanted to become a Catholic priest.

These were times when Pius IX had declared the Prussian anti-church law invalid! As one can guess from his correspondence with Rhode, Nietzsche was deeply hurt. Romundt had been a housemate in ‘the Basilian cave’, and had previously been in tune with these freethinkers.

After the loss of Romundt, as Gersdorff recounts in his letter of 17 April 1875, Nietzsche had a headache that lasted for thirty hours and repeated vomiting of bile. (It was the same nausea that the world gives me, but I avoid psychosomatic conversion by denouncing, in vindictive autobiographies,the people who have betrayed me.) Elisabeth, his sister, recounts that in the autumn of 1875, when they lived together, Nietzsche played the hymn to solitude on the piano almost every night. But in October Nietzsche met the musician Heinrich Köselitz, whom he nicknamed ‘Peter Gast’—literally Peter the Guest—and became close friends with him: a friendship that was to replace, in a way, the loss of Romundt.

Nietzsche found himself in a dilemma: mihi scribo, aliis vivo (do I write for myself, do I live for others?). Part of his being demanded that he belong to a group. On the other hand, the philosopher had already detected what, on this site, I have called the Christian question: the cause of German decline wasn’t only the Jewry that Wagner imagined. But if Nietzsche spoke his mind, he would suffer social ostracism. And if he didn’t say what he thought, the daimon that already lived in him would transmute into terrible ailments. He chose a third way: to begin to hint at what his inner daimon was whispering to him, albeit for the moment hermetically, in obscure aphorisms.

In one of the posthumous fragments from that period we can read a quotation from Voltaire, ‘Il faut dire la vérité et s’immoler’, to tell the truth is to immolate oneself. Stubbornly, he refused the Wagners’ generous invitations and went to meditate in the mountains and forests, on excursions where he felt freer. Above all, he had to avoid vomiting for hours on end that occurred without having eaten anything, and put aside the quackery cures of the time, such as those shameful enemas and leeches that a doctor had prescribed.

These were the times when the trumpets were already blowing for the opening of Bayreuth, and all his friends would gather there when the poor professor was still suffering from convulsions and stomach ailments: a morbus Wagneri. How could he proclaim the truth without aphorisms and in clear and transparent prose without self-immolation? Nietzsche wanted to surpass Wagner in stature, but that could only happen if another generation would recognise him as the originator of the new religion that was already brewing inside him. He was ‘a premature birth of a future not yet verified’, he would write. ‘Some are born posthumously’.

To be sure, Nietzsche had certain consolations in his existential loneliness. His time with Elisabeth brought back the happy memories of his early childhood, abruptly interrupted when he was cloistered for years in Schulpforta. He wanted, as he wrote to Gersdorff, ‘a simple home with a very orderly daily life’, although he also confessed to him that he had then spent the worst Christmas of his life.

In 1876 Nietzsche published the fourth of his Untimely Meditations, entitled Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. Thus the sick young man paid homage to the healthy old man, and to the Wagners he would send deluxe copies. While in search of freedom in Geneva, Nietzsche met the twenty-one-year-old Mathilde Trampedach. She was ‘blonde, slender, green-eyed and had a Renaissance figure’, writes Werner Ross. On 11 April Nietzsche made a sudden offer of marriage to her, whom he had met only five days earlier, but the nymph… refused.

In July the Bayreuth festivals began with The Ring of the Nibelung. Nietzsche was to arrive the following month.

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Friedrich Nietzsche Philosophy

Crusade

against the Cross, 10

Nietzsche was never entangled in the cobwebs of what, misleadingly, Bertrand Russell would later call ‘Wisdom of the West’ (in reality, the philosophy of the Christian era had only been mental darkness). Nietzsche knew this, as he wrote in On the Pathos of Truth about the true lovers of wisdom: ‘Such people live in their own solar system’. Such sovereign independence was the antithesis of the mental illness that Kant’s apotheosis had meant in Germany, a folie en masse that even Schopenhauer was infected by. The new philosopher ‘speaks in forbidden metaphors and unheard-of complexes of concepts in order at least to respond creatively, by destroying and mocking the old conceptual barriers’. This new ‘philosopher, insofar as he poeticises, knows; and insofar as he knows, poeticises’: a liberating vindication of the Id against the ogre of the neo-theologians’ Superego.

Thus, in Nietzsche’s mind, an innovation emerged: that of the philosopher-poet. And since one of his pillars was pre-Platonic philosophy, Heraclitus became his philosopher-artist. Years later, in Ecce homo, Nietzsche would come to confess that he felt more at home with Heraclitus: the philosopher of the burning of worlds from whom he would draw—oops!—his own metaphysics: that of the eternal return. It was already the time when Nietzsche was beginning to cultivate a thicker moustache than in his earlier years. And before he came up with the word Umwertuung (transvaluation), in his personal notebook we can read about the new philosopher: ‘If he found a word which, if uttered, would destroy the world, do you think he wouldn’t utter it?’ As Stefan Zweig would write in Der Kampf mit dem Dämon, this man, who was not yet thirty, already knew that he had a daimon inside him. Werner Ross comments:

Nietzsche found himself slowly and painfully. Decisions matured: separation from Wagner and separation from the university. Both measures were necessary to achieve full independence and to face what awaited him which he himself defined as ‘the sorrows of truthfulness’. But he was an anguished eagle [hence the title Der ängstliche Adler] and, equipped as he had long been with the weapons of a bird of prey, he preferred to return to the home nest [spend some time in Naumburg]. The heroic had been applied to his soft temperament with violence: with cold water and unheated rooms, with swimming trials [in a lake] and a lot of early rising, with a lot of study and sexual abstinence.

Nietzsche, who had no contact with young girls, suffered from bodily ailments, perhaps psychosomatic in that, until the onset of madness in later times, Christmas was a critical time for his depression. In an attempt to cure himself, he wrote to his friend Malwida: ‘Now I wish for myself, in confidence, a good woman very soon, and then I’ll consider the wishes of my life to be fulfilled’. Meanwhile, the visionary Wagner believed that the symphony was to be replaced by his musical drama (Wagner didn’t call his works ‘operas’). And he somewhat was right, for with the advent of cinema—musical dramas with new technology—soundtracks would replace the conventional symphony genre.

I don’t want to recount all the anecdotes about the eleven days Nietzsche later spent in Bayreuth, recorded lightly in Cosima’s diary, except that at one point Wagner ‘became very angry and spoke of his longing to find in music something about the superiority of Jesus Christ’, as Ross writes. Suffice it to say that Nietzsche had dared to have brought a Brahms score! Later, when Nietzsche sent them his essay Schopenhauer as Educator, the Wagners received the text with delight. Richard wrote to him: ‘I have thought that you should either marry or compose an opera; both would be useful to you. But marriage seems better to me’ and invited him once more to his home. Unfortunately, Nietzsche declined the invitation because he wanted to go on a pilgrimage to a high, lonely Swiss mountain. What he had in mind was to fulfil the role of the new philosopher: ‘When there is much to destroy, in times of the chaos of degeneration, it is most useful’.

But Nietzsche lamented that he didn’t yet know how to fly. For the moment the young eagle could only flap its wings, and he confessed that he was staggering backwards in the face of the immense free space, but that the day would come ‘to soar as high as a thinker has never soared before, to the pure air of the Alps and the ice’. And more telling still: ‘Or, to leave absolutely no doubt as to what I mean, when it matters unspeakably more the appearance of a philosopher on earth than the persistence of a State or a university’.

Shortly afterwards he would be thirty years old.

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Philosophy

Crusade

against the Cross, 9

David Friedrich Strauss

Between 1873 and 1876 Nietzsche published separately four major essays, David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Schopenhauer as Educator, and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (these four were later collected and entitled, together, Untimely Meditations). All four essays shared the orientation of a general critique of German culture in an attempt to change its course, which Nietzsche foresaw as wrong.

Since in this series on Nietzsche I am not trying to deal in depth with his complex legacy, but only to show how the anti-Christianity of Hitler’s private conversations in the 20th century had been brewing in his homeland since the previous century, I will only say a few words about the first of the Untimely Meditations: the attack on David Friedrich Strauss.

If we remember that Nietzsche had read Strauss’ magnum opus, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, published in Tübingen in 1835-1836); that the book helped his apostasy; and that he even wanted to communicate this reading to his sister, it seems a mystery that in this first great essay after The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche should fiercely attack Strauss. But it must be understood that Nietzsche was attacking another book by Strauss that was selling like a bestseller, published decades after Das Leben Jesu. I refer to The Old and the New Faith: A Confession (1871).

So far I have based much of the biographical information in this series on Werner Ross’ book on Nietzsche, originally published in German under the title Der ängstliche Adler. But I am afraid to say that, as far as the acerbic satire of the ‘Straussiade’ is concerned, Ross is wrong in saying that Nietzsche’s essay was simply a commission from Wagner, whom Strauss had long before attacked mercilessly.

What prompts me to say a word about this Nietzschean diatribe is that, on this site, I have held Strauss in high esteem, in the sense that since 2012 and 2013 we have presented him as a pioneer of New Testament textual criticism (here, here, here and here). Critical exegesis aside, the normie Ross, who had a poor idea of Hitler, didn’t realise that Nietzsche’s concerns about Strauss’ bestseller were genuine and that they arose naturally from his point of view. (To use a vulgar analogy, it is as if in our century I were to attack Richard Carrier’s Wokism even though I accept the thesis of his book on the non-historicity of Jesus.) We must understand that Nietzsche had erected for himself an ideal of culture based on three pillars: pre-Platonic Greece, Schopenhauer and Wagner. Strauss’ book was in exemplary opposition to them, and its success indicated that the danger for Germany was more serious than could have been supposed.

In David Strauss: der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller (David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer, 1873) Nietzsche presents Strauss as an example of the German thought of the time. He casts the Straussian ‘New Faith’, based on the ‘scientific’ progression of history, as a vulgar reading of history in the service of a degenerate culture. Throughout his essay Nietzsche uses the term ‘Philistine culture’. Philistinism was a pejorative term that, although of German origin, it was used from the 19th century onwards in the English language. By comparison with the ancient Philistines, in the cultural milieu of the Victorian era it was applied to vulgar, uneducated or insensitive people. Today the term is in disuse because vulgarity in the ‘culture’ of the masses, and even of the elites, is no longer seen as vulgar.

It is difficult to present Nietzsche’s critique of culture in a blog post because one must be immersed in the spirit of 19th-century Germany. Such an enterprise could only be of value to a scholar writing retrospectively. But for a taste of Nietzsche’s essay, I will quote a few passages from his heated polemic. After prefacing his critique with the sentence ‘There was once a Strauss who was a brave, rigorous scholar, not at all lightly clad, and we liked him just as much’, Nietzsche tells us:

What kind of people are these who must have attained dominion in Germany and who can forbid such strong and simple feelings and prevent their expression? That power, that kind of people I will call by their name—they are the cultiphilistine…

Because of this lack of self-knowledge, the Philistine has the firm and convinced feeling that his ‘culture’ is the full expression of true German culture: and since everywhere the Philistine goes he meets cultured people of his kind, and since all public institutions, all educational, cultural and artistic establishments are organised by the Philistine’s cult and needs, he wanders everywhere with the triumphalist feeling that he is the worthy representative of present-day German culture…

He finds everywhere the uniform imprint of himself, and from this uniform imprint of all ‘cultured’ people he derives a unity of style of German culture.

The posthumous fragments from the time of the composition of this first of the Untimely Meditations, such as one fragment from the spring-summer of 1873 (the time when Tolstoy was publishing Anna Karenina) are even more direct in probing Nietzsche’s thinking:

Strauss is not a philosopher. He lacks feeling for style. He is not an artist…

The horrendous dilapidation of Hegelianism! Not even those who have been able to save themselves from it, like Strauss, are ever completely cured.

Two misfortunes befell Strauss: firstly, Hegelianism took possession of him and made him dizzy at a time when he should have been guided by a serious philosopher. Secondly, his opponents made him fall into the mania that his cause was popular and that he was a popular author. As a result, it has never been possible for him to cease to be a theologian, and it has never been permissible for him to begin again to be a rigorous disciple of his science. Now he has done his utmost to eliminate Hegel and the theological ingredient as much as possible: but in vain. The former is evident in Strauss’ chatteringly optimistic way of looking at the world, in which the Prussian state is the ultimate goal of world history; the latter in the irritated invective he hurls against Christianity. Strauss lacks something to lean on and throws himself into the arms of the State and of success; his thinking is not at any point a thinking sub specie aeternitatis [in the perspective of eternity], but a thinking sub specie decennii vel biennii [from the standpoint of the decade or the biennium]. This is how he becomes a ‘classic populist’, just like Büchner…

The cultiphilistine ignores what culture-unity of style is. He agrees that there are classics (Schiller, Goethe, Lessing) and forgets that they wanted a culture, but that they are not a foundation on which to rest.

What to say about Nietzsche’s political ideas, would the philosopher have approved of the Third Reich had he lived lucidly and for as many years as his sister? What is certain is that more than one pundit answered his diatribe against Strauss. For example, ‘Herr Friedrich Nietzsche and German Culture’ from the pen of B.F., published in the Leipzig journal Die Grenzboten in October 1873 by the mysterious ‘B.F.’[1] rebuked Nietzsche for his lack of patriotism.

Politics aside one thing is certain: the philologist was left behind and a philosopher was born: a critic of culture, the Kulturkampf.

The context of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations must be understood within the legacy of Wagner and the work of ‘total art’, which detested the scientific fever, the faith in so-called progress and the mercantile spirit of the present. (He who advocates the transvaluation of these Judaizing values would say: Let’s go back to the Germanic myths!) These were the times when Nietzsche had made his first solo trip abroad, and in his diary, he wrote things like ‘This Alpine valley is absolutely my pleasure: here there are strong, pure airs, mountains’ and ‘roads I walk along for hours’.

This is already the new Nietzsche, the philosopher-poet of little or no company. Even to his mother he cites pen, ink and paper as his best companions: ‘All together we greet you from the bottom of our hearts’. This was also the year in which the opening of the Bayreuth theater was planned. Wagner was already sixty years old, and Nietzsche was brimming with euphoria.

Strauss was to die the following year.

______________

[1] It hasn’t been possible to find out who was behind the initials B.F. The official documents of the journal list Hans Blum, who was then its editor, as the author. Many years later, in 1909, Blum denied that he was the author of the article, but he couldn’t remember exactly who had given it to him; he hinted that it might have been a professor at the University of Leipzig or a publicist inspired by university media. It has also been claimed that the author may have been Bernhard Forster (the initials match), then and always an ardent supporter of the Reich, who later married Nietzsche’s sister. If this is so, Nietzsche’s critic would thus have become Nietzsche’s brother-in-law. Elisabeth, of course, denied it.

Categories
Ancient Greece Art Friedrich Nietzsche

Crusade

against the Cross, 8

The publication of Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music) caused so much trouble in the stagnant German-speaking academy that even when Rhode wanted to defend his friend Nietzsche against the attack of their colleagues, he was unable to obtain a professorship in Freiburg.

We are used to the culture of cancellation in the darkest hour of the West. This month, on the Führer’s birthday for example, Kevin MacDonald expressed his mixed feelings that his ideological enemy at Cambridge University, Nathan Cofnas, had been expelled for daring to talk about race and IQ. But already in 19th-century Europe things were far from an open marketplace of ideas. The aforementioned textual critic of the New Testament, David Friedrich Strauss, whom Nietzsche had read, was also unable to obtain a professorship after the publication of his book (even today academic exegetes don’t even bother to read Richard Carrier’s book about the dubious historicity of Jesus).

Once one understands that the academy is not the proverbial forum for an open marketplace of ideas, but for the ironclad and orthodox transmission of the paradigm of the day, one will understand that only the freelance philosopher will be able to write something worth reading. Always keep in mind that guys like Kant and Hegel didn’t openly contradict the interests of the State or the Church, so their obscurantist philosophies weren’t only tolerated, but promoted.

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche not only expounds the content of his study of the Greeks, but begins to shape his philosophy. The book is a hybrid of philosophy and philology, which is why Nietzsche himself called it a ‘centaur’. It deals with the birth of Attic tragedy, the motives that inspired it, and the causes of its demise. He aimed to interpret tragedy in ancient Greece, which differed from the concept that the learned had of it. The work develops the thesis that two great opposing forces govern art: the Dionysian force and the Apollonian force. These two forces, once united in Greek tragedy, were separated by the triumph of rationality with Socrates. Nietzsche hoped to rediscover this ancient union in the music of Richard Wagner, to whom he dedicated the book.

The Greece of the white sculptures came to us, but originally they were painted. (Something of this can be seen for at least a few seconds in Oliver Stone’s film in a scene of Alexander the Great’s father, though that film is generally Hollywood Greece rather than historical Greece.) And the same can be said of its architectural ruins: they were originally painted in bright colours, as can be seen in some contemporary reconstructions. To understand Nietzsche one would have to colour not only the sculptures and temple reconstructions, but the original pathos of Greek tragedy, insofar as the Germanic psyche of his time was burdened with what we might call an ogre of superego: something like baptising the pagans through the late saintly Socrates, a figure who doesn’t represent the violent origins of Greece and the ensuing tragedy.

For the man of our century, one way to grasp the controversy that Nietzsche’s first book sparked would be to watch a film like the tragedy of Iphigenia and compare it with thousands of Hollywood turkeys where we see no tragedy at all: the drama is simply resolved with a rational and even happy ending. Apollo is present but Dionysus is absent: prolefeed for the proles! If we take into account what we said yesterday about how the degenerate Aryan, emasculated by comfort to the point of losing the tragic sense of life—and Hollywood has played a central role in making us forget about tragedy and believe that life is merely a drama—we will have, perhaps, a distant analogy to what happened after the publication of Nietzsche’s first book.

Without going into the details, which can be read in scholarly biographies, Nietzsche had violated the rules of the philologists’ guild by saying that a German Renaissance could be catapulted by Wagner’s music. In The Birth of Tragedy a holy man, Socrates, was dethroned. I would add that, being physically ugly, Socrates was never a true Greek because in the real Hellas physical ugliness was almost a refutation (being the son of a midwife, the baby Socrates avoided premature infanticide by the eugenicists of the time). According to Nietzsche, the original tragedy was lyrical-musical, like Wagner’s musical tragedies. With Socrates and his calculating reason a dangerous optimism had penetrated the Greek psyche, and the original, deeply pessimistic tragedy died (I really suggest that any fan of Judaizing Hollywood watch the Greek film Iphigenia, linked above, to get a taste of what we are talking about).

Wagner went to great lengths to calm Cosima down from the shock of such iconoclasm, and she herself wrote to Nietzsche: ‘The master must have told you what excitement I have been in, and also that all night long he had to talk to me about it, with all the details’.

Wagner certainly applauded Nietzsche’s daring, but he feared greatly for his academic future. For in turning against the white Greece to which 19th-century Europeans were accustomed, introducing the violent colour of the original culture, as well as advocating a revival of Germanism thanks to Wagner’s musical dramas, the book was no longer a dull text: it was a political essay. By presenting himself not as an obscure Basilian professor whose texts are suitable only for colleagues but as a Dionysian dancer, Nietzsche, besides being too strong for the palate of his classicist contemporaries, was marked in relation to the notorious composer.

These were times when Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung—the most pagan and ambitious of his operas—was much talked about in Germany. He was still working on the last of the four operas in that series (see our summary from Wagner’s libretto here). Tannhäuser had been left behind in public conversation and the neo-Christian Parsifal hadn’t yet been composed. Nietzsche couldn’t have imagined that he alone would lead the way in transvaluation while the Wagnerians would take a step backwards. Only the next century Himmler and his kind would take steps forward on the psychological Rubicon instead of the fear that the Rubicon causes by stepping back (say, like the regressive step William Pierce took after the exterminationist The Turner Diaries with his next novel, Hunter, where Pierce introduces a Christian character as the good guy in his drama).

Before Parsifal the medicine that Nietzsche prescribed for the general malaise of the Germanic peoples was still sold in the Wagnerian pharmacy. Richard, in fact, invited Nietzsche, now his herald, and in Cosima’s diary we see that her husband even wept with happiness after the publication of The Birth of Tragedy. Unfortunately, Nietzsche didn’t attend because that winter he suffered from the typical Christmas depression that invaded him on the darkest days of the year.

The King of Bavaria himself, a great friend of Wagner, let it be known via third parties that he had received Nietzsche’s book but didn’t comment on its contents. Ritschl, the representative of academic philology who had been so supportive of the young man, wrote in his notes not intended for publication that the book was ‘a witty drunkenness’. For what was already apparent in this essay was a desire to reorganise German culture and to declare conventional philology, so devoid of bright colours and the tragic meaning of life, dead. For the depressed Nietzsche all that suited him: to fight. He wanted to pick a fight to get out of his depressions!

And the fight actually came. One of the normies of the time, the philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, who like Nietzsche had studied at the boys’ cloister, asked the professor to leave the chair and wrote a pamphlet denouncing The Birth of Tragedy, where he writes: ‘What a shame you inflict, Mr Nietzsche, on Mother Pforta’ and later added that Nietzsche had degraded all that he had been taught as untouchable and sacred. Biographer Ross comments: ‘The serene Hellenism… was like a piece of religion for bourgeois and intellectuals that would not be extirpated’. For Wilamowitz had grasped Nietzsche’s intention to create a new philology based on the original spirit of Ancient Hellas, on that deep blue of the Mediterranean and so distant from the grey skies of northern Europe.

Rhode replied to Wilamowitz and even Wagner himself intervened in the exchange with a published text of his own (ignored by the philologists of course). Wilamowitz in turn replied to Rohde and other professionals intervened. Never before had such a furious controversy raged in philology, and Nietzsche took refuge in a further elaboration of his pregnant philosophy.

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Richard Wagner

Crusade

against the Cross, 7

Erwin Rohde, Karl von Gersdorff and Nietzsche.

Although 19th-century Basel was picturesque, it lacked hygiene to such an extent that a few years before Nietzsche lived there it had suffered a bout of cholera.

When he was already a respectable town professor, Nietzsche wore a top hat: the only one in Basel to do so. His friend Rhode remained faithful if distant; with Wagner, he continued his affectionate relationship, and the theologian Overbeck became his closest friend. It is difficult to imagine this Prussian reading passages from Mark Twain’s amusing novels in conversation with his friends, but this has come to light thanks to documents that have come into the possession of his biographers.

Although Nietzsche was already established and a member of the community, the Basilian professorship was to last only a decade. He didn’t like to be a teacher, although the exercises of the Greek tragedies were somewhat close to his interests. Nor was he interested in philological minutiae but in the intense spirit of ancient Greeks. He wanted the spirit of ancient Hellas to be reborn and distinguished from the sombre way in which its study was taught in the formal academy.

He also disliked that he had to appear daily before his students very early in the morning, in addition to preparing the countless hours of lectures and seminars. But he enjoyed the walks, the social life and the meals with his colleagues; he invited his students to his home—time and again he sought their warmth—and when he arrived home, a beautiful grand piano awaited him for his improvisations. With the anchorite image we got of him in his later years, it is hard to imagine him eating at his colleagues’ invitations, joking and even dancing.

But he was too shy to take the step Wagner strongly urged him to take: marriage. Werner Ross tells us that Nietzsche ‘has gone down in history as one of the few important men who has never even been known to have had a relationship with a woman. He was a special being: a fact that can be understood as a priestly renunciation for the sake of a mission that was to shake the world…’

Old-time friendships in Europe were deeper than ours. Curt Paul Janz observed that Nietzsche’s compositions for piano responded to the motto of friendship. Of Rohde, for example, Nietzsche writes, ‘of the best and rarest kind and faithful to me with touching love’. Rhode for his part wrote the following retrospective soliloquy in his diary of 1876: ‘Think of the golden gardens of happiness in which you lived while, in the spring of 1870, Nietzsche played for you the fragment from The Master Singers: “Morning Brightness”. Those were the best hours of my whole life’. And about the celebrated composer Nietzsche wrote about ‘the warmest and most agreeable nature of Wagner, of whom I want to say that he is the greatest genius and greatest man of our time, decidedly immeasurable!’ The group he had first formed with his Shopenhaurean friends mutated into a group that now deified a living man: Richard Wagner. Just as Bayreuth aimed to break with the way music was taught in Germany, Nietzsche wanted to break with the dead form in which philology was taught at the Academy.

Another of Nietzsche’s friends, Karl von Gersdorff, pictured above with Rohde, converted Nietzsche to vegetarianism; and Nietzsche, in turn, converted him to Wagnerianism. Although Gersdorff was in complete agreement with Wagner’s anti-Semitism and even viewed Mendelssohn’s music with contempt, Wagner was exasperated that Nietzsche wouldn’t eat meat when he invited him and even scolded him in front of Cosima. It is very significant to note that neither the Jupiterian Wagner nor the aristocratic Nietzsche said a word about the victims during La semaine sanglante (the bloody week) with which the French government repressed the Paris Commune.

When Nietzsche visited the Wagner house he brought toys bought in the Eisengasse in Basel for Cosima’s children, who saw the professor as a welcome playmate. Wagner himself began his letters with phrases like ‘Dearest Herr Friedrich…’ and had drawn up plans that, should he die prematurely, Nietzsche would be the tutor of his son Siegfried: named after the third opera of Wagner’s tetralogy inspired by pre-Christian mythology. This was Wagner’s fervent wish when Nietzsche was already twenty-eight years old, so, understandably, the academic activity to which he was chained was experienced as an ordeal.

By this time he had left philology behind and philosophy represented his real passion. But we must make it clear that Nietzsche didn’t have in mind the nonsense that, before him, had been written by all the so-called great philosophers (whom I have referred to on this site as neo-theologians). After all, none of them said anything influential about the Aryan race or the transvaluation of all Christian values. The ‘great’ philosophers had spent their lives discussing abstruse metaphysics and theories of knowledge but absolutely nothing relevant to our sacred words. Philosophy has been an immense Sahara of sterile discussions, and the fact that after so many centuries the philosophers haven’t even intuited what eventually motivated Adolf Hitler, is testimony to the frivolity of their activity.

At this point in his life, Nietzsche was already beginning to glimpse a prophetic mission. Many things were on his mind besides the reform of philology on Greco-Roman authors, and the majestic Aryan art that was to give birth to a New Renaissance as envisaged by Wagner, who now inaugurated it in Bayreuth: ideas that were swirling around in his head. We can imagine those times when the master already had white hair and the young professor sported a dark moustache, meetings presided over by the slender and refined Cosima: a woman who was to become a kind of muse for Nietzsche. Although, as a passionate admirer of Greece, one could imagine the professor travelling to Attica, the circle of the inveterate bachelor didn’t leave Naumburg, Leipzig, Lake Lucerne, Lake Geneva, the Swiss mountains and occasionally the Wagners’ house.

When the philosopher would mature, he would discover to his surprise that even Wagner had only been a way station on his spiritual odyssey.

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Vincent van Gogh

Crusade

against the Cross, 6

Friedrich Nietzsche in 1867.

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).

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Music Richard Wagner

Crusade

against the Cross, 5

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.