Category: Stefan Zweig

A great man is pushed and hustled and
martyrized until he withdraws into solitude.

Nietzsche lived in many different towns; he travelled into countless realms of the mind; frequently he endeavoured to escape from solitude by crossing a frontier into a foreign land; but always his journeyings brought him back to solitude, heartsore, weary, disillusioned.

His solitude had become complete isolation, the final, the seventh, solitude, wherein one is not merely alone but also forsaken. A void surrounded him, an awe-inspiring silence; no hermit or anchorite in the desert was ever more abandoned. They, at least, still had their God whose shade dwelt in their huts. But he, “the murderer of God,” had neither God nor man to companion him. To the extent that he drew nearer to himself, he receded from the world; and, as his voyages extended, “the desert widened” around him.

Generally the works conceived and written in loneliness gain more and more ascendancy upon the minds of men; by a magnetic force they attract increasing numbers of admirers into the invisible circle of their influence. But Nietzsche’s books alienated even his friends. In Germany no publisher would any longer accept his manuscripts. During his twenty years of production, his manuscripts accumulated in a cellar and came to weigh many hundredweight. He had to draw upon his own slender resources in order to get his books printed. Not only did nobody buy the few volumes that were issued, but he found no readers when he gave them away. So vast was the chasm between this man’s genius and the pettiness of the time.

Practically no reviewer or critic took the slightest notice of Zarathustra, which the author described as “the greatest gift ever bestowed upon men.” One day he lamented: “After such an appeal as my Zarathustra, a cry that came from my heart, it is terrible not to hear a responsive word, to hear nothing, absolutely nothing, to be surrounded by silence, to be a thousand times more isolated than heretofore. This is a situation exceeding all others in horror; even the strongest might die under the strain… And I am far from being the strongest. Sometimes it seems to me as though I were indeed wounded unto death.” This gnawed at his vitals, undermining his proper pride, inflaming his self-assertive impulse, consuming his soul. Lack of recognition was the shaft which poisoned his isolation, and raised his temper to fever-heat.

“Prolonged silence has exasperated my pride.” At all costs he wanted response, sending letter upon letter, telegram upon telegram. Blindly and wildly he flung his missiles far and wide, never looking to see if they hit the mark. Since he had slain the gods, he set himself up as a divinity. “Must we not become gods if we are to be worthy of such deeds?” Having overthrown all the altars, he built an altar for himself in order to praise himself, seeing that no one else would acknowledge him. He chanted his own dirge with enthusiasm and exultation, mingling it with songs celebrating his deeds and his victories. To begin with, a twilight covered the landscape of his mind as when black clouds stalk up from the horizon and distant thunder growls; then a strident laugh rent the sultry air, a mad, violent, and wicked laugh full of despair, heartbreaking: this was the pæan of Ecce Homo.

As the book develops, its cadences become increasingly spasmodic, the yells of laughter are more shrill amid the glacial silence; he is, as it were, outside himself. His hands are raised, his feet stamp rhythmically; he breaks into a dance, a dance over the abyss, the abyss of his own annihilation.

A snake which cannot slough its skin is
doomed to perish. So likewise, a mind
which is prevented from changing its
opinion ceases to be a mind.

Goethe’s life expanded around a fixed point, just as year by year a circle invisible to the outer world is added to the trunk of a tree. Patiently, thanks to an active though stubborn concentration of his energies, Goethe attained his maturity; he resolutely guarded his ego while defending his proper growth.

Nietzsche, the changeable, was perpetually obliged to destroy himself that he might reconstruct himself wholly.

Each of Nietzsche’s spiritual earthquakes destroyed the whole edifice of his convictions, and the philosopher was obliged to start building anew from the foundations. Nothing even grew quietly and imperceptibly and naturally with him; his inner being was never given a chance to develop and extend by a process of stealthy labor. Invariably he is struck “as if by lightning”; always his universe must be annihilated in order that the new cosmos may emerge.

“My books tell the story of the victories I have gained over myself.” They relate his manifold transformation, his spiritual pregnancies and lyings-in, his deaths and resurrections; they are tales of the merciless warfare he carried on against himself, the punishments and summary executions he inflicted upon his own being; they are the biographies of all the creatures Nietzsche impersonated during the twenty years of his mental existence.

What makes Nietzsche’s transformations so peculiar is that they seem retrogressive. If we take Goethe as the prototype of an organic nature in harmony with the forward march of the universe, we perceive that this development is symbolical of the various ages of life. In youth he was fiery and enthusiastic; as a man in his prime he was actively reflective; age brought him the utmost lucidity of mind. His mental rhythm corresponded in every point with the temperature of his blood. As with most young men, he began in chaos and ended his career in orderly fashion, as is seemly with the old. After going through a revolutionary period he turned conservative, after a phase of lyricism he became a man of science, after being prodigal of himself he learned how to be reserved.

Nietzsche took the opposite course. Instead of aspiring to an even more complete integration of his ego, he desired complete disintegration. As he advanced in years he became increasingly impatient, vehement, revolutionary, and chaotic. His outward aspect was in strident opposition to the customary evolution of a man.

While his university companions were still delighting in the usual horseplay of undergraduates, Nietzsche, though but twenty-four years old, was already a professor, aspirant to the chair of philology at Basel, that famous seat of learning. At twenty-four, Nietzsche’s intimates were men of fifty and sixty years of age, sages such as Jakob Burckhardt and Ritschl, while his closest friend was the most celebrated artist of the day—Richard Wagner. He deliberately put the brake upon his poetical aspirations and upon his love of music. Like any other pedant, he sat over his Greek texts, revising pandects, and compiling erudite indexes. From the outset, Nietzsche’s eyes were turned towards the dead past. Old before his time, a confirmed bachelor, he had no true joy in life. Professorial dignity swamped his cheerfulness, dimming what should have been his natural exuberance. He was wholly immersed in printed texts and in dryasdust problems.

His first book, The Birth of Tragedy, was completed when he was twenty-seven. Herein he breached into the present, though his face was still wearing the mask of a philologist.

At the age of thirty, when most men are starting life, when Goethe became a minister of the State, and when Kant and Schiller were full-fledged professors, Nietzsche had kicked over the traces of his official duties and, with a sigh of relief, had quitted the chair of philology at Basel University. Now at last he came to grips with himself, seeking to penetrate into his personal universe, undergoing an initial transformation, rupturing old ties, and making his début as an artist. This initial step into the realm of the present was the moment when the real Nietzsche was born.

By the time he had reached his thirty-six year, Nietzsche had become an outlaw, an amoralist, a sceptic, a poet, a musician. He had regained “a better youth.” Such a course of rejuvenation is almost unprecedented. Having reached his fourth decade, Nietzsche’s language and his thoughts, his whole being, indeed, possess a freshness, a colour, a fearlessness, a passion, and a music he had never known as a lad of seventeen. The recluse of Sils-Maria had a lighter touch, his words soared on freer opinions, his feet danced more joyously through his works than had those of the prematurely old professor of twenty-four summers.

He could find no halting-place for his restless mind. Hardly had he settled down somewhere when he felt his “skin chapped and rent.” He himself felt as if he were confronting a ghost when someone referred to “Professor Friedrich Nietzsche of Basel”; it was hard enough even to remember that he had been such a person twenty years before. Has any human being, before him, made so trenchant a cleavage between past and present? Does not this severance account for the terrible solitude of his latter days? He had broken all the links which attached him to the past, and the furious rhythm of his life and of his ultimate transformations was too ardent for him to create new ties.

His ruthless amputation of the Wagner complex proved to be an extremely perilous surgical intervention, one that was almost fatal, because it came so very close to the heart. For, precisely at the moment when the form of his being was stretched to the utmost, his mental tensions culminated in disruption. The primitive and daimonic power exploded, annihilating the superb series of incorporations which he had created form his own blood and out of his own life while storming the hidden battlements of the infinite.

What is of genuine importance is
eternal vitality, not eternal life

Knowledge was Kant’s daily and nightly companion; she lived with him and bedded with him for forty years on the same spiritual couch; he procreated with her a family of German philosophical systems whose descendants still live with us in every middle-class circle. His relationship to truth was essentially monogamous. The urge that brought Schelling, Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer to philosophy was a desire for order, a desire which has nothing daemonic about it, but is typical of the easy-going German nature, objective and professional, tending to discipline the mind and to establish a well-ordered architectonic of existence. They love truth, honourably, faithfully, durably. No selfishness has any place in this love, there is nothing erotic about it, no desire to consume or be consumed in the furnace of passion. Each of them built a house.

Nietzsche’s craving for knowledge arose from a totally different emotional world. Everything allured him; nothing was able to retain his interest. So soon as a problem had lost its virginity, had lost the charm and mystery of maidenhood, he forsook it pitilessly, without jealousy, for others to enjoy if they cared—as did Don Juan, his brother so far as the impulsive life was concerned, in the case of his mille e tre. Nietzsche yearned to seduce, to lay bare, to penetrate voluptuously, and to violate every spiritual object—“to know” in the Biblical sense of the word, when a man “knows” a woman and thereby filches her secret.

Nietzsche, therefore, never set up house with knowledge so as to economize and preserve; he built no spiritual home over his head. Maybe it was a nomadic instinct which forced him into a position of never owning anything. Other German philosophers lived in a quasi-epic tranquility; they spun their theories quietly from day to day, sitting commodiously in an armchair, and their thought-process hardly raised their blood-pressure by a single degree. Kant never produces the impression of a mind seized by thought as by a vampire, and painfully enduring the terrible urge of creation; Schopenhauer from thirty onwards, after he had published The World as Will and Idea, seems to me a staid professor who has retired on a pension and has accepted the conviction that his career is finished.

Now, what renders this life unique and tragical is precisely the absence of repose in Nietzsche’s searchings, his incessant urge to think, his compulsory advance. These make his life a work of art.

Nietzsche’s complaint, therefore, moves us profoundly. “One falls in love with something, and hardly has this something had time to become a deep-felt love than the tyrant within, which we should do well to name our higher self, claims our love for the sacrifice. And we yield to the dictator, though ourselves consumed in a slow fire.” Don Juan’s natures have ever to be wrenched from love’s embraces, for the daimon of dissatisfaction incessantly urges them to further exploits—the same daimon that harried Hölderlin and Kleist and harries all those who worship the infinite.

For the first time in the ocean of German philosophy the black flag was hoisted upon a pirate ship. Nietzsche was a man of a different species, of another race, of a novel type of heroism; his philosophy was not clad in professorial robes, but was harnessed for the fray like a knight in shining armour.

He was a member of no creed, had never sworn allegiance to any country. With the black flag at his masthead and steering into the unknown, into incertitude which he felt to be the mate of his soul, he sailed forward to ever-renewed and perilous adventures. Sword in hand and powder-barrel at his feet, he left the shores of the known behind him and sang his pirate song as he went:

I know whence I spring.
Insatiable as a flame,
I glow and consume myself.
All I touch flashes into fire,
All I leave is a charred remnant.
Such by nature am I—flame.

To obtain a real likeness of the man, we need to see him in his actual surroundings. What were they? A dinning-room in some modest boarding-house, quarters in an equally modest hotel among the Swiss mountains or on the Italian Riviera; insignificant fellow-boarders, for the most part elderly females, experts in small talk.

Quietly and even timidly he sought the place reserved to him at the table, and he remained shrouded in an uncanny silence during the meal. One felt that this was a man who dwelt among the shadows, a man beyond the pale of human society and conversation, one who winced at the slightest noise. He would bow courteously to his fellow-guests, wishing them politely “God day”; and in return his fellow-guests would with equal polite indifference greet “the German professor.” There was never any wine or beer or coffee served where he sat; he smoked neither cigar nor cigarette after meals.

Immediately the meal was ended he would retire to his room, a typical chambre garnie, exiguous and chilly and dowdy. The table was usually littered with sheets of manuscript, with jottings on scraps of paper, with proofs. Not a flower, not an ornament, hardly a book, seldom a letter would be found.

One fine day he might take a stroll, but he would invariably go alone, alone with his thoughts. Never did he encounter a soul to cheer him, never did he have a companion, never did he meet an acquaintance. He hated gray weather, rain, snow which dazzled his eyes; and during such inclement days he would remain a prisoner in his dingy room. He never paid calls, never came in touch with other human beings. Of an evening he supped on a few biscuits and very weak tea, which having swallowed, he would resume his endless communing with his thoughts. A gulp of chloral or another soporific, and he would snatch at sleep, a sleep which is the facile boon of those who do not think overmuch and who are not perpetually harassed by the daimons.

Everywhere he went, the chambre garnie was the same. The names of the towns he visited changed from Sorrento to Turin, from Venice to Nice or Marienbad, but the chambre garnie remained identical, a rented room, a room totally lacking in any feeling of home.

During all the years of his pilgrimage he never once put up in friendly and cheerful surroundings, never at night felt the warm body of a woman pressing against him; never did the sun rise to see him famous, after a thousand nights of dark and silent labour. How immeasurably vaster was Nietzsche’s loneliness than is the picturesque highland of Sils-Maria where between luncheon and tea our tourists wander in the hope of capturing some of the glamour that clings to a spot sanctified by his presence. Nietzsche’s solitude was as wide as the world; it spread over the whole of his life until the very end. Conversation wearied and irritated him who constantly gnawed at his own vitals and whose hunger for himself, and himself alone, was never satiated.


_____________

Chechar’s note:

Of course: these are only excerpts of a chapter of The Struggle with the Daimon, as in earlier or later installments of this series. A new edition of Zweig’s book, with syntax modified for readers of our century (I prefer the 1930 edition that I quote by direct typing from the text), is now available in the market.