web analytics

Category: Stefan Zweig

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Psychology Stefan Zweig

A one-man drama

der_kampf_mit_dem_daemon

The tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche’s life was that it happened to be a one-man show, a monodrama wherein no other actor entered upon the stage: not a soul is at his side to succour him; no woman is there to soften by her ever-present sympathy the stresses of the atmosphere. Every action takes its birth in him, and its repercussions are felt by him alone. Not one person ventures to enter wholeheartedly into the innermost sanctum of Nietzsche’s destiny; the poet-philosopher is doomed to speak, to struggle, to suffer alone. He converses with no one, and no one has anything to say to him. What is even more terrible is that none hearken to his voice.

In this unique tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche had neither fellow-actors nor audience, neither stage nor scenery nor costume; the drama ran its course in a spaceless realm of thought. Basel, Naumburg, Nice, Sorrento, Sils-Maria, Genoa, and so forth are so many names serving as milestones on his life’s road; they were never abiding-places, never a home. The scene having once been set, it remained the same till the curtain was rung down; it was composed of isolation, of solitude, of that agonizing loneliness which Nietzsche’s own thoughts gathered around him and with which he was entrapped as by an impenetrable bell-glass, a solitude wherein there were no flowers or colours or music or beasts or men, a solitude whence even God was excluded, the dead and petrified solitude of some primeval world which existed long ago or may come into being æons hence.

At first, while he was professor of Basel University and could speak his mind from the professorial chair, and while Wagner’s friendship thrust him into the limelight, Nietzsche’s words drew attentive listeners; but the more he delved into his own mind, the more he plunged into the depths of time, the less did he find responsive echoes. One by one his friends, and even strangers, rose to their feet and withdrew affrighted at the sound of his monologue, which became wilder and more ecstatic as the philosopher warmed to his task. Thus was he left terribly alone, upon the stage of his fate. Gradually the solitary actor grew disquieted by the fact that he was talking into the void; he raised his voice, shouted, gesticulated, hoping to find a response even if it were no better than a contradiction.

Thus the drama was played to a finish before empty seats, and no one guessed that the mightiest tragedy of the nineteenth century was unrolling itself before men’s eyes. Such was Friedrich Nietzsche’s tragedy, and it had its roots in his utter loneliness. Unexampled was the way in which an inordinate wealth of thought and feeling confronted a world monstrously void and impenetrably silent. The daimon within him hounded him out of his world and his day, chasing him to the uttermost marge of his own being.

Nietzsche never tried to evade the demands of the monster whose grip he felt. The harder the blows, the more resonantly did the unflawed metal of his will respond. And upon this anvil, brought to red heat by passion, the hammer descended with increased vigour, forging the slogan which was ultimately to steel his mind to every attack. “The greatness of man; amor fati; never desiring to change what has happened in the past; what will happen in the future and throughout eternity; not merely to bear the inevitable, still less to mask it, but to love it.”

This fervent love-song to the Powers smothers the cry of his heart. Thrown to earth, oppressed by the mutism of the world, gnawed by the bitterness and sorrow, he never once raised his hands to implore a respite. Quite otherwise! He demanded to be yet further tortured, to become yet more isolated, to be granted yet deeper trials; the greatest to which mortal man can be put. “O will of my soul that I call fate, thou who art in me and above me, take care of me and preserve me for a great destiny.”

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Goethe Psychology Stefan Zweig

Master Builders

A Typology of the Spirit

by Stefan Zweig

der_kampf_mit_dem_daemon

Translated from the German
by Eden and Cedar Paul
Viking Press, 1930

PART TWO

The Struggle with the Daimon

Hölderlin
Kleist
Nietzsche



Excerpted from the introduction:

Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche are obviously alike even in respect of the outward circumstances of their lives; they stand under the same horoscopical aspect. One and all they were hunted by an overwhelming, a so-to-say superhuman power, were hunted out of the warmth and cosiness of ordinary experience into a cyclone of devastating passion, to perish prematurely amid storms of mental disorder, and one of them by suicide.

A power greater than theirs was working within them, so that they felt themselves rushing aimlessly through the void. In their rare moments of full awareness of self, they knew that their actions were not the outcome of their own volition but that they were thralls, were possessed (in both senses of the word) by a higher power, the daimonic.

I term “daimonic” the unrest that is in us all, driving each of us out of himself into the elemental. It seems as if nature had implanted into every mind an inalienable part of the primordial chaos, and as if this part were interminably striving—with tense passion—to rejoin the superhuman, suprasensual medium whence it derives. The daimon is the incorporation of that tormenting leaven which impels our being (otherwise quiet and almost inert) towards danger, immoderation, ecstasy, renunciation, and even self-destruction. But in those of common clay, this factor of our composition which is both precious and perilous proves comparatively ineffective, is speedily absorbed and consumed. In such persons only at rare moments, during the crises of puberty or when, through love or the generative impulse, the inward cosmos is heated to the boiling point, does the longing to escape from the familiar groove, to renounce the trite and the common-place, exert its mysterious way. For the daimon cannot make its way back to the infinite which is his home except by ruthlessly destroying the finite and the earthly which restrains him, by destroying the body wherein, for a season, he is housed.

Thus it comes to pass that everyone whose nature excels the commonplace, everyone whose impulses are creative, wrestles perforce with his daimon. This is a combat of titans, a struggle between lovers, the most splendid contest in which we mortals can engage. Many succumb to the daimon’s fierce onslaught as the woman succumbs to the passion of the impetuous male; they are overpowered by his preponderant strength; they feel themselves joyfully permeated by the fertilizing element. Many subjugate him; their cold, resolute, purposive will constrains his ardours to accept their guidance even while he animates their energies.

Hölderlin, Kleist and Nietzsche were the Promethean race which is in revolt against customary forms and tends thereby to destroy itself. There is no art worthy of the name without daimonism, no great art that does not voice the music of the spheres.

The first thing that is obvious in Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche is their detachment from the world. The daimon plucks away from realities those whom he holds in his grip. Not one of the three had wife or children, any more than had their congeners Beethoven and Michelangelo; they had neither fixed home nor permanent possessions, neither settled occupation nor secure footing in the world. They were nomads, vagrants, eccentrics; they were despised and rejected; they lived in the shadows. Not one of them ever had a bed to call his own; they sat in hired chairs, wrote at hired desks, and wandered from one lodging-house to another. Nowhere did they take root; not even Eros could establish binding ties for those whom the jealous daimon had espoused. Their friendships were transitory, their appointments fugitive, their work unremunerative; they stood ever in vacant spaces and created in the void. Thus their existence was like that of shooting stars, which flash on indeterminable paths, whereas Goethe circled in a fixed orbit.

For Kleist, Hölderlin and Nietzsche, living was not to be learned, nor worth learning. Fire became their element; flame, their mode of activity; and their lives were perpetually scorched in the furnaces which alone made their work possible. As time went on, they grew even more lonely, more estranged from the world of men. To the daemonic temperament reality seems inadequate: Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche, each in his own way, were rebels against the existing order.

The formula of Goethe’s life was the circle, a closed curve; that of an existence perfectly rounded and self-contained; the daimonics’ curve is the parabola: a steep, impetuous ascent, an uprush into limitless space, a brusque change of direction, followed by no less a steep, a no less impetuous decline. The climax, both in respect of imaginative creation and in respect to the artist’s personal life, is reached immediately after the fall. Goethe’s death, on the other hand, is an inconspicuous point in the circle; but the life of the daimonic terminates in an explosion or a conflagration. In the latter case death compensates for the material poverty of life.

Invariably, even in the most perplexing and most dangerous manifestations, the creative genius has a value supreme over other values, a meaning profounder than that of all other meanings.

Categories
Alexander the Great Alice Miller Ancient Greece Ancient Rome Archeology Carl Gustav Jung Carthage Child abuse Christendom Ethnic cleansing God Hojas Susurrantes (book) Holocaust Human sacrifice Infanticide Lloyd deMause Maxfield Parrish Mayas Neanderthalism Old Testament Philosophy of history Pre-Columbian America Prehistory Pseudoscience Psychiatry Psychohistory Psychology Stefan Zweig

Translation of pages 543-609 of “Hojas susurrantes”

Boas

Note of September 2017: I have removed this text because a slightly revised version of it is now available in print within my book Day of Wrath.

Categories
Music Psychology Stefan Zweig

An unheard of continent for nationalists

The recent discussion in this blog about degenerate forms of music moved me today to add a post about Jung’s concept of the “Self.”

It’s all too obvious that, like the rest of mankind, white nationalists are totally ignorant of depth psychology, which must not be confused with the epidermal psychology that is taught at our universities.

Confusion-bookA few days ago I reviewed my copy of Stefan Zweig’s Confusion: The Private Papers of Privy Councillor R von D as a starting point to introduce nationalists to deep psychology. Unfortunately, I cannot quote it here since my copy is in Spanish.

Originally the idea occurred to me to write every Friday or Saturday about how modern pleb music—rock and its heaviest derivatives—is “bad for you,” as CorkyAgain said in a recent thread. Unfortunately, besides some snippets from George Lincoln Rockwell and Ford’s The International Jew about music promoted by the Jews I don’t know if there exists more substantial literature that demonstrate this premise, that is, scholarly literature from professional musicians.

Whereas the members of my family are classical musicians, my field of interest had nothing to do with music. Music is not my forte, at least not as a profession. Before I became racially aware I used to be a fan of what may be called intuitive psychology, to differentiate it from academic psychology: the latter, the impossible attempt to understand the human psyche without delving deeply into the dark chambers of one’s soul. Genuine delving into one’s own Self is so didactic that I believe that Zweig could be a good starting point to invite nationalists to set foot on an unheard of continent. That they know nothing of it reminds me that most people who live in New York have never set foot in the Statue of Liberty.

Incidentally, those who complain that Zweig was Jewish should remember that he passed the “Hitler test”. Zweig wrote the script for a Richard Strauss comic opera, and Strauss insisted that Zweig’s name appeared on the theatrical billing, much to the ire of the Nazi regime. But it seems that the script of Strauss’ chosen librettist was read by none other than the Führer himself before the opera was premiered.

I am tempted to purchase a copy of a German-English translation of Zweig’s Confusion with the sole purpose of quoting it here. But is it worth it? I very much doubt that nationalists are interested in intuitive psychology, in spite of the fact that much of the movement’s failure has been the result of the emotional imbalance of some of its members during the previous decades.