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Tag: Adolf Hitler

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Christendom Democracy Egalitarianism Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 94

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20th February 1942, midday

The last somersaults of Christianity.
 

 

The people who call themselves democrats blame us for our social policy as if it were a kind of disloyalty: according to them, it imperils the privileges of the owning classes. They regard it as an attack on liberty; for liberty, in their view, is the right of those who have power to continue to exercise it. I understand their reaction very well—but we had no choice. National Socialism is a purely German phenomenon, and we never intended to revolutionise the world. It was enough for us to be given a free hand in Russia and to be offered a few colonies.

One can’t, in fact, bridge the gap that exists between rich and poor merely with the consolations of religion. In virtue of what law, divine or otherwise, should the rich alone have the right to govern? The world is passing at this moment through one of the most important revolutions in human history. We are witnessing the final somersaults of Christianity. It began with the Lutheran revolution.

The revolutionary nature of that rebellion lies in the fact that until then there had been only one authority, on both the spiritual and the temporal level, that of the Pope—for it was he who delegated temporal power. Dogma cannot resist the ceaselessly renewed attacks of the spirit of free enquiry. One cannot teach at ten o’clock in the morning truths which one destroys in the eleven o’clock lesson.

What is ruining Christianity to-day is what once ruined the ancient world. The pantheistic mythology would no longer suit the social conditions of the period. As soon as the idea was introduced that all men were equal before God, that world was bound to collapse.

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Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 95

the-real-hitler

 

26th February 1942, evening

Roads—German minorities in the Balkans—Importance of the Danube.
 
 
Apart from those in Transylvania, the German minorities in Hungary have a tendency to degenerate. I realised this at Nuremberg, when I saw their delegations march past. In our plans for colonisation in Russia, we’ll find room for these minorities. It’s not profitable for us to repatriate minorities, but if I settle them on territories that don’t cost me anything, that’s quite different. A government must have a lot of authority to succeed in such an operation. Anyway, I suppose that if we want to practise a sincere friendship with Hungary, we shall have to withdraw our minorities from the country.

Obviously, if we want to convert the Danube into a German river, our policy will have to be different. In that case, we’d have to settle all our minorities from the Balkans on the banks of the river. But we would be obliged to give the Germans of the Banat, for example, a land as fertile as the Banat.

It’s clear that the Hungarians and Rumanians will never be reconciled, even if they regard Germany as a common enemy.

If I settle the fifteen hundred thousand Germans of our minorities in the Eastern territories, I’ll build an autobahn fifteen hundred kilometres long, dotted at intervals of fifty to a hundred kilometres with German agglomerations, including some important towns.

That’s a tentative solution, but the Danube remains the Danube. We should establish a strong foothold at the Iron Gates. Unfortunately it’s an unprepossessing region and won’t attract our colonists. It will always be possible to populate the region by the exploitation of the copper-mines. That will be an excellent way of procuring the copper we need, and there will be all the more reason for it if we’re not on good terms with the Yugoslavs.

The Danube is also the link with Turkey. And it’s only when one’s lines of communication are safe that one can build a world empire.

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Catholic Church Christendom Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 96

the-real-hitler

 

27th February 1942, midday

On Christianity and Catholicism.
 

 

Even amongst those who claim to be good Catholics, very few really believe in this humbug. Only old women, who have given up everything because life has already withdrawn from them, go regularly to church. All that’s dead wood—and one shouldn’t waste one’s time in concerning oneself with such brains.

That little country girls and simple working men should be set dancing to that tune, that’s a thing that can be explained. But that intelligent men should make themselves accomplices to such superstitions, and that it’s because of these superstitions, and in the name of love, that hundreds of thousands of human beings have been exterminated in the course of history—that is something I cannot admit.

I shall never believe that what is founded on lies can endure forever. I believe in truth. I’m sure that, in the long run, truth must be victorious.

I shall never come personally to terms with the Christian lie. In acting as I do, I’m very far from the wish to scandalise. But I rebel when I see the very idea of Providence flouted in this fashion. It’s a great satisfaction for me to feel myself totally foreign to that world.

I adopted a definite attitude on the 21st March 1933 when I refused to take part in the religious services, organised at Potsdam by the two Churches, for the inauguration of the new Reichstag.

As far as I’m concerned, I act according to my convictions. I don’t prevent anyone from praying silently, but I’ rebel against all blasphemy. So let nobody waste prayers on me that I shall not have asked for. If my presence on earth is providential, I owe it to a superior will. But I owe nothing to the Church that traffics in the salvation of souls, and I find it really too cruel. I admit that one cannot impose one’s will by force, but I have a horror of people who enjoy inflicting sufferings on others’ bodies and tyranny upon others’ souls.

Our epoch will certainly see the end of the disease of Christianity. It will last another hundred years, two hundred years perhaps. My regret will have been that I couldn’t, like who-ever the prophet was, behold the promised land from afar.

What is important above all is that we should prevent a greater lie from replacing the lie that is disappearing. The world of Judaeo-Bolshevism must collapse.

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Heinrich Himmler Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 97

the-real-hitler

 

27th February 1942, evening

Slogans for the British.
 
 

I very well understand the emperors who were not tempted by the conquest of the East. These spaces had no roads, and no means of heating. Winter there lasted all the year round. It’s easy to say: “Blood and soil.” But for the particularism of the German princes, we’d have succeeded in Germanising the whole of Northern Italy. Racially, the West is to a great extent Germanic.

Himmler’s theory needs serious consideration. We pay far too much honour to Heinrich the Lion, for he helped in frustrating the policy of Barbarossa and Heinrich VI. If everyone had supported the emperors’ policy, what would we not have achieved? Supposing the expansion to the West had been pursued logically, we’d have a great Germanic empire stretching from Denmark to the Loire—and England would not have acquired the importance that is hers to-day.

The moment has come when propaganda can play an important rôle in our favour. It’s not a matter of attacking each Englishman individually to induce him to such and such a particular action. It’s a matter of a propaganda that sets forth undeniable facts, and consequently slogans that fall upon a soil well prepared to receive them. For example: “The British Empire is becoming more and more a colony of American Jews.”

On the organ of Westminster Abbey, the Internationale was played after the service. What can that mean, if not the fall of Christianity? It’s enough to compare the statements now being made in London with those issuing a year ago from Lisbon, to realise the change in the situation. It’s a turning-point in history.

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Music Richard Wagner Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 98

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Night of 28th February-1st March 1942

The Bayreuth Festival 1925—Bayreuth and National Socialism—Rôle of Frau Wagner—Siegfried Wagner.

In 1925, the Bechsteins had invited me to stay with them in Bayreuth. They lived in a villa in the Liszt Strasse (I think this was the name of the street), within a few yards of Wahnfried. I had hesitated to go there, for I was afraid of thus increasing the difficulties of Siegfried Wagner, who was somewhat in the hands of the Jews.

I arrived in Bayreuth towards eleven o’clock in the evening. Lotte Bechstein was still up, but her relatives were in bed. Next morning, Frau Wagner came and brought me some flowers.

What a bustle there was in Bayreuth for the Festival! There exist a few photographs of that period, in which I figure, taken by Lotte Bechstein. I used to spend the day in leather shorts. In the evening, I would put on a dinner-jacket or tails to go to the opera. We made excursions by car into the Fichtelgebirge and into Franconian mountains.

Dietrich Eckart, who had been a critic in Bayreuth, had always told me of the extraordinary atmosphere prevailing there. At the first performance of Parsifal that I attended at Bayreuth, Cleving was still singing. What a stature, and what a magnificent voice! I’d already been present at performances of Parsifal in Munich. That same year, I was also present at the Ring and the Meistersinger. The fact that the Jew Schorr was allowed to sing the rôle of Wotan had the effect of a profanation on me. Why couldn’t they have got Rode from Munich? But there was Braun, an artiste of exceptional quality.

For years I was unable to attend the Festival, and I’d been very distressed about it. Frau Wagner also lamented my absence. She often urged me to come, by letter or by telephone. But I never passed through Bayreuth without paying her a visit.

It’s Frau Wagner’s merit to have created the link between Bayreuth and National Socialism. Siegfried was a personal friend of mine, but he was a political neutral. He couldn’t have been anything else, or the Jews would have ruined him.

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Table talks Women

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 99

the-real-hitler

 

1st March 1942, evening

Jealousy of women.
 

 

In the eyes of a woman, the finest of dresses at once loses its charm—if she sees another woman wearing one like it. I’ve seen a woman suddenly leave the opera at the sight of a rival who had entered a box wearing the same dress as herself. “What cheek!” she said. “I’m going!”

In the pleasure a woman takes in rigging herself out, there is always an admixture of some trouble-making element, something treacherous—to awaken another woman’s jealousy by displaying something that the latter doesn’t possess. Women have the talent, which is unknown to us males, for giving a kiss to a woman-friend and at the same time piercing her heart with a well-sharpened stiletto. To wish to change women in this respect would be ingenuous: women are what they are. Let’s come to terms with their little weaknesses. And if women really only need satisfactions of that sort to keep them happy, let them not deprive themselves, by any means!

For my part, I prefer to see them thus occupied than devoting themselves to metaphysics. There’s no worse disaster than to see them grappling with ideas. In that respect, the point of disaster is reached by women painters, who attach no importance to beauty—when it’s a question of themselves! Other women are extremely careful of their appearance, but not beyond the moment when they’ve found a husband.

Social prejudices are in the process of disappearing. More and more, nature is reclaiming her rights. We’re moving in the proper direction. I’ve much more respect for the woman who has an illegitimate child than for an old maid. I’ve often been told of unmarried women who had children and brought these children up in a truly touching manner. It often happens amongst women servants, notably. The women who have no children finally go off their heads.

I often think of those women who people the convents—because they haven’t met the man with whom they would have wished to share their lives. With the exception of those who were promised to God by their parents, most of them, in fact, are women cheated by life. Human beings are made to suffer passively. Rare are the beings capable of coming to grips with existence.

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Ancient Greece Pedagogy Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 100

the-real-hitler

 

3rd March 1942, midday

Ideas on a curriculum for schools.

 
 

I don’t believe there’s any sense in teaching men anything, in a general way, beyond what they need to know. One overloads them without interesting either them or anybody else. It’s better to awaken men’s instinct for beauty. That was what the Greeks considered the essential thing. To-day people persist in cramming children with a host of unrelated ideas.

Do you see the necessity for teaching geometry, physics and chemistry to a young man who means to devote himself to music? Unless he has a special gift for these branches of study, what will he have left over of them later? I find it absolutely ridiculous, this mania for making young people swallow so many fragmentary notions that they can’t assimilate.

If a pupil is particularly brilliant in his speciality, why embarrass him in his studies by obliging him to assimilate notions that are beyond his powers of assimilation? Wouldn’t it be better to help him further in the direction that comes naturally to him?

Forty years ago, the teaching of history was restricted to a dry listing of dates. There was a total absence of principles. What happened when the teacher, into the bargain, lacked the necessary gift forgiving these dead things a soul? Such teaching was a real torture.

Some children have so much vitality that they can’t sit still, and won’t and can’t concentrate their attention. It seems to me useless to try to force them. I understand, of course, that such an attitude annoys the teachers. But is it just to deprive a child of the possibilities that life offers him, simply because he’s unruly?

I remember that on the average I spent a tenth of the time my comrades spent in doing my prep. My selected branch was history. I felt sorry for those of my comrades who never had a minute for play.

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Psychology Table talks Women

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 101

the-real-hitler

 

Night of 10th-11th March 1942

Feminine jealousy is a defensive reaction
—Some stories about women.

 

In woman, jealousy is a defensive reaction. It surely has an ancestral origin, and must go back to the time when woman simply couldn’t do without the protection of a man. First of all, it’s the reaction of a pregnant woman, who as such has all the more need of protection. She feels so weak in those circumstances, so timid—for herself and for the child she’s carrying. And this child itself, how many years will it take to gain its independence! Without the protection of a man, woman would feel exposed to all perils. So it’s natural that she should be quite particularly attached to the hero, to the man who gives her the most security. Once this security is obtained, it’s comprehensible that she should bitterly defend her property—hence the origin of jealousy.

I knew a woman whose voice became raucous with emotion when I spoke in her presence to another woman. Man’s universe is vast compared with that of woman. Man is taken up with his ideas, his preoccupations. It’s only incidental if he devotes all his thoughts to a woman. Woman’s universe, on the other hand, is man. She sees nothing else, so to speak, and that’s why she’s capable of loving so deeply.

Intelligence, in a woman, is not an essential thing. My mother, for example, would have cut a poor figure in the society of our cultivated women. She lived strictly for her husband and children. They were her entire universe. But she gave a son to Germany.

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Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 102

the-real-hitler

 

Night of 11th-12th March 1942

The evils of smoking—Three farthings a day.

 
 

I made the acquaintance in Bayreuth of a business man, a certain Möckel, who invited me to visit him in Nuremberg. There was a notice above his door: “Smokers not admitted.” For my part, I have no notice above my door, but smokers aren’t admitted.

Some time ago I asked Goring if he really thought it a good idea to be photographed with a pipe in his mouth. And I added, “What would you think of a sculptor who immortalised you with a cigar between your teeth?”

It’s entirely false to suppose that the soldier wouldn’t endure life at the front if he were deprived of tobacco. It’s a mistake to be written on the debit side of the High Command, that from the beginning of the war it allotted the soldier a daily ration of cigarettes. Of course, there’s no question now of going into re- verse.

But as soon as peace has returned, I shall abolish the ration. We can make better use of our foreign currency than squandering it on imports of poison. I shall start the necessary re-education with the young. I’ll tell them: “Don’t follow the example of your elders.”

I experienced such poverty in Vienna. I spent long months without ever having the smallest hot meal. I lived on milk and dry bread. But I spent thirty kreuzers a day on my cigarettes. I smoked between twenty-five and forty of them a day. Well, at that time a kreuzer meant more to me than ten thousand marks do to-day. One day I reflected that with five kreuzers I could buy some butter to put on my bread. I threw my cigarettes into the Danube, and since that day I’ve never smoked again.

I’m convinced that, if I had continued to be a smoker, I’d not have held out against the life of incessant worry that has for so long been mine. Perhaps it’s to this insignificant detail that the German people owes my having been spared to them.

So many men whom I’ve known have died of excessive use of tobacco. My father, first of all. Then Dietrich Eckart, Troost. Soon it’ll be your turn, Hoffmann.

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Aryan beauty Axiology Christendom Friedrich Nietzsche George Lincoln Rockwell God Kali Yuga Literature Neanderthalism Turner Diaries (novel) William Pierce

Solitude

Below, my comments of the ten threads about Nietzsche’s
prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra in a single entry:


1

Visitors will be surprised to learn that a Spanish edition has more detailed endnotes than the academic English translation of Nietzsche’s magnum opus.

This is because Spaniards are fed up of Catholicism. North Americans have a few centuries experimenting with Christianity. Spain has more than a millennium and a half, and our parents’ religion is on its last dying breaths there.

Andrés Sánchez-Pascual’s scholarly translation of Nietzsche’s books since the early 1970s became so popular that over the decades he has received hundreds of letters from his Spanish-speaking readers. The book’s edition of Así Habló Zaratustra that I purchased this month for example (I lost the old copies that I used to read sporadically in the 1970s and 80s) is its twentieth edition.

So fed up of Catholicism are Spain’s thinking classes that, again, the copies I bought of Karlheinz Deschner’s Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums which introduction appears in my compilation The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour, were translated to Spanish for an audience unexpectedly avid of this sort of extraordinarily scholarly material (Deschner’s maximum opus has yet to be translated to English).

Another example. Manu Rodríguez, who has had a place of high honor in this site and in The Fair Race, is also an avid reader of Sánchez-Pascual’s translations of Nietzsche. Thanks to his revaluation of Christian values, Rodríguez overcame his original prejudice against National Socialism in his later posts of La Respuesta de Europa. With the exception of non-Christian geniuses like Revilo Oliver and William Pierce, I have not seen such a metamorphosis of the mind in most of the English-speaking racialists.
 

2

“Could it be possible! This old saint in his woods has not yet heard the news that God is dead!”

This is one of the most quoted passages of Nietzsche’s literature. I abandoned theism long ago. Presently I don’t believe in the existence of a personal god, let alone in the existence of the Jewish god (which would be absolutely dead in the heart of any fanatic of the 14 words if the white nationalist “movement” was not all bluff). That doesn’t mean that I’m an atheist, as Hegel and other philosophers of Classic German Idealism developed a new understanding of God: panentheistic views that I am not prepared to dismiss.

The theological issues of Zarathustra’s encounter with the old hermit aside, I’d rather say something about the soliloquy in the previous post of this fictional character, something related to the very meaning of this blogsite.

The darkest hour is just before the dawn. In the endnotes about the opening soliloquy in Nietzsche’s book, Andrés Sánchez-Pascual interpreted the term Untergehen as follows: “By sinking into his decline, like the sun, Zarathustra moves to the other side. ‘Passing to the other side’ means surpassing oneself and becoming the Overman.”

This is what nationalists have failed to do, and was the message of the last pages of my compilation The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour: white nationalism as a stepping stone at the middle of a river, not as the promised land itself which is beyond the rapid waters.

That was my metaphor.

As to Nietzsche’s metaphor, we could say that today’s whites, including Christian and libertarian white nationalists, have yet to “sink themselves into their sunsets.” Some force may be with them but they’re not overmen yet; they have not surpassed themselves as Hitler’s SS men did (always keep in mind my “Where are the Syssitias?”).

The purpose of this blogsite is to prepare a few metamorphosing men, those in the process of “passing to the other side” (Übergang) from the soul’s darkest night into the coming dawn of the fair race.
 

3

I don’t claim to have reread the Zarathustra since my adolescent infatuation with Nietzsche. But these are surely the words that made a very powerful impression in my mind since my first reading:

“I teach you the Overman. Human being is something that must be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?

What is the ape to a human? A laughing stock or a painful embarrassment. And that is precisely what the human shall be to the Overman: a laughing stock or a painful embarrassment.

You have made your way from worm to human, and much in you is still worm. Once you were apes, and even now a human is still more ape than any ape.

Behold, I teach you the Overman!

The Overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the Overman shall be the meaning of the earth!”

The passage “…and you want to be the ebb of this great flood and would even rather go back to animals than overcome humans?” nails perfectly contemporary whites.

This is exactly what they are doing to themselves—white nationalists included, so reluctant to fight (or preparing to fight by saving precious metals before the dollar crashes). As Jack Frost has asked the clueless, feminized males of The Occidental Observer more than once, “Where’s the resistance?” to the anti-white, exterminationist System. Where are the cells for would-be soldiers that treasure William Pierce’s three books as their New Tablets?

I see none of it. And many Jew-wise nationalists are themselves etnosuicidal because they simply ignore that Christianity inverted healthy values—negative values that they themselves subscribe! Cowardice similar to this in the 19th century explains why Nietzsche’s Zarathustra gives the biblical verse an antithetical sense from the original.
 

4

Now Zarathustra looked at the people and he was amazed. Then he spoke thus: “Mankind is a rope fastened between animal and Overman – a rope over an abyss. What is great about human beings is that they are a bridge and not a purpose: what is lovable about human beings is that they are a crossing over and a going under.”

Again, this brings in mind my metaphor of the bridge. This is what I wrote in the final essay of The Fair Race: “White nationalism is only a stone at the middle of the rapid-flowing waters of a dangerous river; a stepping stone that can help us in our endeavor to jump to the other side. I myself used that stone during my crossing from Christianity and Liberalism to National Socialism. In fact, I could even write such a spiritual odyssey in a text that might be titled ‘From St Francis to Himmler’.” But no American white nationalist today is prepared to wear a T-shirt of Herr Himmler, not even in the privacy of their homes.

“I love the great despisers, because they are the great venerators and arrows of longing for the other shore. I love those who do not first seek behind the stars for a reason to go under and be a sacrifice, who instead sacrifice themselves for the earth, so that the earth may one day become the Overman’s. I love the one who lives in order to know, and who wants to know so that one day the Overman may live. And so he wants his going under.” [sinking in his sunset according to Sánchez-Pascual]

This cannot contrast more with today’s white nationalists, so reluctant to sacrifice themselves as Rockwell did. They want it both ways: enjoy their homely comfort zones and try to “save” the race from the ongoing extermination.
 

5

In Ecce Homo Nietzsche wrote:

In this sense Zarathustra first calls the good “the last men”… He finds them the most harmful kind of man, because they secure their existence at the expense of truth just as they do at the expense of the future.

Do “the last men” sound like contemporary whites overwhelmed with guilt? But white nationalists are the Overman’s “last men” too. Think for example of the voices from those self-righteous, Christian and atheist nationalists who recently called a lone wolf “an evil sociopath” in Dixie, basically subscribing the meme “black lives matter.”

White- or Southern nationalism is phony, was phony and will be phony until societal collapse forces the survivors to grow a hairy pair. This is Pierce’s Diaries: “His forehead was then marked with an indelible dye, and he was turned out and could be readmitted permanently only by bringing back the head of a freshly killed Black or other non-White.”
 

6

Just for the record, about 150,000 copies of a specially durable wartime Zarathustra were distributed to the German troops during the First World War.
 

7

“A nice catch of fish Zarathustra has today! No human being did he catch, but a corpse instead!” looks like me trying to convey Nietzsche’s message to a dead race!
 

8

“I want to teach humans the meaning of their being, which is the Overman, the lightning from the dark cloud ‘human being’.”

For some unfathomable causes, this sentence from the previous section, Prologue §7, reminded me my identification with the art of the pre-Raphaelites and Maxfield Parrish. One of the inner realities that distances me from white nationalists is that they don’t seem to love this 14-words art (“That the beauty of…”) as much as I do.
 

9

“It dawned on me: I need companions, and living ones – not dead companions and corpses that I carry with me wherever I want.”

Just what happened to me during my experience in counter-jihad: after these guys didn’t want to hear about the Jewish problem it was like I had to get rid of their corpses—dead companions. But it also happened to me in white nationalism! After these guys didn’t want to hear about the Christian problem it was like I had to get rid of their corpses.

“It dawned on me: let Zarathustra speak not to the people, but instead to companions!”

Pierce did something similar after the calamity of Rockwell’s murder: instead of speaking to the masses he predicated to a smaller group of companions.

“Look at the good and the just! Whom do they hate most? The one who breaks their tablets of values, the breaker, the lawbreaker – but he is the creative one.”

Hitler was the creative one. Read his table talks.

“Companions the creative one seeks and not corpses, nor herds and believers. Fellow creators the creative one seeks, who will write new values on new tablets.”

Less than a handful visitors of this blog share the moral grammar on my New Tablets…

“Fellow creators seeks Zarathustra, fellow harvesters and fellow celebrators Zarathustra seeks: what need does he have of herds and shepherds and corpses!”

…but still no one wants to become a priest of the 14 words in a latter-day “Syssitia” (like the one Rockwell had).

“I do not want to even speak again with the people – for the last time have I spoken to a dead person.”

Occasionally I still comment at The Occidental Observer but even that has to end—the commentariat and even the authors are clueless that Christian axiology enabled the Jewish problem and the Negro problem and the Mestizo problem and even the more recent empowerment of Asia.

“I shall join the creators, the harvesters, the celebrators: I shall show them the rainbow and all the steps to the Overman.”

Hitler and Pierce showed this rainbow but who among us really follows their revaluated axiology? Most white nationalists follow the Old Tablets; atheist nationalists share also the Christian moral grammar and even the neonazis have not really broken the Tablets.

“I want to go to my goal, and I go my own way; over the hesitating and dawdling I shall leap. Thus let my going be their going under!”

This describes me…
 

10

And so Nietzsche’s lyric prologue ends. Below, some snippets from the Cambridge introduction by Robert B. Pippin:

Zarathustra leaves his cave to revisit the human world because he wants both to prophesy and help hasten the advent of something like a new “attempt” on the part of mankind, a post “beyond” or “over the human” (Übermensch) aspiration. Such a goal would be free of the psychological dimensions that have led the human type into a state of some crisis (made worse by the fact that most do not think a crisis has occurred or that any new attempt is necessary).

The problem, then, that Zarathustra must address, the problem of “nihilism,” is a kind of collective failure of desire…

Nietzsche clearly thinks we cannot understand such a possibility, much less be both shamed and inspired by it, except by a literary and so “living” treatment of such an existential possibility. And Nietzsche clearly thinks he has such a chance, in the current historical context of crisis, collapse, boredom, and confusion, a chance of shaming and cajoling us away from commitments that will condemn us to a “last man” or “pale atheist” sort of existence, and of inspiring a new desire, a new “tension” of the spirit…

As noted, the problem Zarathustra confronts seems to be a failure of desire; nobody wants what he is offering, and they seem to want very little other than a rather bovine version of happiness. It is that sort of failure that proves particularly difficult to address, and that cannot be corrected by thinking up a “better argument” against such a failure.

The events that are narrated are also clearly tied to the question of what it means for Zarathustra to have a teaching, to try to impart it to an audience suffering in this unusual way, suffering from complacency or dead desire. Only at the very beginning, in the Prologue, does he try to “lecture publicly,” one might say, and this is a pretty unambiguous failure.

The reminder here of the Prologue appears to indicate that Zarathustra himself had portrayed his own teaching in a comically inadequate way, preaching to the multitudes as if people could simply begin to overcome themselves by some revolutionary act of will…

He had shifted from market place preaching to conversations with disciples in Part I, and at the end of that Part I he decides to forgo even that and to go back to his cave alone.

rosa_s_pak