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Tag: Biography

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 45

Right at the end of October 192 3, the Völkisch and paramilitary leaders assembled in Röhm’s Reichswehr office in Munich and began preparations for armed action. Their concern was at least as much to head off any separatist tendencies in the Bavarian leadership as it was to support them in joint action against Berlin. It was expected that Kahr would announce his plans for a coup against the Berlin government at a meeting scheduled for 8 November at the Bürgerbräukeller. If Hitler and his co-conspirators were going to forestall Kahr, and his suspected separatist agenda, or co-opt him for their own plans, this would be an excellent opportunity to catch all the major protagonists in one place.

Hitler struck in an evening of high drama. He burst into the Bürgerbräukeller, fired his pistol into the ceiling and announced to general applause that the Bavarian government of Knilling and the Reich government in Berlin were deposed. Hitler ‘suggested’ Kahr as regent for Bavaria and Pöhner as minister president thereof. He promised that a ‘German national government’ would be announced in Munich that same evening. He ‘recommended’ that he himself should take over the ‘leadership’ until accounts had been settled with the ‘criminals’ in Berlin. Ludendorff was to be commander of a new national army; Lossow Reichswehr minister, and Seisser German minister of police. Attempting to marry Bavarian local pride and the pan-German mission, Hitler said that it was the task of the provisional government to march on the ‘den of iniquity in Berlin’. In a considerable concession to Bavarian sensibilities he vowed ‘to build up a cooperative federal state in which Bavaria gets what it deserves’. Kahr, Lossow and Seisser were held captive and prevailed upon to support the coup.

The putschists now swung into action. Their ‘Proclamation to all Germans’ announced that the nation would no longer be treated like a ‘Negro tribe’. Hanfstaengl was detailed to inform and influence the foreign press; he tipped off Larry Rue of the Chicago Tribune that the coup was about to begin and appeared in the Bürgerbräukeller with a group of journalists from other countries. The offices of the pro-SPD Münchener Post were smashed up by the SA, but there was no ‘white terror’ on the streets of Munich; Hitler’s main anxiety was the Bavarian right, not the left. One of the few detentions was that of Count Soden-Fraunhofen, a staunch Wittelsbach loyalist who was accused of being a ‘hireling of the Vatican’. Winifred and Siegfried Wagner, who were almost certainly aware of the plot in advance, were due at the Odeon Theatre immediately after the coup, where Siegfried was to direct a Wagner concert, intended perhaps as a celebration. Hitler announced melodramatically that ‘the morning will see either a national government in Germany or our own deaths’.

The morning brought the sobering realization that the putschists were on their own. There was no general national rising across the Reich. Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, who had given their ‘word of honour’ under duress to support the coup, slipped away and began to mobilize forces to restore order. Hitler’s worst fears were confirmed: he was now fighting not merely red Berlin, but reactionary separatist forces in Munich. A bitter Nazi pamphlet rushed out that day announced. that ‘today the [November revolution] was to have been extinguished from Munich and the honour of the fatherland restored ‘. ‘This,’ the pamphlet added, invoking Hitler’s rhetoric, ‘would have been the Bavarian mission.’ Kahr, Lossow and Seisser, alas, had betrayed the cause. Behind them, the pamphlet continued, stood ‘the same trust of separatists and Jews’ who had been responsible for the treasonous Armistice in 1918, the ‘slave treaty of Versailles and the despicable stock-exchange speculation’ and all other miseries. It concluded with a call to make one last effort to save the situation. What was striking about this document was the far greater stress laid on the separatist-clerical and capitalist danger than on the threat of Bolshevism [emphasis by Ed.].

Hitler and his co-conspirators set out mid morning 9 November for central Munich in a column numbering about 2,000 men, many of them armed. Strasser, who had turned up from Nuremberg with a contingent of followers, was particularly belligerent. Their plan was unclear, but it seems to have been to wrest the initiative back from Kahr; Hitler may also have intended to go down fighting as he had vowed the night before. Outside the Feldherrenhalle at the Odeonsplatz, they encountered a police cordon. Hitler linked arms with Scheubner-Richter and the column marched straight at the police lines, weapons at the ready.

It is not clear whether he was seeking death as a blood sacrifice to inspire future generations or whether he was trying to imitate Napoleon’s famous confrontation with Marshal Ney, when the emperor marched slowly towards his old comrades, who refused to shoot. Shots were exchanged, leading to fatalities on both sides. Hitler himself escaped death only narrowly, injured his arm and fled the scene. Before the day was out, Kahr issued a proclamation announcing the failure of the ‘Hitler­ Putsch’. The great drama had ended in complete fiasco.

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David Irving Heinrich Himmler

True Himmler, 4

Previous True Himmler entries: 0, 1, 2, 3.

 

Gaudeamus Igitur [‘So Let Us Rejoice’]

HE SITS IN THE TRAIN brooding, a few days after his nineteenth birthday in October 1919. There is a young couple seated opposite. He noticed them earlier, on the railroad platform; they are married, and he envies them. He is visiting Eichstatt, a town popular with pilgrims. It has a castle, built by mediaeval princes and clergy—‘impossible with today’s wages and workforce,’ reflects Heinrich Himmler, the teenager. Twenty or more years from now he will command a slave-labour force of millions building much vaster structures.

He has brought along something to read, Friedrich Schiller’s 1784 pamphlet on ‘The Stage as a Moral Institution’—a call for playwrights to purify the German language; both are disciplines after his father’s heart, and the Classics professor may well have pressed this reading matter into his hands. Lingering on rather lower ground, Heini has brought along a ghost story, The White Hand, to read as well.

He and Gebhard are visiting castles and monasteries and family—rattling along on the narrow-gauge railroad to Rebhard-Hofmühle station, and then on to the majestic church at Eichstatt, where their uncle Karl Patin has been a priest since 1894 in the famous abbey of St Walburg’s, named after an English Benedictine missionary whose bones rest here for over twelve hundred years. Uncle Karl is just back from officiating at a funeral, and he invites them in for tea.

Heinrich Himmler is still getting to know his family in October 1919 as he prepares for his years of higher education: men of the cloth and Classical academics, that is his milieu.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 44

Hitler flanked this rhetoric with a carefully calibrated propagandistic effort. He gave a speech at Bayreuth—Wagner’s city—in mid September 1923, and returned about a fortnight later to speak again. On that occasion, taking up the invitation of Winifred Wagner, the English­born wife of Wagner’s son Siegfried, he went to the Wagner shrine at Wahnfried. There Hitler spoke to the composer’s son-in-law, the racist political philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain, author of the best-selling Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, upon whom he made a very favourable impression. Hitler paid homage at Wagner’s grave. He also published an autobiographical text and a selection of his speeches under the title of Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches. The name on the front page was that of his associate Victor von Koerber, but the real author was Hitler. He rehearsed his political positions, including his attacks on ‘Bolshevism’ and ‘international Jewish mammonism’, but pointedly deleted all negative references to the United States, most likely in order to encourage US toleration of a successful coup. The principal purpose of the book was to cast Hitler as the saviour of Germany. Koerber-Hitler spoke of him no longer as a ‘drummer’ but as ‘an architect who is building the mighty German cathedral’. No doubt drawing on his overtures to Bavarian Catholics, Hitler had himself styled as a messianic figure, whose political awakening was compared to the resurrection of Christ, and whose writings were a kind of holy writ.

On 26 September, on the same day as the end of passive resistance in the Ruhr, the Bavarian government announced a state of emergency. Kahr was made commissary general. That same day, too, Hitler signed a proclamation in support of a ‘Battle League to Break Interest Slavery’; pointedly, the main enemy was defined as international capitalism and the victor powers rather than the German left…

Despite the local demands on his time, Hitler made serious efforts to square international opinion. He gave an interview to the American United Press at Bayreuth in which he said that the Bavarian ‘masses’ would back him over Kahr and announced that he was ‘no monarchist and would battle against all monarchic adventures, because the Hohenzollern and Wittelsbachers would merely encourage separatist divisions’. Hitler also gave an interview to the distinguished German-American journalist George Sylvester Viereck, in which he claimed to be the only bulwark against ‘Bolshevism’ and revealed his territorial ambitions. ‘We must regain our colonies and we must expand eastward’, he argued. ‘There was a time when we could have shared the world with England. Now, we can stretch our cramped limbs only to the east. The Baltic is merely a German lake.’ At around the same time, he told an American newspaper of his plans for a ‘Monroe Doctrine for Germany’, the first time he articulated a theme which was to run through his entire strategy. In mid October 1923, he made a public statement in Corriere Italiano once again renouncing any German claim to South Tyrol, as a gesture to Mussolini. He was convinced that France would support a separatist coup, but seems to have believed that Britain and the United States would at least tolerate his own Putsch.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 43

Hitler also worked to expand his international links. These were partly designed to secure funding. One of the figures of whom Hitler had high hopes was the American automobile tycoon and Democratic Party Congressional candidate Henry Ford, who not only symbolized the kind of national productive capitalism he so admired but was an active anti-Semite into the bargain. His book, translated as Der internationale ]ude (1921), had been a great success in Germany. It was well known at the time that Hitler kept a portrait of Ford in his office, and there was talk of inviting the American to speak.

His overtures to Ford were a failure. According to Robert D. Murphy, US vice consul in Munich, who met Hitler in early March 1923, ‘Mr Ford’s organization had so far made no money contributions to the party’ and ‘his funds were principally contributed by patriotic Germans living abroad’. Press reports spoke of Nazi hopes for ‘America’ and a joint struggle against Jews and capitalism. At the end of August 1923, Hitler travelled to Switzerland in search of financial backing. ‘Hitler is very engaging,’ one of the ladies of the house of a wealthy Swiss supporter noted in her diary, ‘his whole body trembles when he speaks,’ which he did ‘wonderfully’. Hitler told the Swiss general Wille: ‘I will strike in the autumn’…

Hitler tried to win over the Americans through a series of interviews. In mid-August 1923 he gave a fire­ breathing interview to the New York World promising a ‘fascist dictatorship’ and demanding that ‘officialdom must be reduced to a minimum’, perhaps a sop to the ‘small government’ preferences of his American readers.

These overtures suggest that Hitler’s overwhelmingly negative image of Anglo-America had given way to a more positive attitude. This was partly tactically motivated, because he realized that his domestic aims could only be achieved with the support or at least the toleration of London and Washington.

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Autobiography Conspiracy theories

Oswald

In the comments section of my article ‘The Failed Oswald’, on Tuesday I said something that I now quote again, slightly modified. I wrote that I recently acquired two books on the subject of conspiracy theories, one by a couple of Americans and another by a European:

Both are flawed precisely because their authors are normies. And normies are incapable of seeing the ultimate truth. However, if I dabble in the subject of conspiracy theories it is because, for a dozen years now, I have been dismayed that many on the racial right subscribe to theories which, in my opinion, are like a Vampire sucking the sap from the dissident: who should devote his efforts to developing National Socialism to an evolved, post-1945 NS (cf. what I wrote about Savitri Devi’s magnum opus yesterday).

This said, there is some value in the books pictured above: It is the proles who have no say in the spheres of power who weave these conspiratorial cobwebs. What strikes me is that intelligent people like Chris Martenson are now spinning these kinds of webs regarding the failed Oswald (Thomas Matthew Crooks) while less intelligent people, like those who listened to the Secret Service at the Capitol Hill hearings on Tuesday, are far more sceptical of conspiracy theories.

The powerless are the ones who weave cobwebs in a representative democracy. If demography collapses significantly in an apocalyptic scenario and Aryan man was to return to direct democracy as in ancient Greece, it would be much easier to circumvent these webs where the proles are presently entangled. The subject is complex, and the normie authors of the American book pictured above at least did their statistical work on those who believe in conspiracy theories.

As regular visitors to this site will know, I discovered white nationalism at a late age: after I had been in this world for half a century. My previous intellectual work was focused on the psychic ravages of parental abuse of children.

One of the psychological fallacies mentioned in the books above is that, to the simplistic mindset of the proles, an act of enormous political and social repercussions cannot have a prosaic explanation (Oswald). There has to be a massive conspiracy of very powerful people who had a grudge against JFK. That, of course, is a ‘psychological fallacy’ and those not versed in how the mind of someone who was severely abused as a child or adolescent by their parents works might read The Gunman and His Mother: Lee Harvey Oswald, Marguerite Oswald, and the Making of an Assassin.

It’s hard to imagine how a mother could torment a child so much that, now grown up, he becomes an Oswald. But now that I am revising my autobiographical books for translation into English, I have to pause for a week because the other day I went through my mother’s entire diary, quoted in toto in the second book of my trilogy: a diary so disturbing that I have to take long breaks, even though decades have passed since she wrote it.

Someone like me can understand Oswald, or Thomas Matthew Crooks who suffered massive bullying at school. But anyone who hasn’t been treated so badly by life can’t even imagine it.

Although reading books is a serious way to delve into the matter, not everyone who has rejected the conspiratorial nonsense believed by the proles will do so. If The Gunman and His Mother won’t be on the shelves of those who delve into the JFK assassination, they might at least check out this audiovisual interview with Paul Gregory by Peter Robinson, the host of Uncommon Knowledge. Gregory dealt directly with Oswald and in his recent book debunks the wide range of conspiracy theories about the assassination by demonstrating that Oswald acted alone.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 40

Rare Hitler pictures.

During this period, Hitler continued to elaborate and develop his strategic thinking. Throughout 1923, he lambasted international capitalism—Jewish and non-Jewish—as the source of Germany’s ills. Hitler provided a brief foreword to Gottfried Feder’s book on the subject describing it as a ‘catechism’ of National Socialism. The salience of anti-capitalism, fears of expropriation and exploitation and enslavement by foreign masters is very clear in the party’s ‘work of the committee for food security of the National Socialist movement’, which Hitler blessed in the summer of 1923. It defined the ‘internal enemy’ as ‘profiteering in the system of the national economy’, the ‘idea of class conflict’ and ‘immoral tendencies in government and law-making’. It lamented the crucifixion of the German middle class by the ‘massive fraud’ of ‘our money economy’, the general ‘spirit of speculation’ and the ‘terror of the capitalist idea’. The document made no direct mention of Bolshevism or the Soviet Union. It recommended—with Hitler’s approval—that the state protect the ‘basic assets of the nation’, namely ‘foodstuffs and manpower’ through ‘an anti-capitalist legislation in the fields of land and settlement, housing, but also in the first instance in the field of the supply of necessities’. This would require the ‘exclusion of foreign capital from German land and soil, businesses and cultural assets’.

Like the Ludendorff circle, Hitler was much less worried about the fate of German minorities and the peripheral lands of the Reich than about the fate of the core area, which he believed to be threatened with subjection and even extinction. Hitler was also beginning to look at long-term solutions to Germany’s predicament. He rejected the common notion of an ‘internal’ colonization of sparsely populated German lands in favour of territorial expansion. ‘The [re-]distribution of land alone,’ he warned in the spring of 1923, ‘cannot bring relief. The living conditions of a nation can at the end of the day only be improved through the political will to expand.’

The concept of Lebensraum is already clearly visible here, though the term itself was not used.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms) Free speech / association

Hitler, 39

Hitler’s position at this time was complicated. He was still virtually unknown in most of Germany. The main Berlin newspapers ignored him and his party. They didn’t even report on the riotous Deutscher Tag at Coburg, whose resonance was confined to south Germany. Hitler had very few funders outside of Bavaria, with the notable exception of the Ruhr industrial baron Fritz Thyssen, who contributed substantially in the course of 1923. That said, within the non-particularist Bavarian right­ wing nationalist milieu, Hitler now enjoyed a commanding position. He was well known in Munich, which Thomas Mann described in a 1923 letter to the American journal The Dial as ‘the city of Hitler’. His speeches drew large and ecstatic crowds. Karl Alexander von Müller, who heard him speak for the first time at the Löwenbräukeller in late January 1923, describes the ‘burning core of hypnotic mass excitement’ created by the flags, the relentless marching music and the short warm-up speeches by lesser party figures before the man himself appeared amid a flurry of salutes. Hitler would then be interrupted at almost every sentence by tempestuous applause, before departing for his next engagement.

Over the next few months, the tempo of Nazi events and activities increased. There were in excess of 20,000 NSDAP members at the start of 1923, and that figure more than doubled over the next ten months to 55,000; the SA nearly quadrupled from around 1,000 men to almost 4,000 during the same period. Hitler himself was so prominent that the NSDAP was widely known as the ‘Hitler-Movement’, the term under which his activities were now recorded by the Bavarian police. He had become a cult figure. The Völkischer Beobachter became a daily paper in February 1923, giving preferential treatment to the printing of Hitler’s speeches. Two months later, it began marking the Führer’s birthday, an honour not accorded any other Nazi leader. He had long given up the humble role of drummer. Hitler spoke once again of the need for a dictator. The German people, he claimed, ‘are waiting today for the man who calls out to them: Germany, rise up [and] march’. There was no doubt from the context and rhetoric that he planned to play that role himself. His followers styled him not merely the leader of the national movement but Germany’s saviour and future leader. The Oberführer of the SA, Hermann Goring, acclaimed him at his birthday rally on 20 April 1923 as the ‘beloved Fuhrer of the German freedom movement’. Alfred Rosenberg described him simply as ‘Germany’s leader [Führer]’.

Conscious of his tenuous position within the Catholic Bavarian mainstream, Hitler continued to try to build bridges to the Church, or at least to its adherents. ‘We want,’ Hitler pledged, ‘to see a state based on true Christianity. To be a Christian does not mean a cowardly turning of the cheek, but to be a struggler for justice and a fighter against all forms of injustice.’ The NSDAP did succeed in making some inroads among Catholic students at the university and the peasantry and in winning over quite a few clerics, including for a while Cardinal Faulhaber, but for the most part Hitler made little headway.

There are two things we might comment on in this passage.

First, we are living in a world of soft totalitarianism. We can already imagine a National Socialist party in Europe today that could recruit thousands of members! That would not even be possible in the US, despite its hypocrisy in claiming that its amendments allow citizens both free speech and freedom of association (in reality, Uncle Sam allows neither, as we saw a few years ago in Charlottesville).

The other issue is this saying that true Christianity doesn’t turn the other cheek but fights injustice. While a hundred years ago it was possible to use this kind of rhetoric in the more conservative sectors of Bavarian society, today it is impossible. The mainstream Christian churches follow the zeitgeist of our century, without exception. I am not criticising Hitler’s use of this rhetoric. But under the circumstances, post-1945 National Socialism must reinvent itself.

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'Hitler' (book by Brendan Simms)

Hitler, 38

Part Two

F R A G M E N T A T I O N

In 1923-7, Hitler grappled with the forces of disintegration in Germany. The most immediately threatening of these remained German particularism, which was largely indistinguishable in his mind from separatism. Hitler was also deeply exercised by the supposed racial fragmentation of the German people. This he attributed partly to deep political divisions, aggravated by foreign and Jewish support for parliamentarism, and partly to the historical legacy of confessional strife. Hitler attempted to head off these dangers through a putsch in Munich. In his subsequent speeches and writing, Hitler contrasted this miserable vista with the natural coherence of the Anglo-American world, which now dominated Germany more than ever, not just militarily, but economically and culturally as well. Last but not least, during his prison term at Landsberg and after his release, Hitler fought the threatened fragmentation of the NSDAP. It was only with difficulty that Hitler re­-established his authority over the ideological direction of the movement and the party apparatus, a process that was not yet complete by the late 1920s.

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Friedrich Nietzsche Videos

Final years

Nietzsche’s final years were spent in the Weimar home under the care of his sister Elizabeth (watch a 1-minute BBC clip here).

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Der Antichrist (book) Friedrich Nietzsche

Crusade

against the Cross, 20

Nietzsche’s guesthouse in Via Carlo Alberto, Turin.

In the first entry of this series, I said that the article by Robert Sheaffer that I first read in 1993 had motivated me to reopen the Nietzsche case, insofar as I consider it central to the point of view of The West’s Darkest Hour. And as I said at the end of the previous entry, once one discovers the primary cause of Aryan decline, everyone else seems idiotic to us, just as the boy who saw the naked king found the adults around him incredibly idiotic.

Becoming like the child of the story represents a huge problem for the adult visionary. ‘Running towards the sun’—Nietzsche’s poetic words to describe himself—in search of ultimate truth results in the visionary being charred, moth-like, as he approaches the primary source of light. No one has described Nietzsche’s dazzling charring better than Stefan Zweig, excerpts from whose book The Struggle with the Daimon I posted more than a decade ago, here.

While I was harsh on Nietzsche in criticising what I call in my autobiography ‘idiotic defence mechanisms’, albeit in his case referring to the eternal return of the identical, I am happy to point out that with The Antichrist this mechanism disappears. Nietzsche himself, in a letter to Franz Overbeck, had acknowledged in April 1884 that his Zarathustra was an ‘anteroom’ and that he was going to spend the next years of his life on ‘the development of my philosophy’.

In The Antichrist, both Zarathustra and the eternal return disappear. Zarathustra would only reappear in his poem Dionysian Dithyrambs, but it is very significant that by this time in December 1888, Nietzsche had already lost his self, and the very title of the first poem of that collection of nine poems to Dionysus is entitled ‘Only Mad! Only Poet!’

That the cause of Nietzsche’s madness was unknown to the doctors who treated him is clear from a letter to Peter Gast of 29 September 1904 written by Otto Binswanger, the director of the Psychiatric Clinic in Jena, where Nietzsche was interned for some months: ‘No one will be able to write an exact medical history of Friedrich Nietzsche’, Binswanger asserted, ‘since the beginnings of the illness have not been fully established’.

Why, then, the mania of the last decades to see the aetiology of Nietzsche’s disorder as a somatic disease? Tip: it is part of Big Pharma’s propaganda to sell us their damned drugs from the 1950s onwards. And the same can be said of those who have written about Vincent van Gogh, who would also be temporarily committed to a psychiatric ward. A better approach to the tragedy of both simultaneous cases can be found in the last words of the third volume of Curt Paul Janz’s extensive biographical study of Nietzsche:

The indulgent veil of mental derangement meant that he no longer had to be aware of it. It gave him something else: the tremendum of the genius chord. Without this ending, the fascination that his entire philosophy exerts on the history of philosophy, which places him close to the heroic-tragic end of Socrates—that Socrates whose rival (at least as much) he wanted to be—would certainly be lacking. But, in Nietzsche, it is not only about the end. His whole existence was a martyrdom. And this opens up for him the connection… with a great community. It means the way from the loneliness so badly endured to belonging to the community of the martyrs of the spirit that is far greater than one is usually willing to admit.

This last sentence has been with me for a long time since a Spanish girlfriend gave me Janz’s book as a present in March 1992, when I was living in Barcelona.

Already in January 1889, Nietzsche sent his incredible missives to several characters, including Franz Overbeck. When Overbeck arrived at the Via Carlo Alberto guesthouse in Turin on 8 January 1889 to rescue his friend, he found him completely mad and ‘surrounded by papers’. After returning Nietzsche to his native Germany, Overbeck took the papers back to Basel and among them, he found the manuscript of The Antichrist, carefully wrapped in a folio. By saving this book, Overbeck saved the key to Nietzsche’s thought. Overbeck wrote to Peter Gast, asking him which works Nietzsche had left unfinished; Gast wrote back and, by return of post, Overbeck replied as follows in February 1889:

Of the Transvaluation of All Values, in particular, there is only the first book, also wrapped in a white folio, with the title:

The Antichrist
Transvaluation of All Values

The second line is crossed out and replaced by the words ‘Curse on Christianity’.

Five weeks later, after reading the work, Overbeck sent Gast another letter, in which he says: ‘In particular, Nietzsche’s conception of Christianity seems to me to be too political, so to speak’. Overbeck wrote that line in criticism, but that is exactly what, 130 years later, David Skrbina would conclude in The Jesus Hoax: that Christianity was originally a political manoeuvre of the Jews against Rome!

It is clear from the correspondence between Overbeck, the first reader of The Antichrist and Gast that, as Nietzsche neared his end, his ideas about his work changed completely. The Transvaluation of All Values had been intended as a four-volume work, of which The Antichrist would have been the first. But Nietzsche himself wrote to George Brandes at the beginning of December 1888: ‘In three weeks I shall give orders for the printing of The Antichrist: Transvaluation of All Values’. In other words, once he had finished The Antichrist Nietzsche decided to burn the midnight oil, and what had been the first part of the work was transformed in its entirety.

A month after his letter to the Jew Brandes, Nietzsche had already carbonised himself internally, writing letters such as ‘to shoot the German emperor and all anti-Semites’. Andrés Sánchez Pascual says that despite the psychotic breakdown, ‘at that moment Nietzsche makes a totally lucid and consistent decision: he crossed out the subtitle “Transvaluation of all values” and under it, he writes the following: “Curse on Christianity”.’

Alas, because Nietzsche lost his mind he didn’t send the manuscript to his publisher, as planned. When, not long afterwards, the manuscript of The Antichrist fell into Elisabeth’s hands, she mutilated not only the subtitle but the climax of the book—the final page—when she published it in 1895! Had her brother not become disturbed, the original version that Overbeck found ready for the press would have been published as early as 1889, after Twilight of the Idols. It was not until Elisabeth died well into the 20th century that all the manuscripts of the Nietzsche Archive were made freely available to researchers.

In 1961, seventy-three years after the work was written, Erich Podach published a landmark book on Nietzschean editions. He showed that The Antichrist had undergone mutilations in addition to those already known, and made known for the first time the ‘Law against Christianity’.

By 1964, what appears to be the definitive edition of Nietzsche’s entire works was underway. Directed by the Italians Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, it was published simultaneously in German, Italian and French. The following decade I was to benefit from the Spanish translation of The Antichrist as Nietzsche had left the manuscript carefully wrapped in a white folio, translated by Andrés Sánchez Pascual.

Sánchez Pascual tells us that this work ‘is the most coherent conclusion, the necessary conclusion, of his entire mental path. If Nietzsche’s thought does not lead to The Antichrist, it leads nowhere’. And he adds that to remain in his previous texts and ‘not to advance to The Antichrist is, quite simply, not to dare to look Nietzsche in the eye’.