GERMANY: Her Brother’s Keeper

Friedrich Nietzsche was a pale, crabby hermit who sat in a cheap Swiss boarding house peering beyond good and evil and demanding, at the top of his apocalyptic voice, the rearing of a daemonically driven breed of superman. Just when the world began to get wind of his prophetic fulminations, he went mad. For the last tragic eleven years of his life, he was a myth—and so he has remained. Out of that myth Hitler’s propaganda made him the philosopher of Naziism in World War II.

Last week the talk of literary Germany was a Darmstadt professor’s painstakingly documented debunking of that myth. The crude myth of the racist Nietzsche, argued Professor Karl Schlechta in his new edition of the seer’s works, was the consciously perpetrated fraud of his sister, guardian and sole literary executrix, the late Frau Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.

Elisabeth, a smug and righteous climber, happened to be visiting her brother Friedrich when he fell in with Richard Wagner. Before long Friedrich was telling Wagner to his outraged face that he thought Bizet’s operas better (“Bizet’s music does not sweat,” explained Nietzsche). But his dumpy little sister fell hard for the antiSemitic, Valhalla-first rantings that her brother Friedrich dismissed as Wagnerian idiosyncrasies. She took up with a Wagnerian camp follower named Bernhard Forster, who organized Germany’s first anti-Jewish mass meetings and rounded up 267,000 signatures for his appeal to Bismarck to register all German Jews and bar them from key jobs. When Nietzsche found out that Forster’s outfit was quoting some of his own diatribes against the values held sacred since Greek and Jewish times, he was furious at what he considered misappropriation of his views: “This damned anti-Semitism!” he wrote a friend. “It is the reason for the abrupt break with my sister.” And to another: “I will not be associated with anybody who has any part in this lying race-swindle.” Elisabeth married Forster and went off with him to Paraguay to start a “Nueva Germania” of 100% blue-eyed, red-bearded Teutons. The colony flopped. Forster committed suicide, and Elisabeth bounced back to Europe just in time to take care of Friedrich. who had suddenly and finally collapsed in 1889.

Hitler’s Author. Calling herself Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, she sued for and got all her brother’s manuscripts. Forthwith, she grandiosely renamed her family home the Nietzsche Archive, where she exhibited Nietzsche, white-gowned and empty-eyed, to teatime guests. But she allowed no one else a look at the manuscripts, put together her brother’s last writings in a volume that she entitled The Will to Power. This is the book which pan-Germans and Nazis acclaimed as “Nietzsche’s crowning philosophical work . . . the most important philosophical system of the 19th century.”

A smaller band of Nietzscheans led by Novelist Thomas Mann acclaimed the Nietzsche of Thus Spake Zarathustra, the prophet-poet who looked piercingly about his Victorian world and pronounced all its accepted truths a sham. But his sister zealously vaunted her status as the Nietzsche Archive’s high priestess, fostered the myth she had largely created, lived to transmit her priestess’ blessing to Mussolini and Hitler. Nietzsche, Hitler proclaimed, was “the pioneer of National Socialism.”

Finally gaining access to the Nietzsche papers after the death of this jealous keeper in 1935, Professor Schlechta has worked ever since over the last writings. His definitive editing downgrades The Will to Power to what he found it to be, a series of notebook jottings in no way coordinated or assembled and never intended for publication in such schematic form or under such a title. Stripping the notes of Elisabeth’s gratuitously added chapter headings and subtitles, he lists them as they were written, along with thousands of other jottings that Elisabeth saw fit to omit because they did not suit her distorting purpose.

Everybody’s Ancestor. Schlechta was able to prove what scholars have long suspected, that Elisabeth suppressed letters in which Nietzsche spoke ill of her and forged others to prove her authority as her brother’s only trusted interpreter. Nietzsche wrote many affectionate letters to his mother; Elisabeth dropped ink blots on the word “Mother” and published the letters as if addressed to herself. Schlechta also spotted other frauds with the help of a pack of notebooks that Elisabeth had hidden under attic eaves (Nietzsche had a habit of drafting letters to friends in his notebooks before sending them). The only copies extant of Nietzsche letters saying, “You are the only person I trust absolutely,” and “You are such a good friend and helper,” were in Elisabeth’s own hand; on these she had written that the originals were “later lost” or “burned by our dear mother.” In all, Schlechta traced about 30 forged letters.

In Western Germany the impact of Schlechta’s findings was instant. Said Hamburg’s newspaper Die Welt: “A new Nietzsche dates from this edition.” In Schlechta’s interpretation, Nietzsche’s “will to power” emerges not (or not alone) as man’s will to mastery over other men, but as his will to a sort of excellence or virtue in his own inner being. Far from upholding Deutschland-über-Alles traditions of Germanic superiority, this Nietzsche is the elite-minded aristocrat who wrote scornfully of his countrymen: “The Germans are responsible for the neurosis called nationalism from which Europe suffers.” To Schlechta and his colleagues, the new Nietzsche is the seer whose volcanic revulsion against what James Gibbons Huneker once called the Seven Deadly Virtues furnished existentialists of modern France and Germany with much of their original inspiration, and whose evocations of the darker side of human consciousness lighted the way to some of the first insights of Freud and psychoanalysis.

Freed at last from the clutches of his sister and her racist friends, Nietzsche may find his place in Germany and Europe not as a national but as a universal ancestor of a troubled age.