Nazis nitpicked Nietzsche to their advantage

Thanks to POSP stringer Tim.

"How the Nazi Party Recast Nietzsche"

by

David B. Dennis

January/February 2014

Volume 35, Number 1

HUMANITIES

High culture played an important political role in Hitler’s Germany. References to music, history, philosophy, and art formed a key part of the Nazi strategy to reverse the symptoms of decline perceived after World War I. Allusions to great creators and their works were used as propaganda to remind the Volk to love and worship their nation. In the words of the French scholar Eric Michaud, author of The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, the Nazis used culture “to make the genius of the race visible to that race.” And to cap off these images of a great national culture, the Nazis heralded Adolf Hitler, the Führer, as an artistic leader.

As Michaud put it: “Hitler presented himself not only as a ‘man of the people’ and a soldier with frontline experience (Fronterlebnis), but also and above all as a man whose artistic experience constituted the best guarantee of his ability to mediate the Volksgeist and turn it into the ‘perfect Third Reich.’”

The revival of a culturally rich Germany as the so-called Third Reich, however, would be achieved only once those whom the Nazis considered its enemies were all destroyed. So war and culture went together in the National Socialist agenda. Art, said Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, “is no mere peacetime amusement, but a sharp spiritual weapon for war.”

To understand how Nazis employed culture to define and promote their broadest ambitions, I looked to German mass media, in particular the main Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, whose cultural pages I examined for the years 1920 to 1945. While the Nazi co-optation of many great figures in the Western intellectual tradition during these eventful years proves revealing, one need look no further than the party’s claim on Friedrich Nietzsche to see how culture became entwined in the discourse of politics and war in the pages of Hitler’s foremost propaganda outlet.

Fitting Nietzsche’s ideas into a single worldview was no simple matter, but this was precisely the mission of the Völkischer Beobachter’s editors and writers: to make even complex ideas such as Nietzsche’s appear to coordinate with the main tenets of Nazism. Looking into the shifting terms with which the daily newspaper presented Nietzsche helps us toward understanding how the Nazi party attempted to place his biography and writings—along with the tradition of Kultur as a whole—at the service of the Nazi outlook.

In addressing the “Germanness” of Nietzsche, however, the cultural politicians of the party faced some difficulties. The newspaper did not try to verify Nietzsche’s racial origins—as it did for many other Western creators, including and especially Wagner and Beethoven—despite the fact that he occasionally claimed to be of Polish heritage. But it did have to confront indications that the philosopher rejected nineteenth-century trends of nationalistic identification.

As one contributor to the Völkischer Beobachter wrote, there is “one important point in Nietzsche’s mental attitude on which even his friends have remained silent, from which they tried to distance themselves as much as possible: this is the matter of Nietzsche’s attitude toward Germanness and the state.” The philosopher, according to the paper, had seen with “sharp eyes” that while the Second Reich had been formed, it still “remained a shell without content” under Otto von Bismarck’s Realpolitik. To him, nationalism was the “illness of the century” because it “attempted to hide its emptiness.” In his words, “Nationalism as it is understood today is a dogma that requires limitation.”

But the point to keep in mind, according to the Völkischer Beobachter, was the qualifying phrase: “as it is understood today.” Nietzsche’s opinions about the German state could be understood only with reference to this phrase—that is, as critiques of his own specific time, not as categorical rejections of German nationalism.

This opened the way for the newspaper to present Nietzsche as a fervent patriot and strong representative of “Germanness.” In fact, the paper reminded, Nietzsche actually said of himself that “I am perhaps more German than the Germans of today.” And he valued the “earnest, manly, stern, and daring German spirit.” He knew that “there was still bravery, particularly German bravery,” that is, “inwardly something different than the élan of our deplorable neighbors.” Compared with the French essence, in particular, he was “consistently, strongly, and happily conscious of the virtues” of the German character. Above all, Nietzsche held that “it is German unity in the highest sense which we are striving for more passionately than for political reunification—the unity of the German spirit and life.”
 
Very few others “saw things so clearly” in those days, said the Völkischer Beobachter. As if on a mission to confirm the philosopher’s Germanness, another contributor traveled to Sils-Maria, wandered the region, and ruminated on passages Nietzsche had written there. The landscape, Ernst Nickell reflected, is “consecrated by German fate and German tragedy.” Nietzsche “needed this landscape; he had to stand near the highest things and the firmament”—because he was “German despite everything.”

Nietzsche was, however, rather ambivalent about politics, having called himself the “last anti-political German of them all.” But Nazi propaganda rigorously promoted the view that the primary creative impulse was as much political as it was artistic. The picture of Nietzsche thus had to be corrected to bring out his political side.

The Völkischer Beobachter admitted that “we find here at first view a sharp contrast with today’s [National Socialist] thinking”—but only at first glance. According to the paper, what Nietzsche understood by the term “state” was completely different from “our idea of the state today.” For him, politicization meant democratization, i.e., the greatest good for the greatest number. This Nietzsche hated, the paper said, because “general prosperity would make mankind too lazy to invest powerful energy in a great individual— in a genius.” That is why Nietzsche wanted “as little state as possible.” A volkish state, directed according to Nazi ideology, however, would revive the genius of the nation, and therefore earn Nietzsche’s support.

The paper acknowledged that Nietzsche had other views that seemed “the complete opposite of our views today.” For instance, he viewed culture and the state as antagonists. This, perhaps, should have made him the oddest of conscripts to the Nazi campaign to subordinate culture to politics and war, but that was not the party line. Such ideas of Nietzsche’s, the Völkischer Beobachter insisted, were likewise conditioned by his own times:

   

The German Reich had had the misfortune to achieve its external form when there was no longer any inner content. The classical heights of German education had sunk, the song of German Romanticism sounded only from afar. On the other hand, Realism was on the rise, leading more and more toward materialism. Money and business had become the gods of the age.

A state as the “guardian and defender of culture; a state as the means of achieving the true goal of existence, not as a goal in itself; a state that is built on the Volk—that, Nietzsche would have accepted,” the newspaper claimed. Therefore, the philosopher “would have agreed with today’s [National Socialist] German idea of the state with all of his heart.”

Under the Weimar Republic, the Völkischer Beobachter complained, Nietzsche had been invoked far too frequently by “international-democratic literati” as a “star-witness” for their worldview. But, the paper countered, Nietzsche “hated and fought every form of democracy, both political and spiritual,” and he said so in the sharpest possible terms. The notions that “all are the same” and that at base we are all just selfish brutes and riffraff—were symbolic of the democratic age that believed in the equality of men and that established “the weak, fat, and cowardly as standards for this equality.”

In Nietzsche’s opinion, said the Völkischer Beobachter, this rule of the humble amounted to a blow against life itself. Against the democratic and supposedly feeble outlook of the Weimar era, the newspaper argued, Nietzsche set forth a way of thinking that sets laws for the future—an outlook which “handled contemporary things harshly and tyrannically” in the interest of the future.

Thus did the cultural-historical material that appeared in the Völkischer Beobachter resound with the Führer/Artist–Artist/Führer theme that typified Nazi cultural politics. Hitler was the primary manifestation of this creative leadership, but he came, according to this view, after a long line of notable predecessors, including Luther, Beethoven, Wagner, and, yes, Nietzsche.

Cultural renewal in accordance with such perceptions of intellectual history was a central premise of the larger project of the Third Reich, fundamental to Hitler’s aims. But this agenda also contributed to the most destructive impulses of the movement. Indeed, German cultural identity as shaped by the Nazi regime did not merely justify anti-Semitism or policies of extermination, it led to them. Hitler’s racist standards of judgment were grounded in cultural terms, as he stated in Mein Kampf: “If we were to divide mankind into three groups, the founders of culture, the bearers of culture, the destroyers of culture, only the Aryan could be considered as the representative of the first group.” According to the Völkischer Beobachter, Jewish creators such as Heine, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn, Mahler, and Schoenberg—among many others—supposedly belonged in the latter, so they and their kind had to be eradicated.

Demonstrating that great cultural figures of the past would have agreed with these premises was a priority in the Nazi newspaper. One contributor put it in these stark terms: “to win over to our movement spiritual leaders who think they see something distasteful in anti-Semitism, it is extremely important to present more and more evidence that great, recognized spirits shared our hatred of Jewry.”
 
In the case of Nietzsche, however, this process required a little more “spin” than the “selective scavenging” for biographical and textual evidence that scholar Steven Aschheim identified as the usual mode of such politicization. Some Völkischer Beobachter contributors recognized that Nietzsche had not been a committed anti-Semite, and had even criticized the anti-Semitic views of Richard Wagner, his own sister, Elisabeth, and her husband, Bernhard Förster. One editor, for instance, said about Nietzsche: “His work contains other crass contradictions and obscurities, especially in his treatment of the Jewish Question, where he sometimes confesses himself as an Anti-Semite, and then as a philo-Semite. Equally obscure is what he understood as race and nation. This may be a result of the eruptive nature of his creativity and the shortness of his life, which didn’t allow him enough time to go into these issues deeply.”
 
But other contributors wrote as if aligning Nietzschean ideas with Nazi anti-Semitism posed no difficulties at all. One article listed carefully selected passages from Beyond Good and Evil to show that Nietzsche “expressed himself extraordinarily farsightedly on the Jewish Question.” An article entitled “Nietzsche as Warner about the Jewish Danger” insisted that Nietzsche concerned himself with the Jewish Question, “as every clear thinking, every sensitive Aryan-German person must.” Nietzsche, the paper said, recognized the danger threatening Germans in the form of a completely foreign and utterly different race, and “warned us—and like so many hundreds of great, significant men who warned us before him, he warned in vain!”

Nietzsche, this article went on, saw how the Jews were becoming “ever more powerful” in Germany and Europe and expressed this in “prophetic words.” Above all, the thought that the Jews “were determining what distinguishes”—in other words, that Jews had become important cultural arbiters—filled him with fright. For he knew that this would lead to a transvaluation of values, favoring “the development of the Jewish race, Jewish culture, and Jewish spiritual life—against German essence, German nature, and German culture.” He saw a foreign race operating at the cost of his own German Volk; and to Nietzsche—“the man of action—it was incomprehensible that the whole German Volk wasn’t arming itself with every weapon in order to save that which is most sacred, its volkish essence.” Was Nietzsche an anti-Semite? the article asked rhetorically. “He was—he was in the most intrinsic, pure and sacred sense of the word!”

National Socialist invocations of historical figures were intended as symbolic indications of what the New Germany would become. As Michaud put it, “the awakening into the myth” was “an awakening to the present”—a “recapitulation of the past directed toward the future.” Citing Baldur von Schirach was an excellent way for Michaud to support this point. The future Hitler Youth leader stated, “The perfect artists Michelangelo and Rembrandt, and Beethoven and Goethe, do not represent an appeal to return to the past, but show us the future that is ours and to which we belong.” The Völkischer Beobachter cultural section was clearly designed for the same reasons.

According to its longtime editor-in-chief, Alfred Rosenberg, the “German spirit” that inspired Nietzsche and about which he spoke with great hope had reawakened after the “darkness of the betrayal in 1918” in “the spirit of the Nazi Party.” Therein, Rosenberg wrote (in his cryptic style), “a new idea of life” and a worldview that recognized the laws of this life came reverentially into light. In their own time, Rosenberg continued, “National Socialists were experiencing the effects of the forces that became a dangerous, destructive power in the nineteenth century and continued to threaten Europe as a “great outbreak of the most dreadful illness.” Nietzsche “stands with us” and Nazis “greet him as a close relative in the formulation of a broadminded worldview, as a brother in the battle for the rebirth of a great German spirituality; as a herald of a European unity, and as a promoter of creative life in our ancient, yet—through a great revolution—rejuvenating continent.”
 
Similarly, Alfred Bäumler, who had been appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Berlin largely on the basis of his Nazified Nietzsche interpretations, wrote in the Völkischer Beobachter that the Volk which produced Nietzsche “was the only one that saw the greatest of all dangers threatening mankind.” Nazis alone—in contrast to their enemies, who were “reviling the great thinker”—honored the philosopher who “wrestled a new, pure image of man out of confusion and degradation.” Nietzsche, according to the leading Nazi Nietzschean, “foresaw and loved the idea we are protecting—that of the man whose innermost seed is bravery, the mother of all virtues; the man who believes: ‘That which does not kill us, makes us stronger.’”

Michaud made it clear that Nazi obsession with the cultural historical past was not a retrogressive “move,” but a forward-looking call for action. The appropriation of the German tradition of Kultur was “quite the reverse of the work of mourning.” It was a “process of reminiscence that asserted itself as faith in one’s own power to reawaken the lost object”—that is, to “produce the New Man.” The Völkischer Beobachter’s identification of Nietzsche as having “foreseen and loved” the New Man of Nazism was utterly consistent with this theme—in fact, a culmination of National Socialist self-validation.

Ultimately, production of these Nazi “ideals” involved going to war. Given the horrible outcomes of Nazi military policy, it is natural to assume that the Second World War itself was the primary goal of the regime. But war itself was not the aim. It was a means to an end. And that end was the realization of the new German man in a renewed nation, modeled on an image of Germany as Kulturnation—postulated and popularized, in part, by Völkischer Beobachter cultural coverage.

The newspaper trumpeted that the average German had to prepare again for battle—and invocations of Nietzsche were common in these warnings. As one contributor put it: “In the name of all conscientious front soldiers,” every “shirker” should read the words of Nietzsche carefully. Visiting Nietzsche’s grave, another claimed that he heard emitting from the site exhortations that Germans steel themselves for approaching conflict.

    Don’t you hear anything? Is that not his voice, speaking to us: we who fight and create! “I want to say something to you, my brothers in spirit! Life means fighting and suffering. Sorrow makes some weary and soft—but it strengthens the creator. Think of the fates of a Michelangelo, a Beethoven and a Friedrich the Great—then you will know how love and toughness can be strangely connected in man. Know love, but stay tough for me!”

In addition to reports of ghostly commands, the paper insisted on a view of Nietzsche as militarist, “because one cannot conceive of sharper opposites than Friedrich Nietzsche and pacifism, Marxism, and egalitarian b.s. in general!” “What,” the paper asked, “would he say to a phrase like ‘No more war’?”

Peace—that is, the ultimately stable realization of Nazi ideals—could only be achieved through “battle” and “victory.” Elsewhere, the Völkischer Beobachter stipulated that Nietzsche constantly repeated that “struggle rules throughout nature—that life itself is an outcome of war.” Nietzsche, in this view, “valued battle as the basis for all life—so much that he cried, ‘Good old war sanctifies everything!’”

Völkischer Beobachter readers were exhorted, therefore, to live by Nietzsche’s teachings by either applying their own will to power or by willfully accepting fates determined by the National Socialist community. In this way, the paper smoothed out another difficulty that Nietzsche’s ideas held for Nazi ideology: Individuals could demonstrate their will to power not by becoming creative leaders alone, but alternatively by “accepting the necessity of things,” becoming a “part and tool of great world events,” and even making the ultimate sacrifice—the “highest self-denial”—for one’s Volk. In the years that Germany was gearing up for war, this reading of Nietzsche’s concept of will to power was most appropriate for Nazism’s militaristic plans.

The Völkischer Beobachter was ultimately designed to motivate action in this war, and regularly called on Nietzsche as a major source of inspiration in the struggle once it started. “What makes Nietzsche so valuable today,” it proclaimed, is his “fearless acknowledgement of the strong personality that alone can lead toward redemption, and after which all the suffering millions yearn.” Not only in Germany, but throughout Europe, “we address him as the preacher of action!” To treat oneself harshly and tyrannically for the sake of the future of our Volk, that was one of the most important National Socialist requirements. “How often do we recite, in small gatherings, the words of [Nietzsche’s] Zarathustra: ‘And if ye will not be fates and inexorable ones, how can ye one day—conquer with me? . . . For the creators are tough.’” Toughness, “for the sake of our Volk!”—that was what the Völkischer Beobachter felt readers should derive from Nietzsche in wartime.

As the Völkischer Beobachter covered it, in a 1944 memorial event on the occasion of Nietzsche’s one hundredth birthday, Alfred Rosenberg gave a speech which even more directly (though still cryptically) associated him with twentieth century warfare. The National Socialist movement, according to Rosenberg, “stood as a unified whole against the rest of the world, just as Nietzsche stood as an individual against the violent forces of his time.” The world of “despicable financiers and their henchmen, the passion whipped up by millions of envious Bolsheviks, the destructive work driven by the rage of the Jewish underworld, this all appeared shortly before the enormous purifying wave [i.e., Nazism] from the heart of Europe began to flow.” Now, as Nietzsche had done alone, the “National Socialist pan-German Empire stood as a block of will” in the middle of this tremendous struggle, “serving in full consciousness the necessity of a great life”—the necessity of, in Nietzsche’s phrase, a “European destiny.”

[David B. Dennis is professor of history at Loyola University in Chicago. He is the author of Beethoven and German Politics 1870–1989 (Yale, 1996) and Inhumanities: Nazi Interpretations of Western Culture (Cambridge, 2012), from which much of this article is derived. In 2007, he received a $5,000 summer stipend from NEH to support his research on the use of cultural history in Nazi propaganda.]

Shift in value definitions--F. Nietzsche

"Nietzsche, Our Contemporary"

by

Eric Walther

November/December 2012

Philosophy Now

Friedrich Nietzsche, who was born in 1844, fell silent in 1889, and died eleven years later, was the first great philosopher of the twentieth century. What made, and makes, him so important, is that he recognized with great clarity and impressive foresight the most troubling and persistent problem of modernity, the problem of values. His attempts to resolve this problem were not successful, but they did uncover depths of issues that still defeat our best efforts today.

Let’s begin with his notorious declaration that “God is dead” (first in The Gay Science, 1872). Secular thinking is a commonplace today, but in Nietzsche’s time this declaration was strikingly prophetic. The point of the claim is not so much to assert atheism: although Nietzsche was certainly an atheist, he was far from being a pioneer of European atheism. Rather, his observation is sociological, in a way: he means that Western culture no longer places God at the center of things. In another way, the term ‘sociological’ is quite misleading, for there is nothing ‘value-neutral’ in Nietzsche’s assertion. The death of God has knocked the pins out from under Western value systems, and revealed an abyss below. The values we still continue to live by have lost their meaning, and we are cast adrift, whether we realize it or not. The question is, what do we do now?

One might at first think that ‘the death of God’ is an all-too-familiar issue, conservative Christians arguing that if God does not exist then objective moral values don’t exist either, and secular humanists replying indignantly that God’s existence is entirely irrelevant to the validity of the moral judgments we make. Nietzsche agrees with those theists that the death of God signaled the end of objectivity as a feature of moral value, but differs from them by not taking this as a reason to believe in God. Yet he did not think that values were subjective in the crude popular sense, that anyone’s convictions are as valid as anyone else’s. Rather, to Nietzsche, values have power, and spring from power: like works of art, their greatness is in their power to move us. But the media manipulation of popular sentiment is no indicator of the power that creates value, since almost everybody is merely a member of the herd to Nietzsche. Any relating of value to popular preferences (even the preferences of an aristocracy) is an attempt to hold on to the objectivity of values. But if moral objectivity is at an end, an entirely new and radically individualistic source of value must be sought. Nietzsche’s conception of the power of values is deeply elitist: only the great can create values.

Nietzsche argued that in ancient times, values belonged to peoples who created them:

    A tablet of the good hangs over every people. Behold, it is the tablet of their overcomings; behold, it is the voice of their will to power… ‘You shall always be the first and excel all others: your jealous soul shall love no one, unless it be the friend’ – that made the soul of the Greek quiver: thus he walked the path of his greatness… ‘To practice loyalty and, for the sake of loyalty, to risk honor and blood even for evil and dangerous things’ – with this teaching another people conquered themselves, and through this self-conquest they became pregnant and heavy with great hopes…

 
  Thus Spake Zarathustra, I, 1883

Thus in antiquity it was the power through which a people defined itself that created the values of that people. Then came what Nietzsche thinks of as the degenerate complexity of Christianity, in which weakness rather than power was used to define value: “The meek shall inherit the earth.” (Matthew 5:5) In fact, the Christian priestly class does exercise its own will to power, in its triumph over pagan peoples, but in the process man’s instinctual animal pride has been abased through the disciplines of poverty, mortification of the flesh, guilt for sin; a morality echoing the message of a God who suffers on the cross. The explicit message is that value is not embodied in earthly holy men, but beyond, yet the truth is the opposite: the priests’ power has been realized in their victory over competing allegiances. But this victory has been won through Christianity’s plague of self-denial – what Nietzsche calls a “nay-saying” to life.

But with the death of God, Christianity’s mode of anti-strength value-creation has collapsed, and modern man has no firm unitary belief to replace it. Our ‘value’ is an incoherent pastiche of bits and pieces from a hundred sources. Nietzsche called it “the multi-colored cow.” The smorgasbord of faiths on offer in the West today wonderfully illustrates what Nietzsche foresaw: values as mix-and-match consumer goods. This is absurd, and the results are pitifully anemic; but how and where can the human will to power burst forth with a new set of values? That was Nietzsche’s dilemma, and it has become the explicit dilemma of modern humanity, just as he predicted.

Like all the best philosophers, Nietzsche made a heroic attempt to give a solution to his problem. He gave his solution the name Übermensch, literally translated ‘overman’, although it’s more often translated (somewhat painfully to us) as ‘superman’. Mere man is not a creator of value; his individuality proves to be insufficient to achieve that. His only dignity is that he may be a bridge to something higher: “The ape is an embarrassment to man; just so will man be an embarrassment to the overman.” The overman is that higher type of individual who has an absolute self-confidence in his power, and through the powerful assertion of his individuality, values may once again be created: not by peoples, not clothed in the spurious authority of a beyond, but for the first time in a specifically individual assertion of values through individually-justified action. And these values must be created, not appropriated as something already existent.

Nietzsche did not claim to know in detail what the overman would be like. He did think that the overman will have fellows, metaphorical brothers, but he must be an individual though and through: the future genius is a non-genus. That’s one reason why the Nazi appropriation of the Übermensch concept for the master race is outrageous to all Nietzsche scholars. Nietzsche expressed contempt for anti-Semites and for propagandists of Germanic racial superiority. Modern man, mass man, whatever racial affiliation he may boast, is anathema to Nietzsche. It is an absurd dream of contemporary culture that we – anyone at all – just by ‘being ourselves’ can surpass the ancient creativity of entire peoples. Most individuals are too small for the task (the crowd chants “We’re all individuals!” – Monty Python, Life of Brian). Any person can try to live according to what he calls “my own values,” but they are usually not his own values: they are bits and pieces picked up in the bazaar of modernity, and he has no idea where they came from. Nothing is more obvious to Nietzsche than the fact that people don’t generally know how to create values.

I think Nietzsche provides a powerful indictment of modernity. Of course, Nietzsche may simply be wrong that the only values with any value (so to speak) are those a powerful individual creates. Personally, I believe that he is wrong. That is, I accept his claim that values must be created by individuals, but I deny that a value-creating individual must be a Nietzschean overman. Furthermore, I think that there are values associated with being human whose validity extends beyond the human self-creating context, to apply to rational beings in general. In that way, I am a Kantian. Sure, the individual as modern multi-culturally sensitive individual cannot create value; but I think it is possible to retain a sense of individuals legislating values while shedding the overman’s sense of absolute separateness from other rational individuals.

Why is modern man so agonized still? I don’t know. But I won’t be totally surprised if Nietzsche turns out to be the first great philosopher of the twenty-first century too.

© Dr Eric Walther 2012

[Eric Walther taught philosophy from 1967 and computer science from 1983 at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University; he retired in 2003. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from Yale University, and an MS in Computer Science from Polytechnic University.]

"In 90 Minutes"...introduction to some philosophy greats

Decent introduction to fourteen philosophers by Paul Strathern.

Paul Strathern [Wikipedia]...

Paul Strathern (born 1940) is a British writer and academic. He was born in London, and studied at Trinity College, Dublin, after which he served in the Merchant Navy over a period of two years. He then lived on a Greek island. In 1966 he travelled overland to India and the Himalayas. His novel A Season in Abyssinia won a Somerset Maugham Award in 1972.

Besides five novels, he has also written numerous books on science, philosophy, history, literature, medicine and economics. He is the author of two successful series of short introductory books: Philosophers in 90 Minutes and The Big Idea: Scientists Who Changed the World. His book on the history of chemistry entitled Mendeleyev's Dream (2001) was short-listed for the Aventis Prize, and his works have been translated into over two dozen languages. He is the author of the best-selling The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance, Napoleon in Egypt, and The Artist, the Philosopher and the Warrior: Leonardo, Machiavelli and Borgia - a fateful collusion. His most recent work Death in Florence: The Medici, Savonarola and the Battle for the Soul of the Renaissance City came out in May 2011.

Strathern was a lecturer at Kingston University where he taught philosophy and science. He lives in London, and has three grandchildren who live in Vienna: Tristan, Julian and Opajoke.

These are all I could find though there are more available such as Bertrand Russell, Confucius, St. Augustine.

An audio presentation.

Aquinas

Aristotle

Descartes

Hegel

Hume

Kant

Kierkegaard

Marx

Nietzsche

Plato

Sartre

Schopenhauer

Spinoza

Wittgenstein

Deceased--Gabriel Vahanian

Gabriel Vahanian
January 24th, 1927 to August 30th, 2012

"Gabriel Vahanian dies at 85; key figure in 'God Is Dead' movement"

The French-born theologian's 1961 book 'The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era' helped define a philosophical movement.

by

Elaine Woo

September 16th, 2012

Los Angeles Times

Despite a provocative title, Gabriel Vahanian's book "The Death of God" caused no public stir when it was published in 1961.

By the middle of the decade, however, a massive upheaval was underway in American society and Vahanian, a little-known Syracuse University professor of religion, found himself at the center of a furious national debate.

The French-born academic entered the spotlight in 1965 when Time magazine's Easter week cover posed the question that Vahanian and other radical theologians had raised: "Is God Dead?" The arguments pro and con were still churning more than a year later, when the magazine noted that the easiest way to boost Sunday church attendance was to announce a sermon on the divine demise.

Vahanian, a key thinker in what became known as the "death of God" movement, died of natural causes Aug. 30 at his home in Strasbourg, France, said his son-in-law, Jeffrey W. Robbins. He was 85.

Time had named him one of the four best-known theologians of the movement, which, according to the magazine, argued it was "no longer possible to think about or believe in a transcendent God who acts in human history" and that Christianity "will have to survive, if at all, without him."

In Vahanian's view, America in the early '60s was a "post-Christian world," driven away from faith by the Holocaust and other World War II horrors.

"Now man has declared God not responsible and not relevant to human self-knowledge," he wrote. "The existence of God, no longer questioned, has become useless to man's predicament and its resolution."

That message found a receptive audience as the '60s unfolded in one convulsion after another — the assassination of a president and struggles over the war in Vietnam, civil rights and free speech.

"It was a period of transformation, and his book was one of the expressions of '60s radicalism," theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer, another prominent death-of-God theologian, said of Vahanian during an interview last week. "He was articulating it theologically, and he had a better understanding than any of us of the actual death of God at that point in history."

Postulating the death of God brought death threats to the group, which also included Paul van Buren and William Hamilton. Hamilton, who died in March, lost his teaching position at Colgate Rochester Divinity School in New York even though he was tenured.

Vahanian often joined his like-minded colleagues in public forums, but he was not in lock step with them theologically. A French Protestant who admired John Calvin and worshiped with a Presbyterian congregation, Vahanian approached the question of God's relevance from the vantage point of a lifelong churchgoer.

"He was an iconoclastic thinker through and through," said Robbins, who teaches religion and philosophy at Lebanon Valley College in Pennsylvania along with his wife, Noelle Vahanian, one of Gabriel's two children.

Unlike others in the God-is-dead camp, Vahanian approached the issue as a cultural critic, looking for ways to talk about God in an increasingly secular world.

"He was doing a cultural analysis, whereas the others were doing a more traditional philosophical, theological critique," said James B. Wiggins, a longtime friend and colleague in the religion department at Syracuse. "Finding ways to give expression to the theological in terms that were intelligible to an ever more secular culture was the project in which he was engaged throughout his career."

Vahanian was born Jan. 24, 1927, in Marseille, France. His parents, Mesrop and Perouse Vahanian, were Armenian refugees who had fled to France after World War I to escape persecution in Armenian areas of Turkey.

He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Grenoble in 1945, followed by studies at the Protestant Theological Faculty of Paris.

In 1958 he earned a doctorate at Princeton Theological Seminary and joined the Syracuse faculty. He led efforts to establish its graduate program in religion, which, Wiggins noted, was unusual for a secular university with no theology school. He also became a key figure in the study of religion and literature.

Vahanian remained at Syracuse for 26 years, leaving for France in 1984 to accept an appointment at Protestant Theological Faculty in Strasbourg.

He married Barbara Swanger in 1962. Besides his wife and daughter, he is survived by a son, Paul-Michel, and two grandchildren.

Although the public spotlight on his ideas receded, Vahanian "remained a death-of-God theologian in a profound sense," Altizer said. "He understood better than any of us the way God is dead in our culture" and especially how atheism was important to faith.

"The Christian era has bequeathed us the 'death of God,' but not without teaching us a lesson," Vahanian wrote in his 1964 book "Wait Without Idols." "God is not necessary, but he is inevitable. He is wholly other and wholly present. Faith in him, the conversion of our human reality, both culturally and existentially, is the demand he still makes upon us."

"Gabriel Vahanian, Professor, Dies at 85; Was Linked to ‘Death of God’ Movement"

by

Paul Vitello

September 8th, 2012

The New York Times

Gabriel Vahanian, a theologian whose 1961 social critique, “The Death of God: The Culture of Our Post-Christian Era,” gave a name to a seemingly atheistic but widely misunderstood theological movement, died on Aug. 30 at his home in Strasbourg, France. He was 85.

His daughter, Noelle Vahanian, confirmed his death.

Mr. Vahanian, a churchgoing Presbyterian throughout his life, was a professor at Syracuse University when a small literary publisher released “The Death of God,” a scholarly work that took church leaders to task for what he considered the trivialization of Christian teaching in the secular age. It was not an endorsement of Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1880s-era announcement of God’s death. And it received little attention outside university religion departments and periodicals like The Journal of Bible and Religion. (The Journal’s review called it a dense read, but worthwhile. “Books like this must be written and read if Christian solutions are to be found,” it said.)

But in 1966, Mr. Vahanian reached a wider audience when Time magazine named his book as the forerunner of several works written around that time by scholars belonging to what the theology world called the Death of God movement. All were grappling with some of religion’s big questions in the post-World War II era, Time said: Would the center hold if people stopped believing? How might religious values survive in a postfaith world?

Mr. Vahanian knew and corresponded with some of the others in the movement, including Harvey Cox of Harvard, Thomas J.J. Altizer of Emory University and William Hamilton, who would be forced out of his faculty post at an upstate New York seminary after the furor over the Time article and later teach at Portland State University in Oregon. He died in March.

None were atheists. Some were uncomfortable with the name of their movement, since they considered themselves more like a rescue team than an attack squad. They saw their work as a continuation of inquiries begun by some of the great theologians of the early and middle 20th century, including Paul Tillich, Karl Barth and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Mr. Vahanian, though, distanced himself from the group and its Nietzschean aura, however ill deserved.

“He had a totally different theological sensibility from most of them,” said Jeffrey Robbins, Mr. Vahanian’s son-in-law, who is chairman of the department of religion and philosophy at Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pa. “He was an iconoclast, and a radical. But he described himself as a lifelong, practicing, disgruntled Protestant Christian.”

Mr. Cox, a professor emeritus at Harvard Divinity School and the author of the best-selling 1965 book “The Secular City” — considered one of the basic texts of the Death of God movement — described Mr. Vahanian as a “visionary” with a traditionalist streak.

“He didn’t like the idea of pronouncements about what no one could possibly know,” Mr. Cox said in a phone interview on Wednesday. “He had too much respect for religious tradition.”

In his book, Mr. Vahanian criticized efforts to modernize Christianity, implicitly rebuking the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, author of the 1950s self-help best-seller “The Power of Positive Thinking.” Mr. Vahanian condemned “positive thinking” and other doctrines that reduced Christianity to what he called “a tool for success.”
Faith had higher purposes, he said. It was for dealing with suffering; plumbing the conscience; confronting doubts about God.

“God is not necessary, but he is inevitable,” Mr. Vahanian wrote in 1964 in “Wait Without Idols,” displaying the gnomic style that sometimes tried reviewers’ patience (and eschewing capital letters when referring to the deity). “He is wholly other and wholly present. Faith in him, the conversion of our human reality, both culturally and existentially, is the demand he still makes upon us.”

Gabriel Antoine Vahanian was born on Jan. 24, 1927, in Marseille, France, one of four children of Mestrop and Perouse Vahanian. His parents settled there in the early 1920s after fleeing the ethnic cleansing campaigns that swept Armenian areas of Turkey after World War I. After completing his studies at the Protestant Theological Faculty of Paris in 1949, he received his Ph.D. at the Princeton Theological Seminary.

In 1958 he became a professor of religion at Syracuse University, where he taught for 26 years and helped to found the university’s graduate studies program in religion. He moved in 1984 to Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg, for a post considered France’s most prominent theological professorship of Protestantism.

Besides his daughter, who, like her husband, Mr. Robbins, is a professor of religion and philosophy at Lebanon Valley College, Mr. Vahanian is survived by his wife, Barbara; a son, Jean-Michel; and two grandchildren.

Though he had differences with the “Death of God” theologians, Mr. Vahanian shared “the deep sensitivity and religious passion that animated the movement,” Mr. Robbins said.

In “Wait Without Idols,” Mr. Vahanian identified the origin of the problem facing “Death of God” theologians as he saw it:

“It is easier to understand oneself without God than with God. The dilemma of Christianity is that it taught man how to be responsible for his actions in this world, and for this world itself. Now man has declared God not responsible and not relevant to human self-knowledge. The existence of God, no longer questioned, has become useless to man’s predicament and its resolution.”
“This, then, is the irony of the cultural tradition of Christianity: it has bequeathed us the idea of the death of God.” 

"In Memoriam Gabriel Vahanian (January 24, 1927-August 23, 2012)"

by

James B. Wiggins, Eliphalet Remington Professor of Religion, Emeritus

The Religion Department at Syracuse University

Professor Gabriel Vahanian, friend, colleague, creative thinker and theologian, devoted father, relatively mild curmudgeon, determined marcher to the beat of his own drummer—I offer some of my recollections of the characteristics and accomplishments of this remarkable man.

Born to Armenian parents in France, he received his primary and secondary education in schools in France and his baccalaureate from the Lycee of Valence.  He received a fellowship to come to the United States in 1948.  He took his Master’s Degree in Theology from the Princeton Theological Seminary in 1950 and his Ph.D. from that institution in 1958.  He joined the faculty in the Department of Bible and Religion in the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University in 1958, where he taught until 1984. Then he returned to France as a professor at the Universite de Strasbourg where he taught until his retirement as Professor Emeritus of cultural theology from the Protestant Theological Faculty of the Universite Marc Bloch.  He continued his active scholarly life and published widely in France and the USA.

It was my great privilege to meet “Gaby” as he was widely and affectionately known to friends and family in May 1963 when I was interviewed for a position in the Department of Religion.  In preparation for that trip to Syracuse, I read his book The Death of God: The Culture of our Post-Christian Era. With its publication in 1961, his work burst into local and national notoriety.

It was widely publicized in the context of a theological movement that became know as “The Death of God” and connected him loosely and not very appropriately to three other American Protestant theologians.  The attention given to the group and each of the thinkers associated with it caused a cultural furor in 1962.  So it was with great interest and some trepidation that I anticipated meeting him.

During his first years at SU, he had already established himself as a leader in the Department who effectively agitated to have its name changed from the Department of Bible and Religion to the Department of Religion, which it has remained ever since.  Gaby and I became friends and colleagues during the next twenty-one years as he played a major role in the department and in the emergence of the field of the academic study of religion through a number of associations.  When the American Academy of Religion adopted that name in 1964in place of the National Association of Biblical Instructors, he was elected as a member of the original Board of Directors.  He remained an active, contributing member and participant as the AAR became the major scholarly and professional organization for the study of religion in the United States.

That involvement stimulated him to creatively imagine what the study of religion at the graduate level should and could be.  He was recruited to join the faculty of the Theology School a Drew University in 1966.  In a great example of his skill and imagination, he instead turned the tables and persuaded the Dean of the Graduate School at Drew, Stanley Hopper, and an assistant professor in the college at Drew, David Miller, to join the faculty at Syracuse.  After that coup, Vahanian enlisted those two important contributors and the rest of the faculty in establishing a brand new Ph.D. program in Religion—one of a very few at that time in a secular university with no school of theology.  In an unprecedented short time, he shepparded the outline and proposal for the new program through the department faculty and then through the vetting process in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Curriculum Committee of the University Senate.  In the fall of 1968 the first students matriculated in the new program and four years later, the first two Ph.D.’s in religion were conferred by Syracuse University.  None of that would have happened without Gabriel Vahanian.  

The distinctiveness of this new program drew widespread attention from other professionals in the field  and students from all across the USA and abroad.  Notable new faculty members were also recruited in the decade of the 1970’s as the college recognized the growing accomplishments of the department.  Among them, for example, Huston Smith and Michael Novak were noteworthy additions.  During the decade of the 1970’s there were also numerous distinguished visiting professors in the department, a practice that had begun early on with the visit of the noted theologian Rudolf Bultmann. The presence of Gabriel Vahanian was a significant factor in attracting such colleagues.

Professor Vahanian was also a very popular undergraduate teacher.  His courses were always over-subscribed, and although students often commented how difficult those courses were, they were intellectually challenging and stimulating.  So, popular but never easy, his courses were a mainstay of the curriculum of the Department of Religion.

In recognition of his many accomplishments both within the university and nationally and internationally, Gabriel Vahanian was named by Syracuse University to the Eliphalet Remington Professor Chair and subsequently to the Jeanette Kittredge Watson professorship. In 2000, the Gabriel Vahanian Endowed Graduate Support Fund was established in the Department of Religion and continues to accept donations in his memory to support the educational and research expenses of current graduate students in this program in which Gaby invested so much of his life.

Even while on the faculty at Syracuse University, Professor Vahanian maintained ties with his native France.  He spent summers at a home near Marseilles. When he was on leaves from SU, he usually resided in France and maintained his connections with colleagues there, especially at the Universite de Strasbourg.  Thus, it was not entirely surprising, though very disappointing to us, when he informed the Department in 1983 that he had been invited to and accepted an appointment to the Protestant Theological Faculty in Strasbourg.  He taught there until he retired.  During his early years there, he also remained an adjunct professor at Syracuse University.

Professor Vahanian was a prolific author.  His bibliography covers a wide range of subjects, all related to his profound interest in the relationship between religion and contemporary culture.  Although his book, The Death of God (1961), is the one that many will be most familiar with, he was a major figure in developing the subfield of religion and literature in his early book Wait Without Idols (1964). That interest in the relation between religion and culture continued throughout his career to In Praise of the Secular (2008.)  He was deeply influenced in a formative way by the theological tradition of the Reformed church from John Calvin through Karl Barth.  The theology of Paul Tillich, interpreted in his distinctive way, was also a lifelong interest and influence on Vahanian as shown in his book, Tillich and the New Religious Paradigm (2004).

Bridging traditions between Europe and the United States as a distinguished faculty member and thinker in a secular department of religion at Syracuse University from 1958 until 1983 and then as a theologian in the Theological Faculty of a major university in France for more than a decade, few figures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries exerted so wide an influence on the study of religion and showed the importance and relevance of theology to the larger secular culture as did Gabriel Vahanian.

He is survived by his wife and their son and daughter.  His daughter, Noelle, and her husband, Jeffrey W. Robbins, both hold Ph.D. degrees (1999 and 2001) from Syracuse’s Department of Religion . They teach and publish in the fields of the theology, philosophy and the academic study of religion today.  Together with professors across the United States and some in Europe who implicitly and often explicitly in citing the work of Professor Vahanian in their own work, they demonstrate the continuing influence of the thought of this remarkable man.

A memorial service for Professor Vahanian was held on Friday, September 7, 2012 in the Église Réformée Saint Paul in Strasbourg, France.

Gabriel Vahanian will long be remembered as a challenging, generous, thoughtful, sometimes enigmatic and always cherished friend and colleague.  He will be profoundly missed.

Gabriel Vahanian [Wikipedia]


Deceased--William Hamilton 

Existentialism dead?

"The Drama of Existentialism"

by

Gary Gutting

July 18th, 2012

The New York Times

Last year I published a book on French philosophy since 1960 with a chapter entitled "What Ever Happened to Existentialism?" The title referred to the fast and apparently complete fall of existentialism from favor among leading French intellectuals, beginning at least as early as the 1960s. My chapter analyzed the fall, asked whether it was as decisive as it seemed, and ended with suggestions that the movement may have had more long-term influence than it seemed to.

Adam Gopnik's recent New Yorker essay on Albert Camus and his relation to Jean-Paul Sartre reminded me how irrelevant my title's question appears from a broader cultural standpoint. Whatever the ups and downs of Camus's or Sartre's stock on the high cultural exchange, their existentialism (not to mention that of their 19th-century predecessors, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) has continued to spark interest among the larger population of educated people. The point is also illustrated by the strong reactions, both for and against Sartre and Camus, in the comments on Andy Martin's recent piece in The Stone. And, of course, the enduring sign of interest has been the perennial popularity of undergraduate college courses on existentialist philosophy and literature.

Gopnik shows the reason for this continuing attraction. I would not recommend his essay as an accurate technical presentation of existentialist thought. For example, Sartre's magnum opus, "Being and Nothingness," is not an effort to "reconcile Marxism and existentialism"; that comes much later in his "Critique of Dialectical Reason." Nor did Sartre reason to his support of Marxist revolution through an atheistic version of Pascal's wager. But Gopnik has a ready response to such philosophical quibbles. The popular appeal of existentialism lies more in its sense of drama than in careful analysis and argument. As Gopnik exclaims: "Philosophers? They [Sartre and Camus] were performers with vision, who played on the stage of history."

This is not to say that existentialists - particularly Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir - are not intellectually serious thinkers. But in contrast to most other philosophers, they work out of a continuing sense of human existence as a compelling drama. In part this derives from the heightened stakes of the war and occupation from which their mature work emerged. Recall Sartre's example of his student who was trying to decide whether to abandon his mother and join the Free French army. On the conventional view, the student's decision would depend on whether he loved his mother or his country more. But Sartre insisted that the decision itself would create the greater love the student might later evoke to justify it.

The war even intrudes into the thorny ontological analyses of "Being and Nothingness." Arguing for the absoluteness of our freedom even in the face of severe constraints, Sartre - no doubt thinking of members of the Resistance captured by the Gestapo - insists that, even under torture, we are free. Those who yield and betray their comrades afterwards live in guilt because they know that, at the moment of betrayal, they could have held out for at least another minute.

But existentialism also ties into the drama of everyday life. Sartre's study of "bad faith" (self-deception) is driven by striking vignettes like that of the woman torn between her psychological desire for a man's attention and her lack of sexual interest in him, who allows him to caress her while thinking of herself as a pure consciousness, with no essential tie to the body he is touching. Similarly, Sartre describes an overly zealous waiter, so self-consciously intent on doing everything just right that he winds up as much pretending to be a waiter as being one.

Drama can always distort, and Sartre's examples are open to criticism for ignoring ambiguities and complexities for the sake of a vivid impact. When an interviewer much later confronted him with a passage expressing his stark early view of freedom under torture, Sartre replied that what was remarkable was that, when he wrote such things, he actually believed them. In another vein, feminist critics have noted the relentlessly masculine standpoint of Sartre's descriptions of what is supposed to be "human reality."

An emphasis on drama also has the advantages and the disadvantages of inevitably connecting the philosophy with the personal life of the philosopher. Gopnik rightly emphasizes how Sartre and Camus's theoretical disagreements over political philosophy are reflected in the sad history of their lost friendship. This personal drama illuminates their philosophical differences and vice versa. Similarly, it is fair to look at Sartre's and Beauvoir's philosophy of freedom in the light of their famous pact to maintain an "essential love" for one another, while allowing for any number of "contingent lovers." Still, too much concern with the messy and ultimately impenetrable details of a life can lure us across the line between philosophical insight and titillating gossip.

Despite its dangers, the drama of existentialism has kept some of the deepest philosophical questions alive in popular intellectual culture and provides students with remarkably direct access to such questions. I am always impressed by the frisson in my class when students realize that there's a sense in which Sartre is right: they could, right now, get up, leave the classroom, drop out of school, and go live as beach bums in a perpetually warm climate. But it's equally impressive to see them - still stimulated by what they're read in Sartre and other existentialists like Camus and Merleau-Ponty - reflect on why this sense of radical freedom is far from the whole story of their lives as moral agents. This combination of drama and reflection is the reason existentialism will always be with us.

[Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, "Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy since 1960," and writes regularly for The Stone.]

Thinking the Impossible French Philosophy Since 1960

by

Gary Gutting

ISBN-10: 0199227039
ISBN-13: 978-0199227037

A related article...

An 1889 oil sketch of Friedrich Nietzsche on his sick bed by Hans Johann Wilhelm Olde.

"Nietzsche Is Dead"

by

Meredith Hindley

July/August 2012

Volume 33, Number 4

HUMANITIES

Count Harry Kessler received the news in the officers’ mess of his army regiment from a fellow officer going through dispatches. On October 25, 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche, who had famously announced the death of God, had himself died.

During the previous decade, Nietzsche’s writings had taken German culture by storm. One of Kessler’s friends joked that “six educated Germans cannot come together for a half hour without Nietzsche’s name being mentioned.” Nietzsche had become a hero—and cult figure—to those who wanted to reimagine Germany; and a villain to those who remained attached to Germany’s Protestant roots and traditional order.

The philosopher’s tragic decline only added to his mystique. Nietzsche had suffered a major mental breakdown in 1888, just as his ideas were catching fire outside of academic circles. The once brilliant scholar and philosopher, reduced to the mental cognition of a child, had no understanding of how famous he’d become.

As Nietzsche’s ideas were being adapted to various and contrary ends by avant-garde artists, psychoanalysts, and racial ideologues, his death provoked a battle over his legacy. Kessler, a prominent patron of culture and a well-connected operator on the European art scene, took part in the fight.

The count was a man of voracious intellect and endless charm, as well as a deeply committed diarist. At the age of twelve he started keeping a journal, creating a treasure trove for historians writing about the artistic forces of Wilhelmine Germany and the Belle Époque. Kessler seemed to meet or know everyone of importance—more than forty thousand names appear in fifteen thousand pages written over fifty-seven years. With the discipline of a great reporter, he recorded countless remarkable moments that describe, in intimate detail, the seismic political shifts that rocked Europe from the turn of the century to the Third Reich. Laird M. Easton, Kessler’s biographer, has edited and translated selections from the count’s early years to create Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880–1918 (Knopf). Nestled among its many stories is Kessler’s encounter with the life and legacy of Nietzsche. When Kessler was a young man, Nietzsche’s writings provided him with a framework for thinking beyond the staid categories of his bourgeois upbringing. Over time, Kessler fashioned himself first into a remarkable aesthete and later a diplomat and a spy. W. H. Auden, who considered Kessler a friend, called him “probably the most cosmopolitan man who ever lived.”

In the years leading up to the First World War, Kessler channeled his organizational talents into designing and raising money for a memorial to honor Nietzsche. But he wasn’t the only one with a keen interest in the philosopher’s legacy. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the philosopher’s sister, had her own ideas about how her brother’s work and life should be used.
 
THE LIVES AND LOVES OF FRITZ AND ELISABETH

Close in age, Fritz (as he was known to friends and family) and Elisabeth shared a bond made all the stronger by the loss of their father, a Lutheran minister, who died in 1849, when Fritz was four and Elisabeth was three. As the boy, Fritz received a fine education, one that encouraged his interest in literature and music. In 1864, he enrolled at the university in Bonn, switching to Leipzig the following year, leaving Elisabeth behind with Franziska, their domineering mother. Fritz’s studies and exposure to the wider world led him, in another sense, away from his sister and his family. He came to question the place of God and religion, and then abandoned theology in favor of philology. His disenchantment with Christianity caused the first of many rifts with Elisabeth, who found his rejection of their father’s faith disconcerting.

In 1869, after a riding accident cut short his military service, Nietzsche accepted a position teaching classical philology in Basel, Switzerland. That same year, he met composer Richard Wagner. Despite an age difference of three decades, the two men forged an intellectual connection through their love of music and an appreciation of the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. In The Birth of Tragedy, published in 1872, the young thinker argued that western culture had reached its pinnacle under the Greeks, but Wagner’s operas had come closest to embodying the Greek tradition in modern terms.

Fritz’s health had never been robust and his mania for work frequently left him spent and vulnerable to illness. His body was also slowly being consumed by syphilis, which he had contracted from a prostitute. Worried by letters recounting migraines and stomach problems, Elisabeth journeyed to Basel in 1870 to care for her brother. Over the next eight years, she spent long stretches managing his household so that he could teach and write.

Fritz’s relationship with Wagner, over time, assumed a father-son dynamic—and the son began to chafe at the father’s overbearing influence. After attending the Bayreuth Festival, inaugurated in 1876 to celebrate Wagner’s music, Fritz experienced a conversion: Wagner’s operas were not the reawakening of Greek culture as he first thought, but spectacles pandering to the basest impulses of the newly unified Germany. He also had doubts about Schopenhauer’s pessimism and the anti-Semitism that permeated Wagner’s worldview.

In 1878, Nietzsche published Human, All-Too-Human, which featured a critique of Christianity and anti-Semitism. The book upset Elisabeth, who was distraught that Fritz may have made her persona non grata to the Wagners and their social circle. The strain led Elisabeth to abandon her brother and return to Germany. Unable to maintain his own household, Nietzsche resigned his post at Basel and became an itinerant philosopher.

Next, the siblings began to quarrel over each others’ love lives. In 1882, at the age of thirty-seven, Fritz fell hard for Lou Salomé, a twenty-one-year-old Russian who was as smart as she was beautiful. Fritz found her mind intoxicating, relishing their never-ending philosophical discussions. Elisabeth, who prized respectability and was fiercely protective of her relationship with Fritz, regarded the unconventional Salomé as a threat. She objected to Salomé’s plan for a “philosophical convent,” in which Salomé, Fritz, and philosopher Paul Rée would create a platonic household. And she cringed with mortification when Salomé shared a photograph—one that depicted Salomé, whip in hand, driving a cart pulled by Fritz and Rée—with their social circle.

In Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Julian Young suggests that Nietzsche staged the scene as an homage to the enslavement of both him and Rée to Salomé’s charms. The photograph also serves as the inspiration for the notorious remark in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “Do you go to women? Don’t forget the whip.”

Angry at his sister’s meddling, Fritz accused her of “dirty and abusive” behavior. Fritz had his own issues with Elisabeth’s engagement to Bernhard Förster, a leading figure in Germany’s anti-Semitic political movement. In 1881, Förster masterminded an unsuccessful petition drive demanding that the government register all Jews, limit Jewish immigration, and ban Jews from teaching. When Förster’s political activities cost him his teaching job, he decided to pour his energy into launching Nueve Germania, a racially pure German colony in Paraguay. While initially skeptical of Förster’s radicalism and his colonial project, Elisabeth came to embrace his ideas, finding them more palatable than her brother’s rejection of God. By 1884, the siblings ceased to speak to each other. “This accursed anti-Semitism . . . is the cause of a radical breach between me and my sister,” Nietzsche wrote a friend.

Over the course of the next year, they reconciled. Elisabeth even asked Fritz to serve as best man at her wedding. He refused—standing up at the ceremony meant endorsing the marriage, something he couldn’t do. Elisabeth married Förster on May 22, 1885, the anniversary of Wagner’s birthday. At the end of October, Fritz wished Elisabeth well before she departed for Paraguay, secretly happy to put both physical and philosophical distance between himself and Förster. It was the last time Elisabeth saw her brother in his right mind.

By 1888, Nietzsche was becoming remarkably well known. The University of Copenhagen hosted a series of lectures about his philosophy, and translations of his key writings were in the works. So promising was the outlook that he made inquiries about buying back his oeuvre from his publisher.

But most of his fame lay abroad, he complained: “In Vienna, in St. Petersburg, in Stockholm, in Copenhagen, in Paris, in New York—everywhere I have been discovered; but not in the shadows of Europe, Germany.”

In early 1889, he collapsed, his body exhausted from almost two decades of battling syphilis. When he regained consciousness, the philosopher declared himself to be the reincarnation of Dionysus. It was not an ironic philosophical proclamation, but the desperate cry of a faltering mind. It was the end of his intellectual life, and the beginning of his immortality. But as Friedrich Nietszche and the nineteenth century entered their final years, German readers began to embrace the works of this native son.

“A great deal of the magic lay in the lyricism, beauty, and power of Nietzsche’s language. The philosopher was a German thinker with German roots addressing what were thought to be largely German problems,” writes Steven E. Aschheim in The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990.

Kessler was one of those enraptured by the magic. Born in Paris in 1868 to a Hamburg banker and a British heiress, he spent his childhood straddling Victorian Britain and Wilhelmine Germany. The nationalist fervor of the late-nineteenth century, in combination with pressure from his father, made it impossible to be a citizen of Europe, as the sensitive young man would have preferred. Faced with the prospect of becoming a banker, Kessler this time asserted himself and convinced his parents to let him study law and art history at Bonn and Leipzig. When it came time to fulfill his military service, he secured a spot in the elite Third Guard Lancers.

Through his studies, Kessler developed an interest in ancient Greece, an appreciation of art and aesthetics, and a disdain for historicism, making him an ideal reader for Nietzsche’s writings. At the end of 1891, a friend lent him a copy of Human, All-Too-Human. Kessler wasn’t immediately smitten. His diary entries find him contesting Nietzsche’s explanation of schadenfreude and observing that the philosopher’s hatred of everything German had “led him to utter absurdities,” such as divorcing Goethe’s accomplishments from German culture. But Kessler’s skepticism soon waned.

Uncertain of what career path to take, Kessler found solace in Nietzsche’s dictum that “the world is only justifiable as an aesthetic phenomenon.” As he embarked on a trip around the world in 1892, he packed Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s meditation on how to achieve a “superhuman” state. Kessler read it, along with the Odyssey, on a voyage between San Francisco and Yokohama.

THE MADMAN  IN THE ARCHIVE

After five years in Paraguay, Elisabeth returned to Germany in 1890, arriving not as a triumphant first lady, but as a disgraced widow. Accused of mismanaging Nueve Germania and stealing from its inhabitants, Förster had shot himself rather than endure the humiliation of bankruptcy and possible jail time. “False friends and the intrigues of enemies broke his heart,” Elisabeth explained, insisting that her husband had not taken his own life but instead had died from a heart attack. Having already born the loss of her husband, Elisabeth found that she had two brothers: the philosopher being devoured by Germans like Kessler, and the madman haunting the halls of their childhood home.

Rather than stay and help her mother care for her brother, Elisabeth returned to Nueve Germania, determined to carry on Förster’s work and revitalize his reputation, only to face charges of mismanagement herself. Leaving a trail of creditors in her wake, she fled back to Germany and embraced her identity as Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister. No longer would she be Elisabeth “Eli” Förster, but rather Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the name change made permanent by court order.

Stuck under her mother’s roof in the small town of Naumburg, Förster-Nietzsche channeled her energy into establishing an archive of her brother’s works and began the process of deciphering what else could be published from his papers. Given Förster-Nietzsche’s indifferent education and contradictory views, she was not an ideal custodian. But as she had physical possession of Nietzsche’s papers, there was little his friends could do. Anyone who had business with Nietzsche’s papers and his legacy had to go through Förster-Nietzsche.

On October 26, 1895, Kessler paid a visit, meeting her for the first time. Kessler had become a member of the editorial board of Pan, an illustrated journal devoted to literature and modern art, and wanted to publish Nietzsche’s musical compositions. “She is a small, delicate, still pretty woman, with a fresh complexion and tresses; her appearance does not indicate her energy,” he wrote in his diary. The archive, which housed Nietzsche’s books and manuscripts, was a “medium-sized, friendly room.”

Over lunch and dinner, Förster-Nietzsche educated him about her “unpleasant” situation. “She says that no one here has the slightest interest in, or understanding of her brother. She maintains her earlier connections to the old retired officers and civil servants but is not thanked for her advocacy of Nietzsche’s interests and thoughts, at most only forgiven. Even their own mother, an old pious pastor’s wife, is, in her sentiments, among the enemy.” While leery of Förster-Nietzsche, Kessler left the meeting an ardent supporter of the archive and agreed to help however he could.

Förster-Nietzsche had never lacked for ambition and her brother’s growing fame became a vehicle for it. In 1896, she wrested control of the copyright for his works from their mother and moved her brother to Weimar, a sleepy town regarded as the cradle of German culture. There, she could position him as the equal of Goethe and Schiller.

In August 1897, the Nietzsches moved into Villa Silberblick, a four-story house that was an easy walk from the center of Weimar. The villa was purchased for them to use by Meta von Salis, a Swiss aristocrat who had befriended Nietzsche when he lived in Zurich. Captivated by her fine manners and high German accent, Nietzsche had overlooked Salis’s advocacy of women’s emancipation, an issue for which he had little fondness. “She, in turn, was bowled over by him—the encounter, she said, cast a ‘golden shimmer’ over the rest of her life, a life during which she never abandoned the cause of promoting his philosophy,” writes Young.

Not long after the Nietzsches took up residence in Villa Silberblick, Kessler stopped in. “The house lies on a hill above the city in a newly planted but still rather bare garden,” he wrote in his diary. Förster-Nietzsche told him that her brother liked the new house—upon arriving he had wandered from room to room chanting, “palazzo, palazzo.” That story and other tales of Nietzsche’s behavior unsettled Kessler. “She seems to have become so accustomed to treating her brother as a stammering child that she no longer seems to feel the horrible tragedy of it all.”

It also appears to be the first time that Kessler encountered Nietzsche—to use the word “met” would be misleading.

    He lay sleeping on a sofa. The mighty head rested, as if too heavy for his neck, sunk on his chest, hanging halfway to the right. The forehead is quite colossal, the mane of his hair still dark brown, and also the shaggy, swollen moustache. There are wide, black-brown shadows sunk deep under his eyes into his cheeks. In his flat, loose face deep furrows from thought and desire are engraved but gradually fading and becoming smooth again. The hands are like wax, with greenish-violet veins, and somewhat swollen, like those of a corpse.

Despite Förster-Nietzsche stroking him and calling him, “darling, darling,” the philosopher failed to wake. “Thus he resembles not someone sick or crazy but rather a dead man,” wrote Kessler.

After dinner, Förster-Nietzsche offered Kessler the job of editing new editions of Zarathustra and collected poems, but Kessler demurred, offering instead to oversee the design and printing.

As always Kessler was making mental notes. He wasn’t impressed with how the house had been decorated, calling it in his diary “prosperous, but decorated without refinement.” Förster-Nietzsche apparently felt the same way and embarked on a series of expensive renovations, sending the bill to Salis for payment. Outraged at Förster-Nietzsche’s “increasingly reckless arrogance,” and fueled by a nasty exchange of letters, Salis broke off contact. Wanting nothing more to do with Förster-Nietzsche, she sold the villa to a Nietzsche cousin in 1899. With a twinge of regret, Salis joined the ranks of Nietzsche’s friends and admirers who worried what would become of Nietzsche’s legacy so long as it was in the custody of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.

THE MASK OF DEATH

Kessler arrived home from reserve duty to find a telegram waiting. “This morning my deeply loved brother passed away unexpectedly,” wrote Förster-Nietzsche. “Monday afternoon at 5 p.m. the funeral in the Nietzsche Archive. Please come if possible.” There was no “if” about it. Kessler booked a train ticket to Weimar for the next day. When he arrived, he found that Förster-Nietzsche was “very upset.”

Nietzsche’s body had been laid out in a coffin lined with white damask and linen, his half-opened eyes suggesting he was merely sleeping. “His last sickness gave him a pitifully drawn and emaciated expression, but the large, puffy, frost-gray moustache hides the pain of the mouth,” observed Kessler. “And this splendid form appears everywhere through the emaciation: the wide, arched forehead, the robust, powerful jaw and cheekbone appear still more sharply under the skin than when he was alive. The total impression is one of strength despite the pain.”

The idea of memorializing Nietzsche in some manner must have already been on Kessler’s mind. On the morning of the funeral, he arranged for a death mask to be made. To help him, Kessler recruited Curt Stoeving, who had painted the philosopher’s portrait some years earlier, and a local plasterer. They were done in a half hour.

At five o’clock, mourners packed the archive, bodies crowding the coffin. Candles blazed and a women’s choir sang Brahms and “a magnificently tragic motet.” There was also a long eulogy by art historian Kurt Breysig, who offered a cultural-historical analysis of Nietzsche’s work. “Seldom have I experienced a grimmer moment,” wrote architect Fritz Schumacher, who attended the service. “Scholarship pursued this man to the grave. If he had revived he would have thrown the speaker out of the window and chased us out of the temple.”

The following day, Nietzsche was buried next to his parents in the graveyard of the church in Röcken, where his father had served as a pastor. It was contrary to his wishes—he had wanted to be buried in Switzerland on the Chasté peninsula in Sils-Maria, where he had spent so many pleasant summers. “What was Nietzschean in the service was the sunny stillness of this natural solitude: the light playing through the plum trees on the church wall and even in the grave; a large spider spinning her web over the grave from branch to branch in a sunbeam,” wrote Kessler. Otherwise, it was a Christian affair for a man who did not believe in God: the bells rang, a choir sang spirituals, and a silver cross lay on the coffin. In the running debate over religion between Förster-Nietzsche and her brother, she had the final word.
 
MEMORIALIZING NIETZSCHE

As the new century inched forward, Kessler found himself drawn to Weimar for reasons other than Nietzsche. His dear friend, Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, had become director of Weimar’s arts and crafts school in 1902. There were those in the court of Wilhelm Ernst, the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, who longed to see Kessler in Weimar as well. For a man who thrived on the cultural frisson of Berlin and Paris, the decision to ensconce himself in a town of thirty thousand, populated by retirees, was not undertaken lightly. But the offer of an honorary directorship of the Museum of Arts and Crafts was hard to refuse and Kessler took up the post in March 1903.

Kessler had grand plans for turning Weimar and the museum into a center for aesthetic modernism. He organized a series of exhibitions that promoted symbolist artist Max Klinger, French postimpressionism, and English book and theater design. Kessler also bought a house in Weimar, enlisting van de Velde to design the interior, and collaborated again with him on plans for the construction of a new theater.

Assembling the pieces of his vision led Kessler to spend long stretches in London and Paris, meeting with artists and dealers. In February 1905, during one of his Paris sojourns, Kessler approached Auguste Rodin about doing a bust of Nietzsche. The artist was reluctant to take the commission, citing the “great difficulty of doing someone whom he had never seen alive.” Kessler assured him a death mask had been made, which seemed to cheer him, but Rodin still balked. “The bone structure, that’s already something, it’s the foundation of all we do,” Rodin told Kessler. “But beyond that there is the movement of the surfaces that one must observe, the principal direction of the movement of the muscles on the bone structure that one can only observe with a model. . . . When one has the movement, one has everything.”

Kessler’s modern ideas about art soon clashed with the more traditional ones held by Weimar society. In 1906, he was forced to resign his post after an exhibition of watercolors of nude women by Rodin caused a scandal. Kessler quickly moved on to other projects, such as becoming a patron of artists whose work he admired. He also collaborated with composer Hugo von Hofmannsthal for the libretto for Der Rosenkavalier, an opera composed by Richard Strauss.

Förster-Nietzsche had not been idle either. She enlisted van de Velde’s services to redecorate and extend the archive in 1903 (it remains a showcase of art nouveau design). In 1908, she formed the Nietzsche Archive Foundation, which formalized its operation. Kessler was given a seat on the board. The money to operate the archive came from Ernst Thiel, a Swedish businessman of Jewish descent. Förster-Nietzsche played down her anti-Semitism to win his support.

A steady stream of Nietzsche’s collected works and letters had also appeared under Förster-Nietzsche’s direction, with more on the way. The volumes are riddled with forgeries large and small. Scholars who later tried to reconcile the content of the volumes with the archival record have noted the lack of originals for many letters, particularly in the correspondence between Förster-Nietzsche and her brother during her time in Paraguay. Förster-Nietzsche also wasn’t above changing the identity of letter recipients or altering the text to soften her brother’s rants against anti-Semitism.

Did Kessler know about the sleight of hand? His diary is silent on the matter, and Easton, his biographer, isn’t sure either. “Whether Kessler, before the war, ever suspected how Elisabeth was deliberately distorting her brother’s legacy to suit an anti-Semitic, nationalist interpretation, is unclear,” he writes.

Planning for a memorial progressed in fits and starts until 1911. Förster-Nietzsche began to push for its completion in time to celebrate her brother’s seventieth birthday in 1914. But how does one memorialize a philosopher, especially one who wrote deeply about art and had a poor opinion of contemporary art forms? Förster-Nietzsche imagined a “modest temple.” It is revealing that she thought a temple appropriate as long as it was not “gigantic,” for which there might not be sufficient funds. Ever the architect, van de Velde argued for remodeling the existing archive by adding a great hall that incorporated a memorial.

Kessler also wanted a temple, one that would embody the ancient Greek principles that infused Nietzsche’s worldview—and he had already mapped it out in his head. In a nod to Apollonian principles, the courtyard would feature a statue of a naked youth carved by Aristide Maillol, a French Catalan sculptor known for his classical forms. The interior would invoke Dionysus, with a bust of Nietzsche and bas reliefs by Klinger. Nietzsche quotations engraved by Eric Gill, a British artist with a flair for typography, would adorn the walls.

The assembling of different artists in service of a larger project was pure Kessler. He could also be incredibly persuasive. By the end of their first meeting to discuss the project, van de Velde and Förster-Nietzsche had signed on to his vision.

Building the temple required money, somewhere in the range of fifty thousand marks. Kessler and the others decided to offer subscriptions, which would start at one thousand marks (Kessler committed five thousand), and to publish facsimile editions of Nietzsche’s writings. Kessler also envisioned benefit performances, lectures, and concerts in Germany, France, Austria, and New York. The informal committee soon morphed into a formal board, with Kessler as president. Förster-Nietzsche, however, did not have a spot on the board. Easton speculates that Kessler might not have offered her one, fearful of giving her too much influence.

When Kessler ventured to Paris in the spring, he talked up plans for the memorial among his social circle, which included poet Rainer Maria Rilke, the writer Jean Cocteau, theater promoter Gabriel Astruc, composer Reynaldo Hahn, and Ballet Russes founder Sergei Diaghilev. He encountered both enthusiastic support and studied opposition. Painter Pierre Bonnard refused to support the project. “It’s because I am, in a certain sense, opposed to Nietzsche, not to his ideas, but to his person,” Bonnard told Kessler. “I am a little afraid of those beings that are nothing but thought. It seems to me that they will finish one day with their thinking by being devoured by life.”

Over lunch, Kessler asked dancer Vaslav Nijinsky, the toast of Paris for his performances with the Ballets Russes, to act as the model for Maillol’s sculpture. Nijinsky agreed, but Maillol objected. “Have you seen him naked?” Maillol asked Kessler. “Isn’t he round? What is beautiful for others is not often for the artist who has an idea in his head. The model must respond to the idea that the artist wishes to execute.” One evening of watching Nijinsky dance changed Maillol’s mind. “He’s absolutely Eros,” he told Kessler. “He’s so perfect that he is almost too beautiful.”

Building a temple was an ambitious but manageable project—then came the idea for the stadium. Writing to Förster-Nietzsche, Kessler begged her not to be frightened of the idea. “Your brother was the first . . . to teach joy in one’s body, on physical strength and beauty; the first who brought physical culture, force, and grace back into relation with the spirit and the highest things.” Kessler found support for the stadium idea among the other board members, who grasped that gymnastic clubs and sport leagues would help finance its construction.

Förster-Nietzsche was both “excited and horrified” by the idea of the stadium—and accused Kessler and van de Velde of working behind her back. “Basically she is a little philistine, pastor’s daughter, who swears to be sure upon the words of her brother, but is upset and angry as soon as you try to transform them into deeds,” wrote an exasperated Kessler. “She justifies much of what her brother said about women. She was in fact the only woman he knew intimately.” Putting his vitriol aside, Kessler met with Förster-Nietzsche, soothing her paranoia by explaining how the stadium idea had come about.

By September, Kessler had found a stretch of suitable land. Now it was up to van de Velde to design the ceremonial approach, temple, and stadium. Kessler estimated that the final price tag would run close to one million marks. “If we have more money or raise enough, I would like to create, next to the Nietzsche Memorial, an Institute for ‘Genetics,’ for the beautification of the race,” wrote Kessler.

In mid-October, Förster-Nietzsche once again kicked up a fuss about the project. “Unbelievable letter from Förster-Nietzsche, who asks me to give up the plan for the memorial because ‘a Herr Lenke or Menke’ (she cannot recall the name) visited her and spoke against the project,” wrote Kessler. “The ‘forthright indignation’ of this ‘Nietzsche worshipper’ has affected her deeply, and ‘she herself cannot do anything now other than to oppose it.’” The project wasn’t so easily abandoned. Kessler had arranged for a loan of sixty thousand marks to purchase the required property, the money provided by two Jewish bankers. He sent Förster-Nietzsche a terse letter explaining that the loan would have to be paid back, well aware that she lacked the funds to do so. Kessler also suggested that she refrain from valuing the opinion of a man whose name she couldn’t remember.

At the end of November, Kessler met with van de Velde to see the plans. Kessler was greatly disappointed. The design reminded him of “an English country home”—and he worried that his old friend was out of his depth. “His imagination falters without the aid of utility. Clearly he hasn’t much heart for the job.” Van de Velde went back to his drafting board and presented a new design two days later. “Now the temple looks like a municipal museum, just a lot of little gossipy forms, unimportant things, cloak rooms, a hall with skylights, etc.,” wrote Kessler. “I told him that we can’t continue this way.”

Kessler followed up their meeting with a letter that attempted to describe what he wanted the monument to achieve. First and foremost, it was “the transposition of the personality of Nietzsche into a grand architectural formula”:

    A light monument, soaring, so to speak, on its heights before the massive stadium, an almost aerial monument, like certain Italo-Muslim monuments of the Indies that appear constructed by djinns, but nervous and strong and even slyly massive beneath this appearance of lightness, like the physiognomy of Nietzsche himself, with his formidable Bismarckian bone structure under the exquisitely delicate Greek surfaces of his brow and mouth. I would like not only joy but almost irony in the monumental expression of this opposition, the triumph of finesse over force. A complete orchestration of these two motifs leading to a joy and a serenity, an almost ironic purity and lightness.

The charge Kessler gave van de Velde was almost impossible to realize. “One sympathizes with van de Velde upon being told that he had to transform the physiognomy—let alone the ideas—of a philosopher into a building,” writes Easton.

In mid-December, van de Velde presented Kessler with a scale model of how a stadium and temple would look on the site they had chosen. “The stadium in this model has exactly the dimensions of the one in Athens,” wrote Kessler. “The whole, especially the relation of the temple to the stadium, was surprisingly beautiful, beautiful and grandiose.” But things would once again stall when it came to the temple.

“The truth is that our age lacks any tradition and handle on decorative architecture,” wrote Kessler. “This complete failure of van de Velde, after repeated efforts, to find an architectural expression for a pure and aimless joy in life and lightness proves it.”

In June of 1912, van de Velde presented his design for the Nietzsche memorial to the committee. Kessler’s diary is mum on why and how he came to support that particular design. The committee approved it, despite the revised estimate of two million marks needed to make it a reality.

For the remainder of 1912 and 1913, the memorial existed in limbo. Kessler was deeply involved in writing and producing a ballet, but Förster-Nietzsche’s ongoing financial troubles contributed as well. Her mismanagement of the archive had saddled it with a crushing debt and she didn’t like that money, which theoretically could help the archive, was going toward building the memorial. Kessler, she complained, “chases fantasy and it doesn’t occur to him that I have suffered cares and anxieties for twenty years and he could well come halfway to meet my wishes.” Eventually, Kessler and Förster-Nietzsche came to an agreement that securing the archive took precedence, effectively putting the memorial on hold until one hundred thousand marks could be raised.

FUTURE BELIEVERS

The advent of the First World War spelled the end of Kessler’s plans for the memorial, a development Nietzsche surely would have applauded. “I want no ‘believers’; I think I am too malicious to believe in myself; I never speak to masses.—I have a terrible fear that one day I will be pronounced holy,” he wrote in Ecce Homo in 1888.

Like many Germans, Kessler welcomed the war, relishing the opportunity to serve with his regiment on the front lines. “These first weeks of war have brought forth something from unknown depths in our German people, which I can only compare with an earnest and cheerful spirituality,” he wrote a friend. War on the eastern front proved less than uplifting, and Kessler swung a reassignment back to Berlin in 1916. From there he was posted to the German embassy in Bern, Switzerland, where he served out the war acting as a diplomat and a spy.

Förster-Nietzsche used the war to further distort her brother’s work, publishing a series of articles proclaiming that Nietzsche would have supported the war. It’s unlikely that Nietzsche, who regarded the creation of the Second German Reich in 1871 as the catalyst for the decline of German culture, would have done so. The German government also looked to Nietzsche for inspiration, printing 150,000 copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra for distribution, along with the Bible, to German soldiers at the front.

After the war, Förster-Nietzsche, who opposed the new Weimar Republic, joined the überconservative German National People’s party. As the 1920s progressed, she cultivated Nietzsche admirers with far-right political beliefs, especially if they could write a check to support the archive. “It is enough to make one weep to see what has become of Nietzsche and the Nietzsche Archives,” lamented Kessler in 1932.

There was also no more talk of a memorial, at least by Kessler. The milieu that had made such a grand scheme seem feasible had been destroyed by four years of trench warfare. The war also dulled Kessler’s taste for imperial ambition, turning him into a pacifist. Having discovered a talent for diplomacy, Kessler became Germany’s first ambassador to the newly independent Poland. Although Kessler traveled far and wide over the decades, he always returned home to Germany. The advent of the Nazi regime in 1933 made that impossible, both spiritually and intellectually. He lived out his five remaining years in exile in France.

Under the Third Reich, Förster-Nietzsche was showered with attention and accolades. The years she spent molding her brother’s work and memory to align with her right-wing beliefs had made him a hero to the Nazi leadership. Starting in May 1934, she began receiving three hundred reichsmarks a month from Hitler’s private purse in honor of “her services in preserving and publicizing Nietzsche’s work.” When she died in 1935, Hitler attended her memorial service.

[Meredith Hindley is senior writer of Humanities. NEH has given two small grants and a research fellowship to Laird M. Easton since 1992 for work on Friedrich Nietzsche, Harry Graf Kessler, and Kessler’s diaries. Nietzsche’s life and work are the subject of numerous other NEH-supported projects including Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition by NEH research fellow Jessica N. Berry and American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas by NEH fellow Jennifer Eden Ratner-Rosenhagen.]

Count Harry Graf Kessler...extraordinary observer of history 
 
Thanks to stringer Tim for the article.