The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890 - 1990 (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)

Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism #2

by Steven E. Aschheim

The twentieth century has seen countless attempts to appropriate the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche for diverse cultural and political ends, but nowhere have these efforts been more sustained and of greater consequence than in Germany. In The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990, Steven Aschheim offers a magisterial chronicle of the philosopher's presence in German life and politics from the turn of the century through the recent reunification. Beginning with the aesthetic frenzy of fin-de-siecle European culture, through the historical convulsions of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, Nietzsche, the philosopher who hoped he would never have disciples, emerges in Aschheim's account as a thinker whose work crucially influenced - and was recast to fit - a multitude of contradictory projects. Anarchists, feminists, Nazis, religious cultists, Socialists, Marxists, vegetarians, avant-garde artists, devotees of physical culture, and archconservatives are but some of the groups that marched under a Nietzschean banner. Aschheim explores the significance of Nietzsche not only for such well-known figures as Martin Heidegger, Thomas Mann, and Carl Jung, but also for more obscure thinkers such as the liberal Rabbi Cesar Seligmann, who coined the phrase "the will to Judaism," and the radical psychoanalyst and free love advocate Otto Gross. He provides a judicious and balanced account of the link between Nietzsche and National Socialism and explores the ubiquity of Nietzsche within the major tensions of contemporary German history. The philosopher's "untimely" thoughts are, as Aschheim shows, more relevant than ever to the moral, aesthetic, and intellectual challenges of our own age.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, History, European History

364 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1993

Reviews

[Matthew W · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nietzsche influenced everyone: National Socialists, Zionists, Marxists, Protestants, Satanists and a variety of other conflicting groups. At the same time, he was despised by certain figures in all these groups. Also on a individual level, people either tend to love Nietzsche's writing or hate it, for that is the mark of a truly revolutionary/thought provoking writer. If one thing is for sure, Nietzsche never bores.

In the excellent and eclectic work The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890 - 1990, the author provides the words of many different German (as well as abroad) scholars/writers/politicians/etc. in regards to the "Nietzsche question." Some say he was a bourgeois degenerate while others claim him to be the unconscious voice of the German collective, a man who prophesied an atavistic reawakening in the German people (in regards to Nazism). Nietzsche also happened to influence most of the greatest German minds after him including Spengler, Jung (well, Swiss), Hesse, and a variety of others. Early Zionist Max Nordau saw Nietzsche as a supreme degenerate, a psycho-babbling madman that should be ignored and abhorred.

For anyone interested in Nietzsche, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany: 1890 - 1990 is a concise and scholarly work, a text that cannot be ignored. Most importantly, it is fairly objective, for the author does not offer too much opinion/criticism but merely displays the words of others. This work also contains quotes from various non-translated and out-of-print German works, for that alone makes this book extremely intrinsically valuable.

For those tired of hearing various pseudo-scholars arguing why Nietzsche was not an influence on National Socialism or whether he was a "leftist" or not, this is the book to checkout for it incinerates all the biased and muddled confusion.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Twentieth century Germany has provided an exceptional stage for the most difficult questions in intellectual history. Do ideas have an integrity that remains intact wherever they travel, and can thus be said to be “responsible” for effects their authors never envisioned? Or are they just raw materials that get shaped and deployed by whatever interpreter happens upon them? Does it make sense to look for the origins of barbaric and tragic events in the world of ideas? These questions are continually being addressed with regard to the philosopher Martin Heidegger, but have been raised about a slew of other German intellectuals, including G.W.F. Hegel and, perhaps most prominently, Friedrich Nietzsche. Like other aspects of the historiography of twentieth century Germany, German intellectual history has been perhaps centrally consumed with the question of how Nazism could have come about, who should be held responsible, and to what degree.

In the U.S., Nietzsche was widely assumed to have been a Nazi philosopher long before he was the subject of any serious historiography, a situation that opened the way for the enormous influence of the German-American philosopher Walter Kaufmann. Kaufmann, who has remained the godfather of American Nietzsche scholarship despite an avalanche of criticism, not only translated nearly all of the philosopher’s books, but put his stamp on the historiography with his Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, first published in 1950. Kaufmann insisted on a rigid separation between the true, philosophical Nietzsche and the “Nietzsche myth” created by the Nazis, the blame for which Kaufmann laid at the feet of Nietzsche’s supposedly virulently anti-Semitic sister Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche. While Kaufmann is widely praised for making Nietzsche an object of serious inquiry in the U.S., he has also been accused of sanitizing and domesticating Nietzsche in

In his history of Nietzsche’s reception in Germany, Steven E. Aschheim claims to approach this polarized field without an agenda. Nietzsche will be treated neither as hopelessly compromised by Nazism nor expunged of all complicity; in fact, Aschheim immediately brackets the question of a “real” Nietzsche. “There should be no set portrait of the ‘authentic’ Nietzsche, nor dogmatic certainty as to his original intent” (3). Instead, Anchheim aims for a “Rezeptiongeschichte sensitive to the open-ended, transformational nature of Nietzsche’s legacy” (3-4). This methodological presumption has enormous implications for Aschheim’s story: while Nietzsche is quoted liberally, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany contains no close or philosophically informed reading of texts or reconstruction ideas. Instead, Aschheim narrates nearly a century of reception that winds its way along the shifting vectors of left and right in German cultural and political life, pulling in appropriators, opportunists, and opponents alike.

When it was published, Anschheim’s book was surely the most systematic overview of Nietzsche’s reception. It follows Nietzsche’s ideas among the literary and artistic avant-garde in the late 19th century, into the trenches of World War I, through the endless varieties of Nietzschean völkisch, socialist and religious movements, and finally, in the last third of the book, into the Third Reich. In his earlier years, Nietzsche gave avant-garde intellectuals the tools to express their “alienation from the establishment’s high culture and their desire to overcome the nineteenth century” (51). By the beginning of the first World War, Nietzsche had been “institutionalized” in Germany; Aschheim argues that he led “countless intellectuals” in Europe to look positively on the prospect of war, which Nietzsche had taught them to view as a “regenerative” cure for their civilizational decadence (132). As for the classic cliché of the German soldier driven to new heights of barbarism by his nightly reading from Thus Spake Zarathustra in the camp, Aschheim puts it to rest. Not only was the Nietzsche presented to soldiers shorn of any radical implications—he was basically reduced to a prophet of exceptionalism and heroism. In any case, it is unclear that many soldiers actually read him, and if they did, they were unlikely to identify with Zarathustra. “If there was a superman, most soldiers did not regard themselves as such; he was displaced onto more remote figures” (137).

As Aschheim enters his concluding chapters on the Third Reich and Nazism, he reiterates his determination not to measure Nietzsche’s reception against a “real” or “accurate” version. “Recognition and analysis of Nietzsche’s role within the realm of Nazi culture, ideology and indeed policy must proceed independently of whether or not we believe that this usage distorts Nietzsche’s thought or faithfully reflects it” (233). Even though it’s clear the book has finally reached its central concern, Aschheim ostensibly remains committed to his guiding principle. He argues that the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche was precisely that: a heavily massaged, revised, and re-organized version of the philosopher. The Nazi impetus for exalting Nietzsche even above Goethe and the other German heroes they adopted had much to do with his already-existing cultural capital: “The particular Nazi emphasis on Nietzsche derived from his peculiar capacity to legitimate them” (235). Nazi interpreters had to go to hilarious lengths to explain away Nietzsche’s anti-German diatribes and apparent philo-Semitism; they argued that “playing the Jews against the Germans” was part of Nietzsche’s strategy for getting his own backward country’s attention (250-1).

While Aschheim never strays from asserting that the Nazi Nietzsche was “sifted,” “transfigured,” and “mythologized,” his analysis of that entanglement gradually reveals that the effort to trace Nietzsche’s reception without a working conception of Nietzsche’s ideas to be unsustainable. It becomes clear that Aschheim does indeed have a view about which themes and tendencies are truly Nietzschean, and remain so despite being appropriated and reinterpreted in countless and diametrically opposed ways, for both progressive and reactionary ends. For Aschheim, the core of Nietzscheanism lies in the promise of novelty, of cultural regeneration, of “transvaluation” or “reevaluation” of values, a theme recapitulated in nearly every chapter and mentioned with increasing frequency toward the end of the book. It returns once again in the book’s closing paragraph, where Aschheim summarizes Nietzsche in terms he has derived from the Nazi appropriation, and then convicts Nietzsche on the basis of being describable in those terms. Worst of all, the essential relations between the two are declared to “represent themselves” (330).

The unexpectedly essentialist note on which Aschheim concludes reveals what his agenda has been all along—an agenda that, despite my disagreement with it, would have made a better book had it been aired and argued more explicitly. Aschheim’s meandering through the discursive wonderland of twentieth-century Germany, where interpretations are recounted but rarely seriously evaluated, suggests the limits of intellectual-cultural history that altogether eschews a) close reading and philosophical analysis, and b) considerations of broader cultural, political, and economic contexts. Because Aschheim both proceeds without a sophisticated grasp of Nietzsche as a philosopher and fails to go into enough detail about how his ideas moved from philosophical texts to popular culture, the analysis seems batted back and forth, unable to find a clear course. That is, until the final chapters, when Aschheim quietly draws out the themes he considers essential Nietzscheanism, and concludes that they will “continue to be regarded by many” as inescapably intertwined with Nazism. Perhaps if he had taken ownership of this view from the beginning, he would have spared readers detours through relatively minor moments in Nietzsche reception, and been able to build a stronger, more detailed case that Nietzsche’s radical-right ideas laid the cultural groundwork Germany’s dark future.

[Tomislav · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book explores the ideas of diverse individuals inspired by Nietzsche: avant-garde artists, feminists, misogynistic warmongers, vegetarians, Protestant reformists, Jewish reformists, antisemites, radical individualists, socialists, cosmopolitan aristocrats, and proletarian nationalists. Nietzsche was an omnipresent post-Enlightenment thinker who had something for everyone. The book includes both well-known names and half-forgotten ones, featuring serious philosophers, amusing fringe eccentrics, and shallow activists. While philosophical themes are discussed, the focus is primarily on cultural and political issues. For most of the period covered, Nietzsche was regarded more as a cultural critic than a serious academic philosopher. Although Nazism is not constantly mentioned, it holds a central place because many interbellum right-wing interpretations of Nietzsche, with or without intent, led to his appropriation by the Nazis, and all postwar discussions could not escape that legacy.

Initially, Nietzsche mostly attracted marginal, bohemian intellectuals who combined archaic and futurist elements. Conservatives disliked his anti-Christian, subversive messages and regularly accused him and his admirers of degeneracy. However, at the turn of the century, his popularity surged, leading to the emergence of a Nietzschean kitsch industry; some pictures included in the book are even cringier than the Che Guevara memorabilia. With the advent of the Great War, Nietzsche became increasingly identified with militarist and nationalist ideas, both by followers and detractors. His anti-war admirers struggled to formulate their opposition from a purely Nietzschean perspective. The best they could manage was depicting the war as a petit-bourgeois, capitalist affair that should be of no concern to artistically minded individualists. The war gave a strong boost to a right-wing interpretation of Nietzsche promoted by his sister, Elisabeth. The right was already becoming less Christian and traditionalist, with some groups even accepting forms of authoritarian socialism. Bizarrely, Nietzsche was also popular among some leftists who saw him as a generic nonconformist, a critic of stuffy bourgeois society, and a prophet of spiritual self-development for the masses. Thus, the philosopher who consistently denigrated socialism during his career now stood behind not one but two opposing forms of socialism.

Aschheim opposes essentialist readings and rarely compares the variety of interpretations to Nietzsche’s original works, although he discusses the difficulties some encountered in their selective appropriations. He even argues that the main strength of Nietzsche’s philosophy is its ability to be interpreted in various ways by different personalities and in changing social circumstances. Nietzsche's works left no legacy of commitment or rigidity, and no firm foundations for an organized movement or ideology. The book might be a bit outdated with such postmodern conclusions; at the time of publication, there was also a resurgence of studies portraying Nietzsche as a firmly right-wing, although not necessarily Nazi, thinker. For the most part, the book does not try to make systematic, general points or evaluations of his interpreters. It often seems like a catalogue of names and movements, and it is a bit unclear why some are given so much space while others receive so little – his earliest followers and correspondents are barely mentioned. While not a definitive work on the subject, it is a very useful overview of German intellectual history and of the different individuals and movements inspired by Nietzsche. It does not try to make a strong point about the philosopher himself, but you can gain valuable insights about his ideas by examining their various interpretations and applications.

[Illiterate · Rating 2 out of 5]

Aschheim tracks Nietzscheanism from avant garde through WW1 to nazism. As usual with reception histories, I’m left thinking there’s no there there.

[AC · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am reading not this book, but Aschheim’s summary paper: “Nietschean Socialism — Left and Right, 1890-1933”, Journal of Contemporary History 23, 1988, 147-168.

This article is rather slight. It focuses on the attempt to synthesize Nietzsche into the Weimar Socialism of the SPD. As Aschheim admits, this attempt to absorb Nietzsche into left-wing Socialism, which led to voluntarism, was essentially a failure. It was the synthesis with right-wing “German”, or “national” Socialism that was successful. There is nothing new in this, and he does not address the problem of Leninism, or of Mao.