American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

He described American culture as youthful and innocent, unburdened by calcified traditions.“The American way of laughing does me good,” he wrote after reading Die Abenteuer Tom Sawyers, “especially this sort of sturdy seaman like Marc [sic] Twain. I have been unable to laugh anymore at anything German.” He preferred American “silliness more than German cleverness,” and found the playful American spirit of “naiveté and letting-oneself-go” physically and psychically regenerative: “Even villainous acts acquire a form of completeness and the closeness to the wild, and gunshots and marinas result in good health.”7 Though he appreciated how Americans seemed free from the weight of entombing memories, he regretted that their freedom from the past yielded a hasty pursuit of the here and now. In their “lust for gold; and the breathless haste with which they work,” they were infected with “the distinctive vice of the new world”8—“modern restlessness.”