American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Once he highlighted Förster-Nietzsche’s anti-Semitism, Kaufmann built his case for Nietzsche’s innocence by emphasizing the philosopher’s “powerful ambivalence” about his little sister. He loved her because of her devotion to him, but he was often aggrieved by all the ways she “embodied the nar-rowness … and the deeply unchristian Christianity” of the warped culture of the Kaiserreich.34 Ambivalence escalated to disgust when he learned of her marriage to Förster. Witness, for example, his letter to her in 1887 in which he wrote,“One of the greatest stupidities you have committed—for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semitic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me ever again with ire or melancholy.” To this Kaufmann added Nietzsche’s hatred of “Anti-Semitic Teutonism,” which played a central role in his break from Wagner, and loaded his text with selections from Nietzsche’s published writings and personal letters that showed his disdain for anti-Semitism as another expression of nineteenth-century German ignorance and chauvinism. Kaufmann quoted Nietzsche’s last letter to his friend Franz Overbeck: “Just now I am having all anti-Semites shot.”