American Nietzsche: A History of an Icon and His Ideas

by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

The confession by Crane Brinton in his assessment of Kaufmann’s book for the Saturday Review of Literature in 1951 is even more startling. He began by poking fun at the flawed US scholarship on Nietzsche’s ideas and conceded that his was no better: “I myself … brought out a brief [it was 266 pages] and, I admit, rather ill-tempered analysis of Nietzsche in which I found some of his ideas congruous with those of the Nazis, and Nietzsche himself a somewhat unpleasantly pathetic intellectual.” Throughout his study, Kaufmann consistently took issue with Brinton’s interpretations, and Brinton, in turn, used his book review as a platform to tone down or qualify his claims from a decade earlier. He praised the “compact richness of [Kaufmann’s] book,” noting the subtlety with which Kaufmann synthesized Nietzsche’s ideas while “avoid[ing] the tendency to put Nietzsche back together too neatly.” By granting that Kaufmann made “the best case for” a revisionist interpretation of Nietzsche’s martial claims, Brinton seemed willing to question his own version of the philosopher as a demented and decadent proto-Nazi. He noted approvingly that Kaufmann’s study was “one of the very best books on Nietzsche I have seen.”