In any case, no other German writer of equal stature has been so thoroughly opposed to all proto-nazism—which Nietzsche encountered in Wagner’s ideological tracts, in his sister’s husband, Bernhard Förster, and in various publications of his time. If some Nazi writers cited him nevertheless, it was at the price of incredible misquotation and exegetical acrobatics, which defy comparison with all the similar devices that Nietzsche himself castigated in the name of the philological conscience. His works were rejected as a series of poses; parenthetical statements were quoted as meaning the
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