Nietzsche And The German Tradition.pdf

361

BOOK REVIEWS

Don’t Have to Read Women’s Writing to Know It’s No Good (New York:

Pergamon, 1989) or Joanna Russ, How to Suppress Women’s Writing,

2nd edn (London: The Women’s Press, 1994).

C HARLOTTE W OODFORD

Nietzsche and the German Tradition. Edited by Nicholas Martin. Oxford,

Bern and Berlin: Peter Lang, 2003. Pp. xviii + 314.

€

57.80.

Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy.

Edited by Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich. Princeton and

Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp. xv + 341. £11.99.

The papers collected in Nietzsche and the German Tradition were first

delivered at a conference at St Andrews in 1997 (two, strangely, have

already been published elsewhere). Dealing with Nietzsche’s responses

to diverse, sometimes unexpected aspects of German history and

culture, the volume includes several important studies that can be

strongly recommended.

The longest essay, by Thomas H. Brobjer, assesses Nietzsche’s

knowledge of the classic German philosophers since Leibniz. By

examining his notebooks and the marginalia in his personal library,

Brobjer reaches the striking conclusion that Nietzsche had no thorough

first-hand knowledge of the work of any German philosopher except

Schopenhauer and Friedrich Lange. Though he constantly refers to

Kant, he cannot be shown to have read any work by Kant apart from

the Kritik der Urteilskraft. Otherwise, like a lazy student, Nietzsche

relied on secondary sources. These largely negative findings, which

are to be elaborated in Brobjer’s forthcoming book, make one wonder

what Nietzsche meant by his philosophical references. Evidently

Nietzsche uses ‘Kant’, ‘Hegel’ and others as shorthand for philosophical

positions, enabling him to develop his own ideas, and also as

convenient polemical Aunt Sallies. A similar conclusion emerges from

Duncan Large’s study of Nietzsche’s references to Luther. ‘Luther’ in

Nietzsche’s work sums up a historical period, an aspect of German

character, and a psychological type related to ‘Kant’ and ‘Socrates’.

Indeed, Nietzsche engaged more thoroughly with science than with

modern philosophy, though the two short but suggestive pieces here

on Nietzsche and science have already been superseded by Gregory

Moore’s Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor (Cambridge, 2002).

Other noteworthy essays include Ben Morgan’s ingenious and

perceptive linkage of Nietzsche’s image of Christ to the severe

362

JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES 34(4)

Prussian discipline in which he himself had been reared, and Christa

Davis Acampora’s account of his relation to philological discussions

of Homer. Acampora invites scepticism, though, in arguing that

Zarathustra is Nietzsche’s attempt to surpass Homer, a ‘modern

Odyssey’ (p. 103): as Duncan Large shows, Nietzsche here seeks to

outdo Luther. Nietzsche’s relation to German literature is not treated,

though Hans-Gerd von Seggern demonstrates the indebtedness of

Die Geburt der Tragödie to classical German aesthetics. His reception in

German literature is examined in Malcolm Humble’s study of left-

wing Nietzschean novelists and in the editor’s thorough account of

how Nietzsche was virtually blackballed in the GDR until just before

its end – an ironic situation, since the GDR held Nietzsche’s

manuscripts in the Goethe-Schiller Archive, but tried to conceal their

presence from local scholars.

It is rather a relief that, apart from Daniel Conway’s reflections on

the ‘Völker and Vaterländer’ section of Jenseits von Gut und Böse,

Martin’s volume does not explore Nietzsche’s possible relation to

Nazism. To remedy that omission, if it is one, is the purpose of the

volume edited by Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich, in which

philosophical and historical approaches are equally represented. The

basic problem is clearly set out in the introduction and in Wistrich’s

satisfyingly detailed essay ‘Between the Cross and the Swastika’.

Though Nietzsche was not a major influence on leading Nazis, major

strands in his writings demonstrably inspired the many intellectuals

who sympathized with Fascism. And though Nietzsche praised Jews

and denounced contemporary anti-Semitism, he traced Europe’s

decadence to the legacy of Judeo-Christian morality. However, the

detailed explorations that follow are disappointing. Too many

contributors push at open doors by showing that Nietzsche did not

glorify brute force, that he disbelieved in immutable races, that he

was an anti-anti-Semite – all of which are obvious and familiar.

Others deal too much in philosophical abstraction instead of

engaging closely with Nietzsche’s texts and contexts. Thus Alexander

Nehamas asks a tough-sounding question about ‘Nietzsche’s attitude

toward the evil hero’ (p. 90), without examining Nietzsche’s remarks

on such examples as Cesare Borgia or Napoleon. Menachem Brinker

maintains (rightly) that Nietzsche’s case against Judeo-Christianity

rests on traditional anti-Semitic imagery, yet fails to provide the

necessary documentation. The best philosophical contribution is a

semi-autobiographical survey by the late Wolfgang Müller-Lauter,

which valuably distinguishes between Nietzsche the experimental

thinker and Nietzsche the dogmatic polemicist.

363

BOOK REVIEWS

Although the first part of the volume glosses over such disturbing

Nietzschean themes as the advocacy of hardness, the praise of war,

and the rejection of compassion, the second part, consisting of reception

studies, shows that precisely these unacceptable topics appealed to

Nietzsche’s Fascist admirers, notably D’Annunzio, Mussolini, and

Ernst Jünger. David Ohana’s substantial essay on Jünger reveals a

thoroughly Nietzschean amalgam of aestheticism, militarism, and

elitism. Roderick Stackelberg shows that the historian Ernst Nolte did

not have to distort Nietzsche all that much to make him appear a

precursor of Nazism. We are also usefully reminded, by Stanley

Corngold and Geoffrey Waite, that Nietzsche was not only praised in

the Third Reich but also criticized for having been insufficiently anti-

Semitic, and that he was appropriated less enthusiastically than was

the much more blameless Hölderlin. In an incisive piece, Robert

Holub argues that the vilification of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche for

falsifying her brother’s texts has served to deflect attention from the

inhuman opinions that Nietzsche undeniably published.

The Golomb-Wistrich volume thus seems divided against itself.

Philosophers examine rarefied arguments distilled from Nietzsche’s

texts, avoiding the repellent aspects of Nietzsche that literary historians

record without fuss. The volume lacks any sustained attempt to place

Nietzsche’s politics in the context of the German Reich; any investi-

gation of Nietzsche’s intense preoccupation with biology and eugenics;

and, finally, any acknowledgement that his thought could be not only

inhumane but also cranky, in a way that matched the Fascist mind-set.

What are we to make of Nietzsche’s claim, based on suspect philology,

that in prehistoric Europe fair-haired aristocrats subjugated a dark race

which is now reasserting itself in anarchism and socialism (Zur Genealogie

der Moral, I, 6) and his suggestion that primitive people, such as ‘negroes’,

do not feel pain ( ibid., II, 7)? Here Golomb and Wistrich do not help.

R ITCHIE R OBERTSON

Twentieth-Century Reworkings of German Literature: An Analysis of Six

Fictional Reinterpretations from Goethe to Thomas Mann. By

Gundula M. Sharman. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002.

Pp. xii + 221. £40.00.

Comparative literature has been around for some time now, and there

is hardly a UK university that does not offer courses in ‘Comp. Lit.’

or is not scrambling to organize them. What Gundula M. Sharman’s

book proposes, however, is slightly different: a comparison of

Plik z chomika:

Inne pliki z tego folderu:

Inne foldery tego chomika: