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Kaufmann also describes Nietzsche's shock when some German nationalist and
anti-Semitic newspapers start quoting bits of his works out of context,
citing him as a supporter of their views. One of the themes in his
letters to Elisabeth is that people draw the wrong conclusions about him
from the fact that she has married Forster. After a few
misinterpretations, Nietzsche started to become more explicit about his
contempt for anti-Semitism. One more quote from Kaufmann:
"...if [Nietzsche's] suggestion to 'expel the anti-Semitic squallers out
of the country' (Beyond Good and Evil 251) might seem a mere literary
flourish, one may recall that this idea so possessed him that, whem
madness began to break down his inhibitions, he scrawled across the margin
of his last letter to Burckhardt {*}: 'Abolished [Kaiser] Wilhelm,
Bismarck, and all anti-Semites'---while the last note to Overbeck {**}
ends: 'Just now I am having all anti-Semites shot.'" p. 46
* Jacob Burckhardt, A friend of Nietzsche's and fellow classicist of
considerable repute
** Franz Overbeck, a long-time friend
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Quotes from Nietzsche's works
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ECCE HOMO, I 3
"Even by virtue of my descent, I am granted an eye beyond all merely
local, merely nationally conditioned perspectives; it is not difficult for
me to be a "good European." . . . I am the last anti-political German.
And yet my ancestors were Polish noblemen: I have many racial instincts in
my body from that source. . . .
"When I consider how often I am addressed as a Pole when I travel, even
by Poles themselves, and how rarely I am taken for a German, it might seem
that I have been merely externally sprinkled with what is German. And yet
my mother . . . is at any rate something very German; ditto, my
grandmother on my father's side. . . . "
In other words, Nietzsche is quite happy to be racially "impure" and does
not fetishize his birth nationality---he likes being a mix of the sort
that Nazis in their day would repudiate.
HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN, I 475
"The whole problem of the Jews exists only in nation states, for here
their energy and higher intelligence, their accumulated capital of spirit
and will, gathered from generation to generation through a long schooling
in suffering, must become so preponderant as to arouse mass envy and
hatred. In almost all contemporary nations, therefore---in direct
proportion to the degree to which they act up nationalistically---the
literary obscenity of leading the Jews to slaughter as scapegoats of every
conceivable public and internal misfortune is spreading. As soon as it is
no longer a matter of preserving nations, but of producing the strongest
possible European mixed race, the Jew is just as useful and desirable an
ingredient as any other national remnant."
The theme that Europe needs to get past being divided by nationality and
race is voiced, along with Nietzsche's general admiration of Jewish
culture and his disgust toward the anti-Semitic movement.
--------------------------
Marvin Long
Austin, Texas
