http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/?020408crbo_books
The subject is not new. Although evidence of Nietzsche's homosexuality has
been strenuously disputed by earlier biographers, many have speculated on
the nature of his attachment to Salomé, since neither seemed to manifest any
overt erotic interest in the other. Rumors existed in Nietzsche's own
lifetime, and the Nietzsche-obsessed circle around Freud considered
Nietzsche's homosexuality common knowledge. Freud reported having heard from
Jung, whose uncle was a physician in the clinic in which Nietzsche was
confined after his final collapse, that Nietzsche confessed to having been
infected with syphilis while visiting a homosexual brothel, although Freud
warned that neither the story nor Nietzsche's state of mind was to be
trusted. Freud, who believed that Nietzsche achieved greater introspective
insight than anyone ever known, nevertheless concluded that he could not be
analyzed because he remained a sexual mystery.
Nietzsche was furious when some of his ideas caused the rising anti-Semitic
press to take him for a supporter. After his break with Wagner, he was
consistently outspoken in his praise of contemporary Jewry ("the strongest,
toughest, and purest race now living in Europe") and in his belief in the
benefits of mixing races and of Jewish assimilation in Germany-the benefits
to Germans. In "Beyond Good and Evil" (1886), he wrote that, rather than
expel the Jews, "it might be useful and fair to expel the anti-Semitic
screamers from the country." He was anything but a nationalist; by the turn
of the century, his ideal of a citizenry of "good Europeans," transcending
all origins, was attracting adherents-among them many Jews-eager to escape
the shackles of history and forge their own fates. Nietzsche himself, upon
leaving his professorship in Basel, could not bear to go back to Germany;
after nearly a decade of travels he returned home only as a blasted, empty
shell, when his mother took him out of the clinic, in 1890, offering her
gratitude "to our dear, good God that I can now care for this child of my
heart."
>From his mother's abdication of control, in 1895, up through the rise of
National Socialism, Nietzsche's estate-his books, papers, unpublished
writings-was owned by his sister Elisabeth, as unsavory and unscrupulous a
character as ever impinged on literary history. A particularly vicious
anti-Semite ("There can be no reconciliation between a vindictive
anti-Semitic goose and me," Nietzsche wrote after an argument with her in
1884), she was responsible for holding back some of her brother's works
(including the letter just quoted) and reëditing others, for publishing his
scattered notes in an arrangement titled "The Will to Power"-once something
of a Nazi sourcebook, now officially returned to the status of scattered
notes-and, finally, for welcoming Hitler to the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar
in 1934. (The Führer stopped by on his way to Bayreuth.) It is easy and in
many ways correct to place the blame for the "Nazification" of Nietzsche's
work on her shoulders; she would have been proud to bear it.
Perhaps the most important question about the influence of the life on the
work is how much Nietzsche's ideas may be understood-rather like Freud's-as
a response not only to the universal condition but to the specific,
extraordinarily repressed conditions of his era. Many critics have
complained that Nietzsche offered no new values to put in place of those
that he aimed to destroy. Yet it could be argued that his master plan to
spring the cultural trap and release the darker instincts-aggression, sex,
power-would have not only lent these instincts honest shapes but restored
the virtues that had been so long debased by the pretenses of bourgeois
life. It is from the most powerful, and those most capable of evil, that
Zarathustra demands, "I want the good from you." It is their strength that
makes their goodness valuable, because it is freely chosen.
Can goodness, in fact, arise from strength? Would it exist without coercion?
This is the experiment from which generations of humanists have backed away;
for Nietzsche, however, there was no goodness otherwise. Perhaps he offered
no other values because he wanted no others; his task was to scald, scrape,
and purify until the good ran true. "The genius of the heart," Nietzsche
wrote in "Beyond Good and Evil," "divines the hidden and forgotten treasure,
the drop of goodness and sweet spirituality under thick and opaque ice."
Nietzsche was, in a sense, killing morality in order to save it.
Safranski, after damning Nietzsche's philosophy of power, calls the man
himself a "genius of the heart"-referring to the forgiving, compassionate
conduct of his life and the content of his letters, so at odds with the
blazing persona of the work. ("Pity," Nietzsche writes piteously, "has
always been the major source of problems in my life," and he goes on to
lament "a soft spot that would have made any magnanimous Greek burst into
laughter.") In fact, Nietzsche confessed to feeling terror at the idea of
compassion-a terror of being swamped by the suffering the world contained.
At the end, in the Dostoyevskian scene in which he collapsed while trying to
protect a horse, this is precisely what seems to have occurred. Despite the
unceasing onslaught that the would-be warrior made on his moral
constitution, it would not yield. Perhaps Nietzsche's fatal error,
historically speaking, was his assumption that the morality of the
civilization that he assaulted was equally indestructible. "Unfortunately,"
Nietzsche complained of his epoch while looking into his own heart, "man is
no longer evil enough."
He did not live to learn otherwise. Those who carried Nietzsche's
inheritance into the twentieth century have offered radically different
responses to the revelation that man could bring the walls and towers of
civilization crashing down. Freud, who through decades of work had recounted
the psychological costs to individuals made sick by the cultural inhibition
of powerful instincts, announced in 1930, in "Civilization and Its
Discontents," that the price was more than fair. Writing from a vantage
point that feels like the very cliff edge from which Nietzsche soared and
fell, Freud faced the future and warned that our civilization, however
imperfect, represented nothing less than "the struggle for life of the human
species," and that this struggle might soon be lost. Three years later,
Heidegger publicly greeted the triumph of Hitler's party, citing
Nietzsche-"the last German philosopher to passionately seek God"-as an
authority for God's death and for the welcome transformation at which the
German nation then stood poised. Heidegger, who was neither to repent nor
recant his early Nazi fervor, eventually altered his theological position in
one regard. In an interview that he gave long after the war but ordered
withheld from publication until his death, he announced that philosophy,
after Nietzsche, could offer neither hope nor help for mankind's future. All
we can do, he told a startled journalist, is to wait for a god to reappear.
"Only a god," he said, "can save us now."
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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