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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In the fall of 1888, Friedrich Nietzsche proudly informed an admirer that he had completed "a ruthless attack on the crucified Christ." Long experience as both a soldier and a psychologist had taught him, he said, to bring the heavy guns of argument into action. "I swear to you," he added, "we shall have the whole world in convulsions. I am a fate." The frail author of this dire prediction collapsed in a Turin street just a few weeks later, after throwing his arms around a carriage horse to prevent the poor beast from being whipped. He was carried back to his hotel, where he began to shout and sing senselessly; he did not recover his reason again. Of the eleven books that Nietzsche had published before this abrupt end, at the age of forty-four, hardly more than five hundred copies had been sold in all. He lived on for more than a decade, empty-eyed and silent, entirely unaware of the readership that was beginning to spread like fire along the gunpowder trail he had laid from book to book. When the world convulsions began, in 1914, his works were often credited for what one English bookseller termed the "Euro-Nietzschean War," referring both to the war's outbreak and to the stunning brutality with which it was being fought. The Austrian Archduke had been assassinated by young Serbian militants spouting Nietzschean slogans in support of their national will to power. Copies of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," Nietzsche's most famous book, had been distributed to German troops in a durable military edition; in rucksacks all along the killing fields, it lay beside the Bible it had been meant to replace.
Hitler wouldn't have needed to read anything that Nietzsche wrote in order to assert a version of the "Nietzschean" ideas that were claimed by virtually every extreme of German political culture in the decades after the First World War. By the early twenties, crusaders for left-wing causes ranging from socialism to feminism had found in Nietzsche a thrilling incitement to "push whatever is falling," as he put it, and young people from conservative families who were discovered with his books were reportedly locked up with a priest for months. Then, as postwar crises propelled Germany ever farther to the right and into policies of racist hatred, readers increasingly drew a different sort of inspiration from the same books -- sometimes from the same phrases. Notions of the "will to power" and the Ubermensch, burdened with meanings never intended by an author who reserved his greatest contempt for anti-Semites, made Nietzsche the philosopher king of the Nazi state.
Perhaps it was simply "the clumsiest of all misunderstandings," as Thomas Mann wrote in 1947, that the works of this politically naive and wholly spiritual figure somehow justified the Nazi assault on civilization. But Nietzsche had always insisted that reading, like writing, should be an act of self-creation: "One repays a teacher badly if one always remains a pupil." Thanks to his scornful rejection of systematic thinking and a style that makes substantial use of irony, ellipsis, and the riddling wisdom of a Shakespearean clown, his books have notoriously meant what his readers have wanted them to mean. In recent decades, there have been as many Nietzsches as there have been intellectual movements: existentialist, deconstructionist, postmodernist. And yet even those offering the most recondite reconsiderations -- Heidegger, for supreme example, or Derrida -- have been forced to acknowledge the tormenting historical questions that inevitably drag the most tragic figure of modern thought back down to earth. As Derrida notes of the Nazis' use of Nietzsche, "One can't falsify just anything."
Rudiger Safranski's new book, "Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography," translated from the German by Shelley Frisch (Norton; $29.95), was originally published to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the philosopher's death, in August, 2000. A landmark volume almost by definition, Safranski's work, which devotes a great deal of attention to Nietzsche's passion for music, is initially striking less for what the author has to say than for what he has chosen to leave out. Although he ably explores the anti-democratic aspects of Nietzsche's thought, its political uses and abuses after the philosopher's death are treated solely in an epilogue, where Safranski also confines his only consideration of Nietzsche's published writings about the Jews. These priorities do not necessarily constitute defects. Much has already been written about the subjects slighted here, and Safranski's book is, after all, about a philosophy, not its consequences. Yet his silences loom large in a work addressed to the general reader, and make one question whether it will ever be possible for Nietzsche to be released from the history that he inherited and helped to shape. Even now, Nietzsche remains something of a fate, demanding of his readers the courage to face the crises of his epoch, in which mankind first discovered itself alone in a godforsaken world.
The death of God was announced by a madman entering a marketplace, carrying a lantern in the morning light, in Nietzsche's book "The Gay Science," published in 1882. The moment for such an announcement was already late: Darwin had published "On the Origin of Species" in 1859, and even that pivotal work had only given the imprimatur of science to a rationalist culture that had been predicting God's demise for decades. Nietzsche's announcement was far less remarkable than the shattering drama with which it was made, and the fact that a man so clearly imbued with faith was making it.
Born in rural Prussia in 1844, Nietzsche was the son and grandson of Lutheran pastors, and as...
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