101. A Short Excerpt from a Lecture on Friedrich Nietzsche

The following skeleton of ideas was based on three lectures I have recently given on the deceased philosopher and poet at three events in various guises. The first took place in the circle of the "Kommenden" society founded by L. Jacobowski, the second at the friendly request of the "Verein zut Förderung der Kunst", at their Nietzsche celebration on September 15 in the town hall, the third at a Nietzsche celebration organized by the reciter Kurt Holm in association with me on September 18 in the Architektenhaus. The senior director Moest and the reciter Max Laurence also took part in the first celebration by reciting Nietzsche's creations; at the "Verein zur Förderung der Kunst" I had the great pleasure of working with L. Manz, who recited Nietzsche poems, and with Conrad Ansorge and Eweyk. The latter sang two songs composed with true greatness by Ansorge, accompanied by the composer himself. A harmonium recital completed the celebration. On Tuesday the 18th, I was assisted by Kurt Holz with his recitations from "Zarathustra" and Nietzsche's poems.

"Better to live in the ice than under modern virtues and other south winds!" These words, uttered by Friedrich Nietzsche in the first chapter of his unfinished work "Umwertung aller Werte", reflect the sentiment under which he always lived. He felt himself to be an outmoded personality who had to take a different path than the entire contemporary community. He cannot appear to us as the Messiah, nor as the herald of a new world view. However brilliantly, however ravishingly he expresses his powerful ideas, they are not original ideas that have sprung from his spirit; they are ideas that have already been expressed in this or that form by other spirits of the nineteenth century; they are ideas that are deeply rooted in the intellectual life of the last decades. What distinguishes him from others are the sensations, the experiences of the soul that he experienced under the influence of these ideas. The collapse of centuries-old ideas under the force of modern scientific views had such a shattering and personal effect on few as on Nietzsche. What most people only experienced in their heads, the transformation of an old belief into a new one: for Nietzsche this became a very personal, heart-wrenching, individual experience. And with this experience he stood alone, apart from the path that his contemporaries took with their feelings and ideas. His own view of ancient culture grew out of the thoughts that were passed on to him during his student days about the art and world view of the Greeks. Unlike others, he did not see in Socrates, Plato, Sophocles and Euripides the great representatives of the true Greek spirit; he imagined a higher, more comprehensive art and wisdom at home in Greece in the age before Socrates, a culture that had suffered a dilution, a weakening since Socrates. He longed for this ancient culture with all his soul. It has been lost to mankind. Only in the age of the Renaissance did it experience a brief rebirth. In Schopenhauer's philosophy, he believed he could once again hear a wisdom like that of the Greeks before Socrates, and in Richard Wagner's art he thought he could hear sounds that had not been heard since those ancient times of mankind. It was a high point in Nietzsche's life when, at the beginning of the seventies, he formed an intimate friendship with Richard Wagner. Nietzsche still idealized what lived in this genius, what broke free from him as his art. He transformed Wagner into an ideal into which he placed everything that he believed had been realized in the Greece of the pre-Socratic era. It was not what Wagner really was that he revered, but the ideal idea, the image he had of Wagner. Just as Wagner was about to achieve what he was striving for in 1876, Nietzsche realized that he was not worshipping Wagner's true art, but an ideal that he had formed for himself. Now this ideal appeared to him as something alien, something that did not correspond to his innermost nature at all. He now became an opponent of his own earlier ideas. It was not Wagner that the later Nietzsche fought against, but himself, his world of ideas that had become alien to him. Thus Nietzsche was basically lonely with his thoughts even at the time when Wagner's friends counted him among their own; and he must have felt completely lonely when he became an opponent of his own earlier ideas. In the past he had at least cherished feelings that were connected to a powerful cultural phenomenon; now he struggled with himself as a completely abandoned man. In the mood that resulted from such abandonment and loneliness, he absorbed the ideas of modern natural science. Unlike others, he could not come to terms with the idea that man had gradually evolved from lower organisms. This idea grew in his mind. If animality had made it as far as man, it was only natural that man should progress beyond himself to an even higher being than himself, to the superman. The modern spirit of the age had enough to do with initially allowing the far-reaching ideas of the new natural science to have an effect on it; it stopped at understanding man from his past. Nietzsche, however, immediately had to process the idea of the development of mankind with a view to the distant future. Thus he also stood alone with the experience that modern natural science evoked in him.

Whoever is familiar with the intellectual life of the last half century can say that all the ideas that appear in Nietzsche are also present elsewhere; but he must admit that the way in which they have affected Nietzsche is such as can be found in no other personality. Nietzsche is therefore not the herald of a new world view, but a genius who, as an individual personality with his very own soul, arouses our deepest interest.