StudienVerlag - Oapen

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in contrast to the materialist crowd. At the same time Nietzsche is himself anti-God
as a materialist. God is dead, he says again and again. Does this quite tally, you may
wonder. But the answer is that nothing quite tallies in this book. Wrapped in the
most beautiful language, in the most tempting metaphors, you will find the deep
side by side with the shallow, the noble side by side with the crudely materialist and
reactionary thought, truth intertwined with sheer lunacy, and all this so poetically
vague that you may read in it, read into it, read out of it anything you look for.
Listen to what Zarathustra himself says: „True, I am a forest, and a night of dark
trees, but he who is not afraid of my darkness will find banks full of roses under
my cypresses.“ Exactly, and wasps’ nests under the banks. It is the most dangerous
book to the vague, the dreaming, the half-educated, the easily intoxicated mind. I
give you a few more quotations, picked at random:
„If ye cannot be saints of knowledge be at least its warriors; I do not advise you
to work but to fight.“
Or this: „Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one
solution; it is called childbearing. Man shall be educated for war, and woman for
the recreation of the warrior.“
Or this: „Men are not equal. Neither shall they become so. Divinely will we
strive against each other.“
But then again: „Blood is the worst of all witnesses to truth.“
I think this will do to show you the texture of the book. The first part was published
in 1883, It was a failure; no-one cared for it. By the second part people were
stirred but puzzled. The third part, published the following year, had an icy reception.
For the fourth part Nietzsche could not find a publisher, and had it printed
at his own expense and not offered for sale at all. Of the last part he ordered forty
copies from the printers, but he distributed only seven.
Well, let me be short. Nietzsche’s mental illness started in January 1889, with
megalomaniac delusions. From then on he lived in a more or less complete mental
blackout for another eleven years. And in that period of living death they suddenly
discovered him. He became world famous overnight.
He died in the summer of 1900. By that time the catalogue of the British Museum
showed about one thousand titles of publications about Nietzsche and his philosophy.
And now let me say just one word about a thing left out so far on purpose. I mean
Nietzsche’s friendship with Richard Wagner, the famous composer. Compared with
Nietzsche, Wagner was by far the lesser and cruder mind. What was in Nietzsche
the craving for a Utopia, anti-plebeian aristocratic and if you like arrogant, became
with Wagner a crude clumsy palpable idol. And one more thing. Nietzsche prided
himself all his life on being of Polish extraction. „It is my ambition“, he writes
somewhere, „to be considered essentially a despiser of Germans. To my mind the
Germans are impossible“, he continues. „If I try to think of the kind of man who is
opposed to me in all my instincts, my mental image takes the form of a German“,
says Nietzsche. But with Richard Wagner, Nietzsche’s philosophy became flesh, the
heavy flesh of the tenors of pompous heroic opera, and his Superman became a
Teuton. Compare Nietzsche’s „Zarathustra“ and Wagner’s Ring, and you have the