Aphoristic Writings, Notebook, and Letters to a Friend, by Otto ...

found both; but masochism predominates. Venetian epigrams, Hermann and Dorothea
(?) are sadistic; Iphigeneia, Tasso, Werther, Faust (for the most part: the Gretchen
episode creates a partial exception) are masochistic. The author of The Odyssey was a
sadist, although Circe, of course, is the masochistic ideal (i.e., the ideal of the
masochist who does not fight against his masochism, but wants to retain his passivity
in face of the individual thing). Aeschylus, Richard Wagner, Dante, but above all
Beethoven and Schumann are masochists; Verdi (likewise Mascagni, and Bizet) is
more the sadist, just as with all anacreontic poets and the French of the 17 th and 18 th
centuries, as well as Titian, Paolo Veronese, Rubens and Raphael. Shakespeare has
much of the sadist, but is still more the masochist; towards women however, without
the sharp division of sexuality and love, as Goethe, Dante, Ibsen and Richard Wagner
have. The most complete masochism is in the first act of Tristan and Isolde; less so in
Tannhäuser, Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman).
[Geometry corresponds to harmony, arithmetic to rhythm (addition of units of
time?): this as a comment on the earlier remark.]
Criminals who commit great individual criminal actions are sadists; criminals in
the grand style, who actually commit no individual, separate crime, are masochists.
Napoleon was a masochist, not a sadist as perfunctorily believed; as proof take his
relationship to Josephine and his enthusiasm for Werther, his relationship to
astronomy and to God. The individual woman never possessed real existence for him.
The sadist, moreover, can be a thoroughly decent and good person.
The sex murder is perhaps a relief for the sadist, when the reality of the individual
woman becomes too great. (??) Perhaps it does not have to be an act of revenge, as in
Zola, at all.
Englishmen are all masochists, and perhaps that is why their women are often so
stunted in their womanhood.
In the words of Napoleon to his soldiers: “Du haut de ces pyramides quarante
siècles vous contemplent.” 16 , lies something metaphysical, of which a true
Frenchman and sadist would not be capable.
The masochist is initially struck by similarity, the sadist by difference.
Clocks and calendars are the greatest enigma for the masochist even as a child,
because time is always the main problem for him.
The masochist can never lightly brush aside something that has happened earlier,
which the sadist always does, when the new moment promises more reality than the
old.
The masochist takes everything as fate; the sadist loves to play fate. For
masochists, the idea of fate is especially contained in concrete pain; pain has only as
much reality for him as it has a share of this idea. So the sadist is the fate of the
16 “Forty centuries are watching you from the top of these pyramids.” [Trans]
18