Nietzsche

Hidden hand

Be careful, lest in casting out your demon you exorcise the best thing in you. - Frederich Nietzsche.

"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."-----Nietzsche

Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called "Ego".---- FRIEDRICH WILHELM NIETZSCHE

Among the several men who have been dubbed “the Father of National Socialism” (including Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels), Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) is probably most deserving of this distinction, being so labeled by Nazi luminaries Dr. Alfred Rosenberg and Dr. Franck (Peters:221).  Others have called him the “Father of Fascism” (ibid.:ix).  Rabidly anti-Christian and a homosexual, Nietzsche founded the “God is dead” movement and contributed to the development of existentialist philosophy.  Nietzsche’s publisher, Peter Gast, called Nietzsche “one of the fiercest anti-Christians and atheists,” and described his book, The Antichrist, as a “ferocious curse” on Christianity (ibid.:119).  Nietzsche called Christianity and democracy the moralities of the “weak herd,” and argued for the “natural aristocracy” of the Uuebermensch or superman, whose “will to power” was grounded in the material world (Wren in Grolier).
    According to Macintyre in Forgotten Fatherland: The Search For Elisabeth Nietzsche, Frederich Nietzsche never married and had no known female sex partners, but went insane at age 44 and eventually died of syphilis.  According to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Nietzsche had caught the disease at a homosexual brothel in Genoa, Italy (McIntyre:91f).  Nietzsche’s unflattering opinion of women was widely known.  His works were “peppered with attacks against women,” and, like the pederasts of the Community of the Elite, he relegated women to the role of breeders and sexual slaves.  Men, on the other hand were to be bred for war (Agonito:265f).
    One of Nietzsche’s closest friends and another hero of Adolf Hitler was Richard Wagner, the composer.  Wagner was the subject of a 1903 book by Hans Fuchs called Richard Wagner und die Homosexualitaet (“Richard Wagner and Homosexuality”) in which Fuchs recommends art as a means for homosexual emancipation (Oosterhuis and Kennedy:86).  We do not know whether Wagner was homosexual, although Hitler is reported to have identified him as one.  In Kurt Ludecke’s I Knew Hitler, the Fuehrer said the following when the issue of homosexuality among the Brownshirts was raised: “Ach, why should I concern myself with the private lives of my followers!....I love Richard Wagner’s music -- must I shut my ears to it because he was a pederast? The whole thing’s absurd” (Ludeke:477f).
    Nietzsche’s philosophy was grounded in Greek and Roman paganism, and in his writings he called for “a new Caesar to transform the world” (Peters:viii).  Years later, Nietzsche’s sister and chief promoter, Elisabeth, would enthusiastically dub Hitler the “superman” her brother had predicted (ibid.:220).  Indeed, Elisabeth’s adulation of Hitler was mirrored by the Fuehrer’s admiration for her brother.  Hitler and the Nazis were indebted to Nietzsche for his contribution to German nationalism.  “It is not too much to say,” writes historian George Lichtheim, “that but for Nietzsche the SS — Hitler’s shock troops and the core of the whole movement — would have lacked the inspiration to carry our their programs of mass murder in Eastern Europe” (McIntyre:187).  And W. Cleon Skousen writes that when “Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, it was as though Nietzsche was speaking from the dead” (Skousen:348).
    Had he lived in that era, Nietzsche might not have become a Nazi. His works include numerous condemnations of anti-Semitism and nationalism (and thus were selectively censored by Elizabeth).  But the best measure of Nietzsche’s contribution and importance to Nazism is not in conjectures about what Nietzsche might have thought about Nazism, but in the actual reverence of the Nazis for him.  Nietzsche’s most celebrated book, Also Sprach Zarathustra, (“Thus Spake Zarathustra”) was considered the “bible” of the Hitler Youth and was “enshrined with Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Alfred Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century -- in the vault of the Tannenberg Memorial, which had been erected to commemorate Germany’s victory over Russia in the First World War” (Peters:221).  Hitler and the Nazis often used Nietzschean phrases such as “will to power,” “live dangerously,” and “Superman,” but more significantly, Nietzsche became a hero to the masses as well.  Certain German intellectuals canonized Nietzsche through the popular media of the day.  Peters writes, Germany’s intellectual elite, including poets like Stefan George and writers like Thomas Mann, saw in Nietzsche’s “aristocratic radicalism” an answer to the decadent democratic ideals of the West.  Fervent young men and women met for ritualistic readings from Zarathustra.  Hymns were composed to celebrate the new religion, and by the time the body of the sick philosopher was finally put to rest, he was proclaimed a saint (Peters:ix). The Pink Swastika by Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams.