ROBERT S. WISTRICH
Was Nietzsche a Fascist Thinker?
I
N
1934 Hitler's personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, took a
famous picture of the leader of Nazi Germany contemplating the
bust of Friedrich Nietzsche which stood in the reception room of the
Nietzsche Archives in Weimar. Perhaps appropriately, only half of the
philosopher's head was visible in the photograph, which would shortly
appear in the German press with a caption that read: "The Fuhrer
before the bust of the German philosopher whose ideas have fertilized
two great popular movements: the National Socialism of Germany and
the Fascist movement of Italy." To mark the occasion of his historic
visit, the director of the Archives, the octogenarian Elisabeth Fi::irster–
Nietzsche (sister of the dead philosopher) presented Hitler with the
highly symbolic gift of Nietzsche's walking stick. This scene faithfully
reflected a cult that would be carefully built up in the Third Reich to
invoke Nietzsche as a spiritual guide and herald of the Nazi Revolu–
tion-a view that was widely shared at the time by the enemies of fas–
cism. Now, at the turn of a new millennium and one hundred years after
Nietzsche's death, this may be a good moment to reassess the most trou–
bling aspects of his legacy.
Was Nietzsche really a spiritual godfather of fascism, a destroyer of
the old tables of morality who through the power of his ideas seduced
a whole generation of Germans into a Faustian pact with the Devil? Was
he the philosopher-Antichrist that he proclaimed himself to be in his last
works, whose apocalyptic visions were to be translated into genocidal
practice in Hitler's war? Did his Promethean image of Man in a constant
flux of becoming and self-creation, to whom nothing is forbidden and
all is permitted, pave the way for the malignant tyrannies of the twenti–
eth century? Or was Nietzsche one of the great liberators of mankind,
profoundly misunderstood, unjustly maligned and demonized, an inde–
pendent, critical spirit who challenged all orthodoxies and sought to
free us from enslavement to ideological dogmas? Was he not a thinker
whose astonishing influence derived precisely from the ambiguities and
contradictions in his work, from the rich diversity of meanings and mul–
tiplicity of interpretations to which it remains open in rapidly changing
