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Thus, to a certain extent, the Frankfurt School anticipated the late
twentieth-century rehabilitation of Nietzsche on the Marxist Left.
The opposite tendency can be found in the writings of the controver–
sial conservative historian of ideas, Ernst Nolte. Already in his seminal
Three Faces of Fascism
(1963) he had claimed that Nietzsche was "the
first to give voice to that spiritual focal point towards which all fascism
must gravitate"-the assault on practical and theoretical transcendence,
for the sake of a "more beautiful" form of life. Nolte presented Niet–
zsche not only as the intellectual godfather of fascism but also as an
inspiration for Nazism's exterminatory drive. He was the thinker who
had dreamed of wiping out two millennia of "anti-nature" and human
disfiguration created by the debilitating morality and conscience
invented by Judeo-Christianity. In a subsequent work, written in the
mid-1980s, Nolte again presented Nietzsche along with Marx as the
great presager of the European
Burgerkrieg
(civil war) of the twentieth
century and the mass exterminations linked to it. In 1990, in his study
entitled
Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism,
Nolte went even further, sug–
gesting that Nietzsche constructed the image of a fascism more radical
than even Hitler could ever have hoped to implement. Thus it was a
thinker of the German conservative Right who issued an indictment of
Nietzsche more far-reaching than any fabricated by the Stalinist and
orthodox Left-this, moreover, at a time when many Marxists had
embraced a free-floating form of Nietzscheanism. The bitter irony of
this role reversal was compounded by Nolte's obstinate relativizing of
the mass murder of European Jewry and his convoluted flirtation with
some of the theses advanced by Holocaust deniers. Nevertheless, the
intellectual link between Nietzsche and the horrors of Nazism should
not be dismissed out of hand.
One cannot ignore the fact, for example, that Nietzsche was clearly
an elitist who believed in the right to rule of a "good and healthy aris–
tocracy," one which would, if necessary, be ready to sacrifice untold
numbers of human beings "with a good conscience." Nietzsche did
sometimes write as if nations primarily existed for the sake of produc–
ing a few "great men" who could not be expected to show considera–
tion for "normal humanity." Not surprisingly, in the light of the cruel
century which has just ended, one is bound to regard such statements
with grave misgivings. From Mussolini and Hitler to Stalin, Mao, Pol
Pot, and Saddam Hussein, the last eighty years have been riddled with
so-called political geniuses, imagining that they were "beyond good and
evil" and free of any moral constraints. One is obliged to ask if there is
not something in Nietzsche's philosophy with its uninhibited cultivation
