ROBERT S. WISTRICH
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of a "heroic individualism" and the "will to power," which may in prac–
tice tend
to
favor the fascist ethos, even if this was never his explicit
intention.
Similarly, Nietzsche's vehement negation of the Christian morality
which arose out of priestly Judaism, his questionable concepts of deca–
dence and degeneration as well as his hatred of the leveling doctrines of
socialist egalitarianism, do seem to point in this direction. It did not
prove particularly difficult in inter-war Europe to mobilize Nietzsche's
writings for the cause of conservative counterrevolution, fascist vital–
ism, or even for the Nazi philosophy of politics, though not without
serious distortions of his texts. Benito Mussolini, for example, raised the
Nietzschean formulation "Live dangerously!"
(vivi pericolosamente)
to
the status of a fascist slogan. His reading of Nietzsche was one factor in
converting the founder of Italian fascism from Marxism to a philosophy
of sacrifice and warlike deeds in defense of the fatherland . In this muta–
tion, Mussolini had been preceded by his countryman, Gabriele D'An–
nunzio, whose passage from aestheticism to the political activism of a
new, more virile and warlike age was greatly influenced by Nietzsche.
The French fascist intellectual, Drieu La Rochelle, like many "socialist"
fascists in the inter-war period, likewise enlisted Nietzsche's vitalist phi–
losophy and volontarism in his polemics against bourgeois materialism
and the historical determinism of the Marxists.
Equally, there were other representatives of the First World War gen–
eration, like the extremely influential German nationalist writer Ernst
JUnger, who would find in Nietzsche's writings a legitimation of the
warrior ethos. Oswald Spengler's best-selling
The Decline of the West,
one of the post-I918 philosophies of history that most profoundly influ–
enced fascist ideas, also claimed Nietzsche as a major source of inspira–
tion. He reinterpreted Nietzsche (in the image of Weimar's conservative
revolutionaries) as the prophet of a new breed of superior and heroic
"men of action" whose Faustian "will
to
power," aristocratic instincts,
and contempt for the masses, would enable them to master the crisis of
the moment and its historical tasks.
The Nazis incorporated and radicalized this Nietzschean vocabulary
of heroic, soldierly virtues and virile activism, fusing it with a more far–
reaching eugenic vision of racial engineering, freed of any moral
restraints. They took certain phrases from Nietzsche's works relating to
the "annihilation of decaying races" or the "dominion over the earth as
means of producing a higher type" and interpreted them with brutal lit–
eralness as a license to kill with a good conscience. Even if we accept (as
I do) that this was a willfully arbitrary misunderstanding of Nietzsche,
