ROBERT S. WISTRICH
207
Much of the confusion identifying Nietzsche with National Socialism
can be traced back to the disastrous role played by his sister Elisabeth
Forster-Nietzsche (married to a prominent German anti-Semite) who
took control of his manuscripts in the
1890S,
when he was mentally and
physically incapacitated. By the
1920S
she had promoted her brother as
the philosopher of fascism, sending her warmest good wishes (and those
of the Nietzsche Archive) to Benito Mussolini as "the inspired reawak–
ener of aristocratic values in Nietzsche's sense ." As is well known, she
was also an enthusiastic admirer of Hitler.
Her ceaseless efforts to encourage an image of her brother as a great
patriotic German eventually bore fruit when the Nazis seized power.
In
1934
they decided that the time had come to give themselves some sem–
blance of intellectual respectability by publishing popular and inexpen–
sive anthologies of Nietzschean thought.
It
goes without saying that
these were travesties of Nietzschean thought designed to promote mili–
tarism, masculine hardness, and Germanic values. Alfred Baumler, who
was a professor of philosophy in Berlin after
1933,
on seeing German
youth march under the swastika banner, could enthusiastically write:
"and when we call 'Heil Hitler!' to this youth then we are greeting at
the same time Friedrich Nietzsche with that call." Baumler was to play
a key role in the shameless appropriation of Nietzsche as a philosopher
of the Nordic race, a kind of intellectual Siegfried, anti-Roman, anti–
Christian, and thoroughly in tune with the martial spirit of
1914.
Aware
that Nietzsche had no theory of
Yolk
or race, Baumler unscrupulously
concocted a link between his individual struggle for integrity and Nazi
ideals of heroism. With the same sleight of hand, he would explain away
Nietzsche's break with Wagner as a product of personal envy and dis–
miss his tirades against the Germans as expressing no more than disap–
proval of certain "non-Germanic" elements in their character.
No less convoluted were the efforts of the Nazi ideologue Heinrich
Hartle (in his book
Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus
(1939))
to
present the philosopher as "a great ally in the present spiritual warfare."
Hartle knew that Nietzsche's advocacy of a "European" outlook, his
skeptical individualism, approval of race-mixing, and opposition to anti–
Semitism contradicted Nazi ideology. By relativizing these shortcomings
as minor issues (in the case of the Jews he simply quoted instances--com–
paratively few in number-where Nietzsche seemed to be attacking
them) and reflections of a different political environment, Hartle could
present Nietzsche as a precursor of Hitler. By selectively focusing on
Nietzsche's attacks against democracy and socialism, on those comments
that seemed like a glorification of war, or to advocate the breeding of a
