ROBERT S. WISTRICH
209
English of Nietzsche's wntmgs. Kaufmann's
Nietzsche: PhiLosopher,
PsychoLogist, Antichrist
(I
950)
became a standard work in the critical
rehabilitation of Nietzsche in the English-speaking world.
It
recast him
in the image of Anglo-American liberal humanism, as a cultural and
critical individualist severed from any connection to Social Darwinism
or to the intellectual origins of National Socialism. Kaufmann undoubt–
edly contributed much to correcting the myths concerning Nietzsche
that were rampant in America though he tended to render the German
philosopher in a more benign and sterile manner than the original texts
warranted.
Kaufmann did, however, demonstrate Nietzsche's scorn for German
nationalist aspirations, his distrust of all dogmas, and suspicion of the
State as a "cold monster" incompatible with human self-realization . He
showed that Nietzsche had advocated intermarriage between different
nations, believing that German culture had emerged only after a "strong
mixture with Slavic blood," and that he even took pride in his Polish
ancestry (though this was probably fictive).
A more controversial issue remains the extent to which Nietzsche's
anti-Christian polemics were a factor in paving the way towards fascism
and Nazism.
In
The Antichrist
(I888)
(perhaps the most unbalanced of
his works) Nietzsche rails in a disturbingly violent manner against the
Jewish founders of Christianity-especially against St. Paul-even as he
inverts the claims of Christian anti-Semites.
It
is, however, important to
notice the boldness of his reversal of the "supercessionist" assertions of
Christianity with regard to Judaism-claims which are much less fre–
quently heard today, but which, at the time, were the stock-in-trade of
both Catholic and Protestant theology. Nietzsche's opposition to the
Christian annexation of the Bible, which he regarded as a historical and
philological outrage, is strikingly radical. For him, Christianity was the
dross of Biblical Judaism and the New Testament merely the palest of
echoes of the Hebrew Bible, which he looked upon with awe and rever–
ence. For Nietzsche, there could be no comparison between the
grandeur of human beings as depicted in the Old Testament and what
he regarded as the tasteless sentimentality and "petty sectarianism" of
the New: to have "glued this New Testament, a kind of rococo of taste
in every respect, to the Old Testament to form one book.. .is perhaps
the greatest audacity and 'sin against the spirit' that literary Europe has
on its conscience."
Nietzsche's attitude to Christianity, the Jews, and anti-Semitism is, of
course, pertinent to any assessment of his place in the intellectual pre–
history of National Socialism. There are those who see in his ferocious
