ROBERT S. WISTRICH
215
as he intuitively grasped, would have incalculable consequences for the
future of Europe. He saw the symptoms of the coming disaster, even if
his personal solution of philosophical self-overcoming and the existen–
tial call to become our own legislators in the sense of fully autonomous
individuals, remained incapable of averting it.
Nietzsche's notion of the will to power, frequently evoked by fascists
and Nazis, was the product of deep introspection and self-analysis.
It
was intended to assert a life-affirming outlook that would empower the
individual to overcome his or her limitations by questioning all our
assumptions concerning truth, logic, beliefs, culture, values, and history.
It was a teaching of self-transcendence that was fundamentally personal
in character, which did not prevent it from being exploited by twentieth–
century practitioners of mass politics, few of whom had seriously read
Nietzsche. What he had prized above all was spiritual power
(Macht),
not the brute political force which he saw embodied around him in slo–
gans such as
"Deutschland, Deutschland iiber alles"
that he denounced
with contempt. This empowerment of the sovereign, emancipated indi–
vidual who is "master of a free will" involved a long and difficult
process of sublimation that would eventually culminate in self-mastery.
It was a vision fundamentally antithetical to the totalitarian collectivism
of the twentieth century.
What then remains of the terrible accusation that Nietzsche was the
godfather of fascism, or worse still, a spiritual progenitor of the Nazi
movement and even of the Holocaust? At a purely ideological level
there is a superficial plausibility to the connection sometimes made
between Nietzsche's anti-egalitarian, anti -democratic, and anti -socialist
outlook and the fascist worldview-at least the link to those varieties
of fascism relatively free of Judeophobia. But even this schematic inter–
pretation ignores the fact that many conservatives shared Nietzsche's
aristocratic values without being remotely drawn to fascist movements.
Indeed, conservative aversion to fascism derived in part, at least, from
a deep distrust of the politics of mass mobilization and the "mob" val–
ues of the herd, which Nietzsche himself always despised. Furthermore,
it is difficult to conceive of any form of fascism which did not actively
promote ultra-nationalism and denounce "cosmopolitanism," exactly
the reverse of Nietzsche's own position as a "good European" and an
unequivocal opponent of tribal nationalism. In the case of Imperial
Germany, this is particularly striking. Nietzsche's indictment of the
Christian and nationalist Right as well as of Bismarckian
Machtpolitik
and its consequences for German culture, was unequivocal. The break
with Wagner is crucial in this respect because the Wagnerian ideology
