Alfred Baeumler – Nietzsche and National Socialism

Introduction

 

Alfred Baeumler (19.11.1887 – 19.3.1968), was an Austrian-born philosopher, pedagogue, and prominent National Socialist ideologue. From 1924 he taught at the Technische Universität Dresden, at first as a Privatdozent. Baeumler was appointed associate professor in 1928 and full professor a year later. Member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP, or ‘Nazi’ as Dr. Goebbels used to say). From 1933 he taught philosophy and political education at the University of Berlin as director of the Institute for Political Pedagogy. After 1945, Baeumler was interned for three years in concentration camps in Hammelburg and Ludwigsburg. He was one of the few Nazi professors who did not return to a university post because he had not yielded an iota in his political positions.

 

It was Baeumler who first introduced Nietzsche as a philosopher in the late 1920s. His analysis presents Nietzsche as a philosopher of National Socialism. Baeumler himself says this: ‘It was I who first introduced into the critical literature on Nietzsche these two theses: I. Nietzsche is a philosopher;

 

II. Nietzsche’s theoretical universe is unitary’. These two theses later gave rise to several books by other authors. It is enough to review the texts and their publication dates to realize this. But after 1945 it was decided to de-Nazify Nietzsche (the funny thing about all this is that he never was a nazi and remember that during the Third Reich the judgments on Nietzsche were not unanimous). Baeumler is then denied having been the first to see him as a philosopher since he connected part of Nietzsche’s thought with National Socialism. This oblivion occurred only for ideological reasons and in all possible areas. Above all, an attempt was made to create and present a Nietzsche ‘washed with detergent’. Others, such as Montinari accuse of forgery the one who first discovered Nietzsche as a philosopher. As Marianne Baeumler said, ‘we cannot ignore the fact that Baeumler ‘Germanized’ Nietzsche (deducing it, albeit univocally, from Nietzsche’s own writings), just as we cannot deny that he understood Nietzsche’s anti-Christianity as a significant historical event. Both aspects are constitutive of the general historical-philosophical vision developed by Baeumler during the time of National Socialism, and therefore can only be analyzed and judged through an objective approach. Baeumler prepared himself for this task by writing his unpublished writings, and therefore his thought can only be evaluated by the criterion of the analytical and philological method. But Montinari prefers to descend to the lowest level of political defamation (using the ad hominem fallacy)(M. Baeumler, 1977). I suggest to read on this subject something written at the end of volume IV of the Collected Works of Nietzsche (in Spanish(Friedrich Nietzsche, 2018d)). It is a text full of disqualifying adjectives that indicate the twisted path that the intriguer wants the reader to follow. And an aside of mine that I will expand in another text: it is enough to understand, even mediocrely, what the ‘superman’ of Nietzsche is, to be clear that he could not have been a National Socialist, nor a worshipper of the Golden Calf or anything that resembles something existing even today.

 

Another level of lack of understanding of the work of various philosophers was created out by the physicist Mario Bunge through verbal paroxysms (‘they say that Heidegger was a Nazi philosopher. No, it is not true, he was not a philosopher, he was a charlatan, a servile of Hitler’, ‘... nor a nihilistic philosophy, like Nietzsche’s, which denies everything, everything good: it denies that benevolence, cooperation, mutual aid exists, it is a philosophy of war, it is a philosophy of aggression’, ‘Many of those who call themselves leftists rant against science and are anti-scientists without reason. They spread the stupidities of Heidegger, of Habermas, of Nietzsche, who has been refloated when we had sunk him forever in the darkness of Nazism’, etc. All an excess of an hysterical verbiage with touches of positivism, scientism, and lack of information; together with zero arguments since the works of all the just mentioned cannot be reduced to set theory or to a couple of ‘logical statements’). Political defamation is not an argument, let alone the use of the Reductio ad Hitlerum.

 

After reading the six volumes of Nietzsche’s correspondence(Friedrich Nietzsche, 2005, 2007a, 2009a, 2009b, 2011, 2012a), the four volumes of his works (Friedrich Nietzsche, 2014a, 2018a, 2018b, 2018d) and the four volumes of his posthumous fragments (Friedrich Nietzsche, 2008a, 2008b, 2010a, 2010b), to the most I dare to call myself a Nietzsche enthusiast. Of exegete, nothing. The only thing I can say is that, like many artists and philosophers, Friedrich went through several stages (his personal journey). That allows many ideologies or groups of ideas from the right, left, above, below, front, and back, to declare that they are ‘Nietzschean’. Recall that Hitler was only 11 years old when Nietzsche passed away. The link that Baeumler makes between Nietzsche and National Socialism goes through the experience of The Great War (1914-1918). That experience was horrendous (the trenches and chemical warfare, initiated by the German jew Fritz Haber, who was indicted as a war criminal for violating the Hague Convention and for his responsibility as the ‘father of chemical warfare’). 

Figure 1a: Adolf Hitler contemplating the bust of Nietzsche. 

 

Figure 1b: Elizabeth Nietzsche with Adolf Hitler.

 

Figure 2: Adolf Hitler at Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s funeral in 1935.

 

 

Text of ‘Nietzsche and National Socialism’(Bauemler, 1934, 1937).

 

If the German revolution were simply an internal process within the German bourgeoisie, and if this revolution only involved a revision of already existing ideas, the topic ‘Nietzsche and National Socialism’ would have no relevant meaning.

 

But the ‘y’ in the title does not mean that in this case more or less close connections should be established between certain ideas of Nietzsche and certain ideas of National Socialism. Rather, it indicates a deeper connection between these two great entities. Nietzsche lived and thought like a loner, voluntarily departing from the German bourgeoisie, and fighting from his extreme position against the bourgeois condition as a whole. For its part, the National Socialist movement has a point of origin external to the bourgeois world. It is not born within the German bourgeoisie and its tradition but is the creation of a single man who has been deeply influenced by his political experience and the Great War.

 

National Socialism in its early days did not originate directly from Nietzsche. After World War I, no one thought to associate the new movement with Nietzsche. Back then, few really foreshadowed the true significance of the uprising of the German people that began on August 1, 1914. The event of the year 1933 opened the eyes of many, as it marks the beginning of a new world era. For us, the Great War produces an effect similar to that caused by the summits of the highest mountains: at first, they are only glimpsed in the distance.

 

But those who have before their eyes the Great War see Nietzsche and National Socialism simultaneously. Therefore, National Socialism was born of the fire and blood of the Great War, it turns backwards, towards the powerful community of our people dedicated to action and sacrifice, the great event of our history. Meanwhile, Nietzsche, from the perspective of his time, looked forward to this event. Among his contemporaries, he was the only one in Germany who foresaw the earth trembling and glimpsing the impending catastrophe.

 

With the assurance of a seer, he predicted nihilism, ‘the most disturbing kind’, and announced the state of confusion, lack of faith, the transvaluation of all values and the deterioration of all forms of life. In modern democracy, Nietzsche perceived the historical form of the end of the state, pointing with keen discernment as distinctive features of modern man all those tendencies that over the years have opposed Hitler’s victory: in order, the neutrality of the intellectuals, the opportunism of the ruling class and its need for peace and security, the alienation of German man towards nature and historical tasks. The lack of ‘political guidance’ during the First World War means nothing other than the disappearance of the German bourgeoisie from world history.

 

To his contemporaries, and even to his friends, Nietzsche was considered an eccentric, and even a madman, because he opposed everything hitherto considered valid. He was the critic, the denier, he didn’t have any ‘positive projects’! The same accusation has been constantly levelled at the National Socialist movement. In this accusation is expressed especially the distance that the great men of action, the precursors, those who propose the impossible, establish between themselves and those who only consider possible the existing. It was hard to believe that this Weimar Republic, this constitution, this bourgeois state structure, based on defeat and the unwillingness to overcome it, meant nothing, while showing itself in its effective reality through bans, dismissals, arrests, and beatings.

 

However, it was crucial that there was a man capable of nullifying and undoing all this. This man could not foresee what would happen in a year; In fact, no man of action could have predicted it. But he knew that all this was ripe for his decline, and that it was necessary to kick what was falling.

 

If we translate the position taken by Hitler towards the Weimar Republic into a solitary thinker of the nineteenth century, we get Nietzsche. In declaring war on the Weimar Republic, Hitler was also faced with a secular, and even millennial, evolution. At the same time that he undertook the critique of the formation, culture and politics of his century, Nietzsche also began his struggle against a millennial evolution. However, there were always those who saw in Hitler only the liquidator of the Weimar Republic, without understanding its true meaning.

 

Those who see only in Nietzsche the nineteenth-century liquidator also understand little. Both Hitler and Nietzsche are at decisive points in this important movement in our history, which we can call the ‘Northern movement’. Along the political line of this movement are the monarchs by right of peace and war of the high Middle Ages, as well as the founding of Prussia, Bismarck, and Hitler. Along the spiritual-religious line of this Ghibelline movement are Germanic paganism, Eckhardt, Luther and Nietzsche.

 

Nietzsche and National Socialism go beyond the tradition of the German bourgeoisie, but what does this mean? In recent centuries, the great intellectual currents that have shaped the German bourgeoisie have been Pietism, Enlightenment and Romanticism. Pietism was the last authentically Reformed religious movement on Lutheran soil. It led people to withdraw within themselves from a hopeless political reality, wrapping themselves in small private spheres. Pietism represented a religious individualism that enhanced the inclination towards psychological introspection and the study of biographies. Among the German Pietists, any non-political and hostile tendency to the state found its support and sustenance. In the same direction acted the radically different individualism of the Enlightenment. This individualism was neither religious nor sentimental, but rational and rationalistic; it turned out to be ‘political’ only in an anti-feudal sense, but incapable of building a lasting political system, although it paved the way for the capitalist economic system. In that case, man was represented as an autonomous individuality, detached from any original order and bond, as a fictitious subject responsible only to himself.

 

In opposition to this, the Romantics reconsidered the human being within their own historical-natural connections. The romantics opened our eyes again to power, to the past and the ancestors, to myth and the Volk (the people). The movement from Herder to Goerres, the Brothers Grimm, Eichendorff, Arnim and Savigny, is the only spiritual movement still alive. And it is the only one on which Nietzsche has fought.

 

It is no coincidence that romanticism remains the most unknown movement in our history. The German bourgeoisie did not accept it in its entirety, but adopted only what suited it in its salons. The real acceptance of romanticism was countered by the legend of Weimar classicism, created by the liberal-conservative bourgeoisie. Basically, this legend was built by merging illuminist elements with other constituents, such as romantic elements. Thus a broad political sphere was drawn that retrospectively embraced the entire era of the German spirit, within which Herder and Lessing, Schiller and Goethe, Humboldt and Hegel were inserted into a single perspective, assigning to this structure the function of configuring a ‘cusp’ of German history. But thus the most important thing of the time was ignored: the Ghibelline spirit that continued to live in it. Above all, it was not understood how this supposed ‘classical’ era did not have autonomous roots. It was composed of Enlightenment humanitarianism and the spirit and tenacity of exceptional men. There is no such thing as a ‘Goethe’s zeitgeist’; there is only one great loner named Goethe, along with an artistic synthesis called classicism. With the dissolution of the German bourgeoisie, this synthesis dissolves itself, revealing again the great loners: Lessing, the courageous opponent of orthodoxy; Herder, the noble precursor of the Romantics; and next to them, but far surpassing them, the great loners: Winckelmann, Goethe and Hölderlin. If we want to mention Nietzsche’s predecessors, these are their names. All of them share an original and authentically German link with Greek antiquity, something absolutely unthinkable in other peoples: a relationship that not only has a formal and aesthetic aspect but is nourished by Greek reality and religiosity.

 

When we define National Socialism as a Weltanschauung, we mean not only that the bourgeois parties have been annihilated, but that the very ideologies of those parties have been liquidated. Only those who act in bad faith come to affirm the need to deny what comes to us from the past. We, on the contrary, want to sustain the need to relate in a new way to the past, freed to contemplate the significance that has been hidden by bourgeois ideology; in short, the need to discover new possibilities of understanding the German essence. And it is at this point that Nietzsche preceded us. In the face of romanticism, we situate ourselves differently from Nietzsche. But what was his most personal and exclusive legacy, the total rejection of bourgeois ideology, has now become the possession of an entire generation..

 

Here I want to offer an example of what so-called German classicism has cost. If the German bourgeoisie had not gloated in the shadow of the classical ideal which it itself invented, then there would be the possibility that the fundamental concepts of romanticism would be transformed into political ideas. But the political character of the main concepts of romanticism has remained in an embryonic state. The German bourgeoisie has proved incapable of arriving at an overall vision. Bismarck’s political leadership did not coincide with any ideal leadership of the bourgeoisie. As confirmation of this statement resonates a name: Treitschke. For all his great temperament, Treitschke failed to overcome the legend of Weimar classicism (which shrouds his political doctrine like a fog), nor could he explore the world of power with a free gaze.

 

Beyond the oppressive ideology of classicism lies Nietzsche’s blunt assertion: ‘God is dead.’ This statement has been interpreted exclusively as a historical observation: faith in God has disappeared. God is no longer the power in our lives. Nietzsche no longer ‘struggles’ with the Christian God and is unaffected by his death. He is far from denying that there are still Christians, in fact, he bows to those few remaining Christians, finding in them a type of person far superior to that, for example, he can see among the artists of his time. In short, he is completely free from the resentment of the fighter who wants to break free. For Nietzsche, having knowledge of the death of the Christian God does not mean a fully developed ‘idea’, Nietzsche does not desire the death of the Christian God but a vision of the end of faith in the Christian God, the end of the Middle Ages in Europe.

 

‘I have no knowledge by direct experience of real problems in the religious sphere. It completely escapes me the sense of why I should be a sinner...’ We feel the hatred in the words with which Nietzsche evokes his impressions of youth, recalling the pietistic-romantic Christianity and the hypocrisy of Naumburg. ‘We, precisely we who were children in the swamp of the fifties, can only be pessimistic about the notion of ‘German’; We can only be revolutionaries, we will never admit a state of affairs in which servile flattery prevails’.

 

Nietzsche criticizes Christianity as to its historical reality as he has known it. Before him, he perceives a disconcerting phenomenon: the more faith in God disappears, the more the image of a morality founded and existing by itself grows. This is a distinctive sign of the bourgeois condition: morality rather than religion. The content of this morality presumably corresponds to the content of what might be called Christian moral doctrine. The transition from one to the other is performed (at least in appearance) without fractures. ‘It is believed that it can be fixed with a moralism without religious background; But this necessarily opens the way to nihilism’. ‘The Christian-moral God is no longer sustainable, and as a consequence we have ‘atheism’, as if no other kind of divinity could exist’. ‘Deep down, we have only surpassed the moral God’. ‘Christianity has become something very different from what its founder has done and desired’. ‘Precisely what is Christian in the ecclesiastical sense is from the beginning anti-Christian: simple facts and persons instead of symbols, mere stories instead of eternal facts, mere rites, formulas, and dogmas instead of a practice of life. Christian is the perfect indifference to dogmas, worship, priests, the Church, and theology’. ‘And it is an unparalleled prevarication that these configurations of decadence and forms such as the ‘Christian Church’ and the ‘Christian faith’ are designated by those sacred names. What has Christ denied? Everything that today is called Christian’. These words would even be subscribed by that great Protestant of the North, Kierkegaard!

 

However, it might be objected that the road leading to the Church was necessary. Nietzsche would answer thus: let us recognize that the path that goes from the Good News to the Church is the same path that enters history with its orders and laws, that is, the path that leads to politics. Nietzsche does not refute the Christian in his individuality: ‘Christianity is possible as a form of absolutely private existence [...] A ‘Christian state’, a ‘Christian policy’, on the other hand, is an impudence, a lie, just like a Christian military command that ultimately regards the ‘God of hosts’ as a chief of staff’. ‘Christianity is still possible at any moment [...] Christianity is a practice, not a doctrine of faith. It tells us how to behave, not what to believe’. Once the Christian dissociates himself from the people, from the State, from the cultural community, from the judicial system, he rejects training, knowledge, education, the acquisition of goods, action, becoming apolitical and anti- nationalist, neither aggressive nor defensive. A Christian should be one who does not want to be a soldier, who is not interested in justice, who does not ask to join the police, who endures any suffering to ensure inner peace. Nietzsche mocks those who believe they can overcome Christianity through the natural sciences. ‘Christian value judgments are not at all overcome by this; ‘Christ on the cross’ remains the most exalted symbol’.

 

Nietzsche is completely alien to the principles of Christian morality: religious individualism, awareness of sin, humility, concern for the salvation of the soul. He opposes the idea of repentance: ‘I don’t love this kind of cowardice in the face of what has been done; one should not succumb to a sudden feeling of unexpected shame and remorse. Extreme arrogance must stand firm on this point. And, ultimately, what good is repentance?! No action can be cancelled simply because you regret having committed it...’ Nietzsche does not intend here to attenuate responsibility, but rather to intensify it. In this case, the one who knows how much courage and pride are required to assert oneself in the face of fate speaks. From the perspective of his amor fati, Nietzsche speaks disparagingly of Christianity ‘with its perspective of bliss’. As a man of the north, Nietzsche does not understand why he should be ‘redeemed’. The Mediterranean religion of redemption remains completely alien to its Nordic nature. Nietzsche understands man only as someone who fights against fate: he finds incomprehensible a way of thinking that sees only punishment in struggle and action. ‘Our real life is a false, rejected and sinful existence, a punitive existence...’ Pain, struggle, work, death is assumed as objections directed to life. ‘The innocent, idle, immortal, happy man: it is necessary to criticize first of all this vision that stands at the top of all our desires’. With particular vehemence, Nietzsche rages against the monastic contemplative life, against the Augustinian image of the ‘Saturday of Saturdays’. He praises the fact that with Luther the contemplative life has come to an end. At this point, the Nordic tonality of the struggle and activity resonates loud and clear. The tone with which we utter these words today we first hear from Nietzsche.

 

Nietzsche is for us the philosopher of heroism. But this is only a half- truth if we do not also understand him as the philosopher of activism. Nietzsche perceived himself as Plato’s historical antagonist. The ‘works’ do not arise from contemplation, from the recognition of transcendent values, but are the result of exercise, of a doing repeated again and again. In order to make it understandable, Nietzsche uses a well-known antithesis. ‘The works, first and foremost! This means exercise, exercise, and even more exercise! The faith inherent in it will arise by itself, be assured of that!’ In contrast to the Christian proscription of the political sphere, and especially of the sphere of action, Nietzsche presents the phrase with which he overcomes the opposition between Catholicism and Protestantism (faith-works): ‘One must exercise oneself not in the strengthening of the feeling of value, but in doing; One must above all be capable of something.’ With this, he restores the purity of the sphere of action, of politics.

 

‘Values’ in the Nietzschean sense do not constitute an afterlife and therefore cannot be converted into dogmas. In us, through us, values compete for supremacy: they exist as long as we support them. When Nietzsche urges us in this way: ‘Be faithful to the earth!’, he reminds us that the idea is rooted in our strength, without waiting for its ‘realization’ in a distant beyond. But simply mentioning the ‘hereafter’ of values in Nietzsche is not enough, unless one intends to refute at the same time the idea that ‘values are realized through action’. There is always something subordinate in the ‘realization’ of values, whether immanent or transcendent values.

 

Through the risk inherent in action, values arise from a force of their own on which any true ordering among men is built. Prominent forms of historical life will never be realized by an individualistic morality, even if it has an individualistic-religious foundation. According to Nietzsche, common morality has paralyzed the spirit of action, making it impossible to establish historical orders. As a consequence, there are only individual souls and no community that does not have only a provisional value, or types or ‘forms of homogeneous activity of long duration’. However, the individual is not given the opportunity to assert himself as such, so everything becomes a staging. ‘Therefore, everything is transformed into a mise-en-scène. Modern man lacks the sure instinct (consequence of forms of homogeneous and long-lasting activity in a certain human type); hence the inability to accomplish anything; He never fixes on his shortcomings as an individual.’ We are absolutely far from the perfection of being, doing and wanting. ‘The effort of will that extends over a long period of time, the choice of conditions and valuations that give the possibility of disposing of the coming centuries, that is truly the anti-modern in the highest sense of the term. Dissolute principles give our epoch characteristics such as the redundant development of intermediate areas, the decline of rates. On the other hand, National Socialism means the recovery of organizational principles and selective discipline.

 

Nietzsche regards the ‘staging’ of modern man fundamentally as a result of the morality of ‘free will’. This morality is closely related to the generalized overvaluation of conscience. ‘How wrong it is that the value of an action should depend on what precedes it in consciousness’. ‘All perfect actions are unconscious and involuntary; conscience expresses an imperfect and often sickly personal condition. The degree of consciousness makes perfection impossible... a form of staging’. ‘As a soldier trains, so man must learn to act. In fact, this unconsciousness belongs to any kind of perfection: even the mathematician unconsciously uses his own combinations...’. Unconsciousness, exercise, perfection. ‘We must seek perfection where consciousness is least acquired... Righteousness and cunning stored up by generations, who have never become aware of their principles or have even felt a small shudder in front of them. And this is something very different from the liberal doctrine of ‘personality’ which possesses a) principles and b) an individuality capable of being stronger than its own principles. Nietzsche starts not from principles, but from value evaluations corresponding to a certain human typology and useful for its conservation, where this ‘conservation’ should not be understood too quickly: with this term, Nietzsche refers to the conservation of the human typology together with all its values. ‘All assessments refer to a specific perspective: the preservation of the individual, of a community, of a race, of a State, of a Church, of a faith, of a culture’. Nothing exists that, without relating to an existence, has value in itself. Values express existential conditions. Therefore, false values are not eradicated by principles: existence confronts existence.

 

The Nietzschean determination of values, which is Nordic and warlike, is opposed to the Mediterranean and priestly determination of values. The Nietzschean critique of religion is a critique of the priest and starts from the position of the warrior, at the moment when Nietzsche demonstrates how even the origin of religion is within the realm of power. From this follows the disastrous contradiction of morality based on the Christian religion. ‘For moral values to reach dominion, it is necessary that they be put at the service of immoral forces and affections. The birth of moral values is, therefore, the work of immoral affections and considerations’. Morality thus turns out to be the work of immorality. ‘How to bring virtue to predominance: this treatise concerns the great politics of virtue’. Here this doctrine is expressed for the first time: ‘It is possible to achieve the predominance of virtue by the same means by which one is generally mastered, in any way, not by virtue.’ ‘It is necessary to be very immoral in order to become moral by action...’. Instead of bourgeois moral philosophy, Nietzsche establishes the philosophy of the will to power, that is, political philosophy. If he becomes a praiser of the ‘unconscious’, the latter should not be understood in the sense of depth psychology. Nietzsche is interested not so much in the unconscious impulses of the individual, but in the ‘unconscious’ understood as ‘perfection’ and ‘potentiality’. In addition to this, the unconscious means life as a whole, the organism, the ‘great reason’ of the body.

 

Consciousness is only a tool, a particularity in life as a whole. Nietzsche contrasts the aristocratism of nature with consciousness. However, for millennia, a morality hostile to life has opposed the aristocratism of the healthy and strong. Like National Socialism, Nietzsche perceives in the state and in society the ‘great agent of life’, who must be accountable to the very life of any failed life. ‘Humanity wants the decline of the unsuccessful, the weak, the degenerate: but Christianity opposes all this as a conservative force...’. At this point we find the fundamental antithesis: it originates either from a context of natural life or from the equality of individuals before God. On this last statement is based, in the last analysis, the democratic egalitarian ideal, while the first contains the fundamental features of a new politics. In the desire to found the State on race lies an unprecedented audacity. A new order of things must result. It is this order that Nietzsche wanted to erect in opposition to the existing one. But what about the individual? Become an individual in a community again. The instinct of the herd is very different from the instinct of an ‘aristocratic society’. In the latter reappear those strong and natural men who do not let their primal instincts wither away for the benefit of utilitarian mediocrity, men who cultivate their passions instead of weakening or annihilating them. On the other hand, the individual cannot comprehend all this. It takes a long time for affections to be ‘tyrannized’, and this can only be achieved by one community, one race, one people.

 

The justification of passion, of the body, of nature is, in the first place, a justification of reality. By imagining a creative subject, an author of total reality, Nietzsche perceives the ‘innocence of becoming’. The Nietzschean task is to reintegrate the two spheres: that of reality and nature, on the one hand, and that of history on the other. They are the same spheres and the same reintegration undertaken by National Socialism. Instead of absolutely artificial antitheses based on the scheme of good and evil, in this case the hierarchical order of the best and the worst intervenes. And in light of this natural hierarchical order, history takes on a new meaning.

 

The manly era, the age of soldiers and craftsmen, heralded by Nietzsche, is about to begin. Each civilization redefines in its own way the relationship between man and woman. While the role that men will assume in the next era is clear, that of women is not yet clear. Women too must find their place in the new context. In this regard, read what Nietzsche wrote about the Greek woman.

 

The Nordic approach, realistic and virile, expresses first of all its distrust of ‘happiness’, ‘bliss’ and ‘leisure in contemplative states’, finding itself now in the vision of a loved one (in ‘love’), now in the vision of the work of art. Man does not seek pleasure or avoid pain. Following the will to power, Nietzsche teaches that he seeks conflict, since the will to power is the will to overcome fate. ‘How the maximum degree of endurance must be continuously exceeded to stay on top! This is the measure of freedom for both the individual and society: that is, freedom understood as positive power, as the will to power’. The upper type grows where maximum resistance must be constantly overcome. ‘One must impose oneself to be strong, otherwise one will never be’.

 

If there is an authentically German expression, it is precisely this: ‘We must impose ourselves to be strong, otherwise we will never be’. We Germans know well what it means to overcome adversity. We fully understand the ‘will to power’, although in a completely opposite sense to what our adversaries assume. In this sense, Nietzsche has also said something very profound: ‘We Germans want something that is not yet required of us, we want something more!’

 

When we see German youth marching under the swastika badge today, we are reminded of Nietzsche’s Untimely Considerations, where this generation is evoked for the first time. Our supreme hope is that the state will open up to these young people today. And when we greet this same youth with the cry of ‘Heil Hitler’, it is as if at the same time we are addressing our greeting to Friedrich Nietzsche.

 

References.

 

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