A. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): "Towards the Übermensch"
"I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment... Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth.Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go. Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth... What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour when your happiness, too, arouses your disgust, and even your reason and your virtue. The hour when you say, 'What matters my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness ought to justify existence itself.' The hour when you say, 'What matters my reason? Does it crave knowledge as the lion his food? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.' The hour when you say, 'What matters my virtue? As yet it has not made me rage. How weary I am of my good and my evil! All that is poverty and filth and wretched contentment.'
"Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman--a rope over an abyss... What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under...
"I say unto you: one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star. I say unto you: you still have chaos in yourselves. Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star. Alas, the time of the most despicable man is coming, he that is no longer able to despise himself. Behold, I show you the last man. 'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and blinks. The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea; the last man lives longest. 'We have invented happiness,'say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth... One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion. No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse. 'Formerly, all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink... One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health. 'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink."
from Nietzsche's Thus spoke Zarathustra, p.3,4,5, Walter Kaufmann transl.
B. On the Three Metamorphoses of the Spirit
Of the three metamorphoses of the spirit I tell you: how the spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; and the lion, finally, a child. There is much that is difficult for the spirit, the strong, reverent spirit that would bear much: but the difficult and the most difficult are what its strength demands. What is difficult? asks the spirit that would bear much, and kneels down like a camel wanting to be well loaded. What is most difficult, O heroes, asks the spirit that would bear much, that I may take it upon myself and exult in my strength? Is it not humbling oneself to wound one's haughtiness? Letting one's folly shine to mock one's wisdom?... Or is it this: stepping into filthy waters when they are the waters of truth, and not repulsing cold frogs and hot toads? Or is it this: loving those that despise us and offering a hand to the ghost that would frighten us? All these most difficult things the spirit that would bear much takes upon itself: like the camel that, burdened, speeds into the desert, thus the spirit speeds into its desert. In the loneliest desert, however, the second metamorphosis occurs: here the spirit becomes a lion who would conquer his freedom and be master in his own desert. Here he seeks out his last master: he wants to fight him and his last god; for ultimate victory he wants to fight with the great dragon. Who is the great dragon whom the spirit will no longer call lord and god? "Thou shalt" is the name of the great dragon. But the spirit of the lion says, "I will." "Thou shalt" lies in his way, sparkling like gold, an animal covered with scales; and on every scale shines a golden "thou shalt." Values, thousands of years old, shine on these scales; and thus speaks the mightiest of all dragons: "All value has long been created, and I am all created value. Verily, there shall be no more 'I will.'" Thus speaks the dragon. My brothers, why is there a need in the spirit for the lion? Why is not the beast of burden, which renounces and is reverent, enough? To create new values -- that even the lion cannot do; but the creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred "No" even to duty -- for that, my brothers, the lion is needed. To assume the right to new values -- that is the most terrifying assumption for a reverent spirit that would bear much. Verily, to him it is preying, and a matter for a beast of prey. He once loved "thou shalt" as most sacred: now he must find illusion and caprice even in the most sacred, that freedom from his love may become his prey: the lion is needed for such prey. But say, my brothers, what can the child do that even the lion could not do? Why must the preying lion still become a child? The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred "Yes." For the game of creation, my brothers, a sacred "Yes" is needed: the spirit now wills his own will, and he who had been lost to the world now conquers the world.
from Nietzsche's Thus spoke Zarathustra, part I, Walter Kaufmann transl.
C. Special Focus:
"The German and Death: A View compiled from Bergische Universität Gesamthochschule Wuppertal Lehrstuhl für Ästhetik"
Do Germans have a particular inclination towards death? As long as they still were Bavarians, Swabians or Bohemians they considered death a cruel strangler against whom every heart had to rebel even though death levelled men of every standing, rank or name; the mind welcomed death's arbitrariness but it could not comprehend cruelty and violence, though death would prove that the rule of cruelty, the power of evil, the violence of tyranny are merely transitory. The "Ackermann von Böhmen" (The Peasant from Bohemia) still rebels against such intellectual consolations; he cannot accept death because his heart longs for the one and only person, his beloved wife. For the peasant the rule of death is a perversion of God's creation and cannot be justified.
Is this a specifically German argumentation of the fifteenth century? Isn't Luther's brutal demand to let the dead bury their dead a more German request? For him spiritual life alone is valuable whereas the human body, the sack of worms, should be left to the pigs and the soldiery. Luther's argumentation really was a macabre dance of death, an inner ballet of sinister powers that diabolically blow up the body until it bursts, and the gripes of the body, a foretaste of death in the middle of life, should be ignored.
This crude distinction of mind and body had consequences for the Germans. Even though Luther actually wanted to promote the joy of life when he suggested not to care too much about the body, conscienceand the tormentations of the soul; both, culprits and victims referred to Luther's ideas for justification. They had one thing in common: the disdain of the body and its life. They shared the absurd assumption that thoughts and ideas could be free in a chained and tortured body.
The Thirty Years' War and its millionfold death produced the first true Germans, formed their psyche, their concepts of life, society, power, and politics. Ever since, the Germans have called their incapacity of learning through experience loyalty to principles and submission to rules. Ever since, Germans have justified -even enobled - the most absurd human sacrifice as dutifully offerred self-sacrifice. And isn't perhaps the synthesis of culprit and victim in self-sacrifice the only true characteristic of the German and his national character, and the unity of crime and good deed his genuine destination in death? To be German later meant to kill for the sake of an idea. The English and French had different ideas about these matters. When dealing with death they made use of what they had learned through experience. They only killed when they wanted other people's land, power, or money.
This humanism could hardly prevent Germans from making their own negative experiences. At the beginning of the counter-reformation, and particularly after the end of the Thirty Years' War, the humanistic reference to the naturalness of death was completely incomprehensible to Germans. As death had formed them they had to make it an issue at all costs. Death is the only subject Germans had genuinely original ideas about, they are completely incomprehensible to other nations, though. Unfortunately, they did not have only ideas about it. German poetry, fiction, philosophy, historiography, and aesthetics deal with death as sacrifice. Goethe's "Werther" could not be understood by his contemporaries without the imagination of a potential self-sacrifice, i.d. suicide. Only the reader who shot himself like Werther had really understood the book. - Heinrich von Kleist planned his career as a victim of social conditions. He conceived his suicide literally and planned it in German naivete, i.e. systematically. Then he celebrated his infatuation with death in "inexpressible serenity".
"How arrogant", the peasant from Bohemia would have said, "how presumptious". Every heart ought to protest against this arrogance. But "heart" was precisely what the Germans, the children of death, lacked most. They were proud of being icecold and heartless, prouder than the French with Descartes' "clare et destincte", or is Latin only the more elegant version?
In 1944 the subject of the German essay for the school-leaving examination was: "Would Heinrich von Kleist have committed suicide if he had been an SS-officer?" - The expected answer was: of course not! for then he would have sacrificed himself. The teachers were aiming at this answer so the seventeen year old boys could be sent right out to the battlefield. Those students who claimed that Kleist's death was noble self-sacrifice, a Germanic death, passed the test brilliantly. Ernst Röhm, the pederast, had just proved to be non-Germanic by refusing to sacrifice himself, instead he demanded - cowardly like a jew - the Führer should come and kill him. A National Socialist does not kill but convinces his adversary that he has to sacrifice, i.e. to kill, himself.
This is German humanism: it is the same to sacrifice oneself and to be sacrified. Is this perhaps the reason why the German language - otherwise rich in diffentiations - has melted the English words "victim" and "sacrifice" into one word, namely "Opfer"?
How does this work? Heinrich von Kleist, Ernst Moritz von Arndt, Friedrich Jahn, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, patriotic sadists of the nineteenth century, demonstrate it; their feelings and those of the elitist Lützow-Corps, with death's heads on their black uniforms, - not accidentally did the SS refer to them as their predecessors - are expressed in a poem by the German national hero Theodor Körner:
Heran, heran zum wilden Furientanze! Noch lebt und glüht der Molch! Drauf, Bruder, drauf mit Büchse, Schwert und Lanze, Drauf, drauf mit Gift und Dolch! Was Völkerrecht! Was sich der Nacht verpfändet Ist reife Höllensaat. Wo ist das Recht, das nicht der Hund geschändet mit Mord und mit Verrat? Sühnt Blut mit Blut! Was Waffen trägt schlagt nieder! 's ist alles Schurkenbrut. Denkt unsres Schwurs, denkt der verrat'nen Brüder Und sauft euch satt an Blut! Und wenn sie winselnd auf den Knieen liegen Und zitternd um Gnade schrein, Laßt nicht des Mitleids feige Stimme siegen, stoßt ohn' Erbarmen drein! Und rühmen sie, daß Blut von deutschen Helden in ihren Adern rinnt: Die können nicht des Landes Söhne gelten, die seine Teufel sind. Ha, welche Lust, wenn an dem Lanzenkopfe ein Schurkenherz zerbebt Und das Gehirn aus dem gespalt'nen Kopfe am blut'gen Schwerte klebt! Welch Ohrenschmaus, wenn wir beim Siegesrufen, vom Pulverdampf umqualmt, Sie winseln hören, von der Rosse Hufen auf deutschem Grund zermalmt! Gott ist mit uns! Der Hölle Nebel weichen; Hinauf, du Stern, hinauf! Wir türmen dir die Hügel ihrer Leichen Zur Pyramide auf. Dann brennt sie an !- Und streut es in die Lüfte, Was nicht die Flamme fraß: Damit kein Grab das deutsche Land vergifte, mit Überrhein'schem Aas!
(Theodor Körner 1806)
Oh, Germany! Today, as then, men like the ones in the poem are called your noblest sons, the most dutiful heroes, the glory and honour of the country; and they have always argumented like Körner. What Körner really means is: why should a German hero abide by international, penal or civil law when his enemies, these bastards, have violated the law themselves? (Of course, Körner in his unbelievable patriotic ignorance is unable to see that his heroes become bastards themselves.) Naturally the German hero is still chilvalrous! He only shoots a man in arms! When the latter is unarmed and "on his knees, whining and pleading for grace" he is still pitilessly killed even if he can prove to be a German himself. A man considered to be the country's enemy cannot be Germany's son, like jews who had been awarded the Iron Cross during The First World War, for instance.
The murderous excesses of the SS and the Wehrmacht during the Second World War were no uniqe historical accidents that could be blamed to some criminal usurpers. Ever since Luther's day, and certainly since Körner's, we have considered slaughtering worthy of poetical praise and glory.
What kind of concentration-camp poetry are these lines from Körner's poem, written during the heyday of German poetry and philosophy? - "Welche Lust, wenn das Gehirn aus dem gespalt'nen Kopfe am blut'gen Schwerte klebt." (What a joy to see the brain from a split skull sticking to the bloodstained sword.) Important is that "God is with us". And then the corpses are piled in pyramids "under the twinkling stars" and burned to make the chimneys smoke.
"We deeply feel the necessity of such sacrifices" was the tenor of German obituaries bewteen 1806 and 1945, the only truth valid for the dead. The mothers' cultic hysteria of sacrifice, the shrewdness of the fathers' pride. Fathers, mothers (the supposed preservers of life), and sons, and from 1939 on, also daughters and wives, victims and murderers, militaries and civilians, everyone considered sacrifice the ultimate fulfilment of life.
The fact that death by sacrifice formed the Germans must not prevent us from judging the victims. However, it was not allowed to say the truth about the dead. Criticism, analysis, historical comparison, thinking of possible alternatives were forbidden in the face of self-sacrifice. The highlight of this perversion of pathos has so far been the admonition to only say nice things about German jews and also about their executioners who dutifully killed them.
It does not seem wise to say anything positive about the dead of this century their state could be all too desirable. If the dead are given what is not granted to the living it is convincing that it is an advantage to be dead. Death by self-sacrifice often appeared to the Germans to be the only way to a fulfilled life. It seems to be universally accepted that one can commit suicide out of fear of death. The German, however, mocks himself about such humane reactions, he sacrifices himself for love of life, considering death the only guarantee of a fulfilled life.
German poets, writers, intellectuals, statesmen, artists, and, above all, university professors, have always depicted the condition of self-sacrifice of their beloved brothers and sisters in this way so that the number of enlightened humanists does not even pass the number of three dozen (including Jean Paul and Thomas Mann who only became partly infected). Goethe and Heinrich Böll are always reproached that they were reasonable out of cowardice and selfishness, humane because of lack of natural instincts, peaceful because of the loss of their natural will to power.
The selfpraise of Germanism existed in all stands and ranks; doctors and judges were leading in this yearning for death and in the death cult, but intellectuals and workers celebrated it as well. With all reserve it may be said that the total National-Socialist state could be regarded as a particularly complete and minute realization of concepts that had been conceived by German artists and intellectuals. Embodiment of literature so to say. It has been credibly related that Hitler asked with incomprehension why all the great German minds were so unpleasantly surprised by his actions though he only put into effect what they had conceived in their writings. In a way Hitler was right because the Nazi-programs originated from German universities, studios and festival houses. For more than one hundred years they had been performed, exhibited and discussed without being questioned. One only needed somebody powerful to take these speculations, fictions, fairy-tales, and philosophies serious enough to put them into reality and not only discuss them. This is precisely what the Nazis did.
Another example: Hitler doubtlessly considered the cultic ceremonies of the regime a realization of Richard Wagner's consecration-festivals. He did not only dream about the rulers - as many a young man would - but he made thousands of men act in reality: real uniforms instead of fantastic costumes, real corpses instead of actors playing the dead, real time instead of performance time. Hitler did not only dream about this but realized his dream. The German people understood this intention because individual life was understood as a miserable realization of the dream of happiness. Theodor Fontane - one of the very few German humanists - had said in vain: "Wenn du Sehnsucht hast, so hast du alles." (If you long for something you have got everything). People and leaders knew longing and desire all too well but their fulfilment could only be realized as a program of actions.
Hitler attended the Bayreuth Festival even during the war. Joachim Fest writes: " Every time Wahlhall collapsed in flames Hitler - in the darkness of the theatre box - kissed Winifred Wagner's hand." (Reference Albert Speer) Hitler confessed that Wagner was the only person he acknowledged as his predecessor. During the Nürnberg party conventions the functionaries were obliged to attend a performance of Wagner's "Meistersinger". The set pieces of the National Socialist ideology were packed with Wagnerian images that had to be re-interpreted for political purposes, though.
An example for the transformation, realization and fulfilment of artistic concepts into the Nazi strategy may be the commemoration of the 1923 march to the Feldherrnhalle in Munich. The celebration proceeded always according to the same scheme: Wagner's music dramas were supposed to give an answer to the question of the relation between life and death, individuals and national communities, destruction and creation, exstinction and resurrection. The unmentioned ideal for these relations was Christ's crucification as the precondition for resurrection.
In order to avoid the ethical consequences of the Christian faith - one cannot base a totalitarian state on it - the National Socialists transferred the Christian example of the miracle of faith into pre-Christian, repectively Germanic, antiquity like Richard Wagner did. One believed to know that in antiquity the creative power of the individual was based on his willingness to sacrifice himself because the living members of his polis would guarantee his immortality. This was not a promise of life beyond death it rather meant that eternal life was realized on earth through the community's everlasting commemoration of the inividual's sacrifice.
The obligatory cultic ritual in memory of 1923 made the participants feel sure that the self-sacrifice, demanded by the total state, would guarantee their immortality through the remembrance of the living. The climax of the ceremony was the commemoration of the dead. The whole ritual aimed at this moment: Hitler, standing in an open car, was driven along the Ludwigstraße. On both sides of the street flames and vapors of smoke were rising from offering cups on high pillars; the names of the fallen combatants of the march to the Feldherrnhalle in 1923 were inscribed in bronze letters at their bases. SS and SA marched up in columns, structured by light like stage coirs. (Professional stage and costume designers, stage managers and technical staff took all part in the Nazi ceremonies.) At the Feldherrnhalle Hitler got out of his car. In total silence he went up the stairs on a red carpet and bowed in front of the combatants' epitaphs. - The second act: the march of the Nazi-formations on the Königsplatz. Paul Troost, Hitler's first favourite architect, had transformed the square into a stage. The scenery: Stone baldachins above tomblike openings for the bronze sarcophagues of the dead of 1923. Hitler, apparently coming from a great distance, walked through the formations of the combatants as if he walked up into infinity. Having arrived at the point of the two intersecting parallels the "Führer", the incarnation of the unity of past, presence and future (and of life, death, and resurrection) was presented with a military roll call. (Members of military units answer "present" at the calling of their names.) The extension of such an ordinary military act to the core of the National Socialist credo was one of the most effective self-realizations of totalitarianism. The names of the dead of 1923 were read whereupon the assembled living collectively answered "present", i.e. they actually confirmed the presence of the fallen combatants. The dead mounted the "eternal guard" in the memory of the living and were incarnated in them.
The philosophical and theological argumentation for this realm of the living dead and the dead living goes far beyond the representation of the dead Ajax in ancient Greece. The Locrians left open spaces in the middle of the first battle lines where the dead Ajax was imagined to be fighting as a comrade in arms. - In the twenties of this century the Soviet labour collectives left imaginary spaces open in memory of the dead who had been killed during their work for the collective.- In the eighteenth century some Christian sects, the Herrenhuter, for instance, left one place empty for Jesus Christ at the laid table.
West Germany's Minister of the Interior Friedrich Zimmermann (1982- 198??) obvious planned to leave some empty space open in Bonn in order to honour the dead of the future. It is evident that he has not been inspired by the Greeks, the Soviets, or the Herrenhuter. His argumentation is neither philosophical nor theological: He simply demands people's readiness to die as a proof of their democratic convictions. Only the dead can prove to be really trustworthy, martyrs in other words. And of course, one martyr makes up for a thousand truths, and that is something quite different from what the Nazis thought, isn't it.
It will be interesting to know who'll be first to bring about the political "Wende" (turn) in West Germany, poets and philosophers or politicians. The last "turn" was initiated by Heidegger closely followed by Adenauer's policy of turning away from the historical consequences of the Third Reich. Then it was West Germany's Secretary of State Genscher who propagated the patriotical "turn". In the meantime German intellectuals have caught up, like Ulrich Horstmann, for instance, a philosopher and university professor who holds an uncontested position in this competition. His book: "Das Untier" Konturen einer Philosophie der Menschenflucht (1983). (The Beast. Outlines of a Philosophy of fleeing Mankind.) Horstmann delights concervative revolutionaries with his essay though it is dedicated to the "unborn". For Horstmann, life is not worth being preserved (as the jacket text says). Instead a depopulated world seems highly desirable and he openly pleads - not ironical at all - for the "exstinction of mankind". In his opinion, enlightened reason is self-deception and mythical consciousness alone can abolish man's narcistic imprisonment by acknowledging that man is nothing but a human animal, a degenerated pariah of creation. As modern arms technology provides the means for collective self-destruction of mankind the opportunitiy should not be missed, in Horstmann's opinion; in accordance with Ludwig Klages he considers the exstinction of the human race as inevitable.
This kind of reasoning is up to date and will very likely be generally accepted. The American Secretary of the Interior, Watts, said, for instance: a Christian should believe in Christ's return at the end of the world which, thanks to ABC weapons, is for the first time in history a credible promise. For this reason we should desire the atomic apocapylse as the ultimate fulfilment of biblical salvation. So far the German choristers - politicians, university professors, artists and other admirrers of eternal follies - still restrict themselves to the shy question: Isn't he right, after all? and they will continue their elegant conversation about who else besides themselves belongs to the elite. They may feel flattered by Horstmann's reasoning as much they felt flattered by Carl Schmitt's reasoning. Horstmann will certainly become t h e philosopher of the political "turn ". People feel he understands them so well.- "The true elements of their lieves are autodafes and bone-yards, and their actions are animated by their disgust of mankind." Horstmann who always refers to his knowledge of Latin recommends the smooth transition from the homo-mensura sentence to the German students' "Mensur", the duel that completely slashes their faces. However, Horstmann thinks positively and what could be more positive than the idea of paradise. And the German philosopher at the university of Münster adds: " Not until the last oasis will be desolated, the last sigh be unheard, the last germ be dried out, will there be another Eden on earth". The anticipation of this desolate paradise domiantes the minds of the representative of the political "turn" in West-Germany.
Translation from the German by Margret Berki
(The article was written in 1983, shortly after the 1982 elections in West Germany when the Social Democrats were not re-elected and the conservative Christian Democrats formed the new government.)