Nietzsche reception

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This article deals with the Nietzsche reception . The work of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has had an unusually diverse impact since the end of the 19th century.

Impact history

Early reception and the Nietzsche archive

Only after his mental derangement began, Nietzsche's contemporaries began to be interested in the hitherto practically unknown thinker. The first discoverer of Nietzsche is Georg Brandes , who gave a series of lectures on him at the University of Copenhagen in the spring of 1888 and remained in contact with him by letter in Turin until Nietzsche's collapse in January 1889 . Nietzsche's brilliant style then worked far into the German intelligentsia , roughly at the same time as the youth movement . Various groups began to refer to Nietzsche.

Interventions in the printed manuscript of Ecce homo

Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche soon tried, as the owner of the Nietzsche Archive , founded in Naumburg in 1894 and located in Weimar from 1897 , to exert a decisive influence on the rapidly growing and contradicting reception. She disseminated an image of her brother that, on the one hand, mythified him as a person, and on the other, was supposed to make his teachings, as she understood them, popular. She had the complete edition, wrote an official biography with her own interpretation of the work and published Der Wille zur Macht as Nietzsche's main work, a selective and tendentious compilation of estate material. In Nietzsche's correspondence, also edited by her, forgeries, omissions and additions by her hand were later detected. As a counterpart to this “Weimar tradition”, the “ Basel tradition ” founded by Nietzsche's friend Franz Overbeck of dealing with Nietzsche's writings and estate emerged early on .

Diverse effects

Acceptance into art and society

Nietzsche figure by Peter Lenk

Harry Graf Kessler , Lou Andreas Salomé , Rudolf Steiner and Julius Langbehn can be found around the first Nietzsche reception . In the period of upheaval around the turn of the century, many of Nietzsche's work primarily read a culturally pessimistic approach. At times there was a real Nietzsche cult, which also found followers outside Germany, especially in France and Italy. In both progressive and avant-garde as well as conservative circles Nietzsche found declared supporters as well as radical opponents throughout Europe. The breadth of reception even before the First World War was characterized by Ernst Troeltsch in 1922 :

“[...] it was already common at that time that everything from theology to free-thinking, from capitalism to socialism, from conservatism to Bolshevism, from internationalism to nationalism, from atheism to anthropology, with streams of Nietzsche and with quotations to be made witty out of him. "

In the First World War, this perception changed: on the German side authorized by the archive war spending were selected Nietzsche texts hotcakes - redensartlich every German soldier had "Zarathustra in his knapsack" - while conversely, in British, French and American war propaganda Nietzsche Pioneers of the German striving for world power and the brutal German warfare was depicted.

From the beginning, especially artists were deeply impressed by the poetic language in Also sprach Zarathustra ; Richard Strauss ' composition of the same name is very well known . Other admirers of Nietzsche were Hans Olde , Henry van de Velde and Edvard Munch . Ernst Bertram's Nietzsche book and the interpretation of Nietzsche as a mystical poet, as represented in particular by the George Circle , were central after the First World War and had an impact on, for example, Rainer Maria Rilke , Hugo von Hofmannsthal , Christian Morgenstern , Heinrich Mann , Thomas Mann , Hermann Hesse , Hugo Ball , Gottfried Benn , Gabriele D'Annunzio and Georges Bataille . In particular, Nietzsche was considered a pioneer of the Expressionists . Later it was the Surrealists who were enthusiastic and inspired by Nietzsche. The exhibition “Artist's Metaphysics” (2000/2001) in the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin was a reception for contemporary artists.

Exhibition poster "Artist metaphysics"

Admission to the humanities and social sciences

It was only after the first wave of artistic Nietzsche reception that parts of Nietzsche's thinking began to have an impact on humanities and social scientists. Among the first philosophers in the narrower sense who dealt with Nietzsche or even referred to him were Hans Vaihinger , Alois Riehl and Theodor Lessing, as well as the representatives of the philosophy of life . In sociology, Nietzsche worked on Ferdinand Tönnies and Max Weber , in historical theory on Oswald Spengler and in depth psychology ( psychoanalysis ) on Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung .

It was repeatedly discussed whether Nietzsche should even be considered a philosopher. The Nietzsche Archives insisted on this, of course referring to their own interpretation of this philosophy, and tried to do this - on the assumption that a real philosopher is characterized by a system - among other things by publishing the systematic work The Will to Power to underpin. In literary and artistic circles, however, the content of Nietzsche's books was neglected compared to his literary style, especially in Zarathustra . The followers of the above-mentioned Basel interpretation , who at first extended their criticism directed against Nietzsche's transfiguration to Nietzsche himself, also turned against Nietzsche's interpretation as a systematic philosopher. Josef Hofmiller wrote in 1931:

“What remains of Nietzsche then? There remains enough. It remains more and more valuable than a system that never was.
It remains the critic and diagnostician of the time. The moralist remains, not in German but in French: the miniaturist and outsider of philosophy, the aphorist. The three middle works will remain the longest: human, all-too-human ; Dawn , The Joyful Science . What will remain is les plus belles pages, as the French call their fine selections. Details will remain: observations, ideas, thoughts, moods, maxims and reflections, insofar and because they are independent of his supposed system. The artist will stay, the poet will stay. "

Nevertheless, more and more philosophers began to interpret and continue Nietzsche's thinking, albeit in very different ways. In France the existentialists referred to Nietzsche, in Germany on the one hand Martin Heidegger , on the other hand also Karl Jaspers and the emigrated Karl Löwith . Heidegger saw in Nietzsche the perfecter of occidental metaphysics , in whose doctrine of the “will to power” nihilism was revealed as the essence of metaphysics. Jaspers places Nietzsche, together with Søren Kierkegaard, in the line of existential philosophers and compares both of them with Karl Marx . What one can learn from Nietzsche is less a philosophy than philosophizing. Finally, Löwith emphasizes Nietzsche's importance in the secularization of philosophy in the 19th century and his anti-Christian worldview, for example in Also sprach Zarathustra .

The critical theory around Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer also interpreted parts of Nietzsche's work. The second excursion Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality in the Dialectic of Enlightenment , developed at the time of the National Socialist Nietzsche appropriation, treats Nietzsche ambivalently as the philosopher who “took science at its word” and “took the idea of ​​the Enlightenment [to the point] of the transhipment ”.

Early critics

The socialist historian Franz Mehring interpreted Nietzsche's book Beyond Good and Evil in 1891 as the philosophy and poetry of capitalism and accused Nietzsche of wreathing exploitative big business with his laurels . Nietzsche's allegedly groundbreaking realization that precisely the evil qualities of human beings such as greed and lust for power have become levers of historical development can already be found in Hegel . Nietzsche did not conclude from this - according to Mehring - that morality was historical; He saw the suppression of the slaves by the masters as a natural law and wanted to completely eliminate the opposing "slave morality" of human "herd animals". Nietzsche, according to Mehring, preached to the masters, the “free spirits”: exploit the slaves, subjugate them, do it without a guilty conscience, without any common sense, without consideration, without moderation, it is the best thing you can do!

When some postponed polemics by Nietzsche against the socialist labor movement were published in 1896 , Mehring discovered only a collection of anti-socialist phrases that were common at the time; z. E.g. Heinrich von Treitschke's thesis that everything would be fine if the workers could only decide to sing a hymn of praise to “happy poverty”. Nietzsche could apparently only explain the whole of socialism by saying that socialists are people with notoriously dark, brooding and bilious temperaments.

In 1897, the Feuerbach follower Julius Duboc criticized Nietzsche's “Übermenschentum” as a “channel aristocracy” in his work Nietzsche's superhumanity Wicked ones.

In the same year, the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies analyzed Nietzsche's works biographically in his book Der Nietzsche-Kultus and divided them into three phases, which were shaped by the inner struggle between the artist and the scientist Nietzsche. In the first phase, in which Nietzsche was a follower of Schopenhauer and Wagner, the artist dominated, in the second ( Untimely Considerations, The Happy Science ) the scientist, in the third ( Also Spoke Zarathustra , Beyond Good and Evil ) the per se and the world desperate neither artist nor scientist, the "frenzied, howling and completely unconscious Zarathustra".

Fascism and National Socialism

Although the subject of "Nietzsche and National Socialism", sometimes shortened to "Nietzsche and Hitler ", has been dealt with in a large number of publications at different levels and every conceivable view has been represented, a systematic investigation of Nietzsche's reception under National Socialism is still pending . In the only longer scientific monograph on this, it is recorded that there were "positive" ( Alfred Baeumler ) and "negative" ( Ernst Krieck ) assessments of Nietzsche in National Socialist Germany . There was never an open discussion about Nietzsche under National Socialism.

German National Socialism and Italian fascism referred selectively to fragments from Nietzsche's work. Benito Mussolini in particular was enthusiastic about Nietzsche and his reading from the Nietzsche archive was reinforced. The reception under National Socialism can be traced back in part to the manipulations and political tendencies already mentioned by Nietzsche's sister and the Nietzsche archive (see also Max Oehler ).

During the time of National Socialism and after Förster-Nietzsche's death in 1935, Alfred Baeumler vigorously continued to take over Nietzsche for the Third Reich. While "the actual patron of the Nietzsche movement in the 'Third Reich'" was Alfred Rosenberg , Alfred Baeumler was "[a] at the beginning and at the center of the development of a positive Nietzsche image in the National Socialist era". As early as the early 1930s, Baeumler heralded the National Socialist Nietzsche interpretation with his Nietzsche book and a selection of Nietzsche texts that he edited, which in terms of selectivity and tendency exceeded the will to power the Nietzsche archive. Those who liked could use Nietzsche's provocative catchphrases such as “superman”, “will to power”, “master morality” and, last but not least, the “blonde beast” to find justifications for their own ideas. Some of Nietzsche's statements about Jews and Judaism were useful for Nazi ideologues ; they ignored his distancing from the anti-Semitism and nationalism of the 1880s.

There is no doubt that Nietzsche was anti- democratic because of his elitist sentiments . He glorified strength, struggle, lust for power and war. Many Nietzsche researchers today understand his affirmation of war only metaphorically as a war of spirits. In the First World War and in National Socialism, however, it was taken literally and used to legitimize war-affirming politics.

After 1945

After 1945 Nietzsche was not only considered abroad, where he had been demonized again in the war propaganda, but also in Germany initially as a Nazi philosopher. The essay Nietzsche's Philosophy in the light of our experience by Thomas Mann is therefore noteworthy , in which he rejected the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche in 1947, but at the same time distanced himself from his own earlier worship of Nietzsche.

In the states of the Eastern Bloc , Nietzsche was hardly received at all. Georg Lukács ranked him in 1954 in the " irrational " bourgeois philosophy of Germany, which by destroying the reason the fascism have paved the way and Nazism. This thesis became more or less official: until the end of the GDR, apart from a facsimile edition of Ecce homo ( Edition Leipzig 1985), no work by Nietzsche appeared there. When there was a debate about the new Nietzsche image in the West in 1986/87 in the magazine Sinn und Form , Wolfgang Harich repeated and intensified the verdict about Nietzsche: “ Into nothing with him! "

In the West, a new interest in Nietzsche's philosophy grew soon after the war, especially in France, then also in Italy and other countries. The existentialism around Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus , which was influential at the time , drew important stimuli from his thinking. Walter Kaufmann tried to give the English-speaking world access to Nietzsche's work and at the same time to prove that the appeal of National Socialism to Nietzsche was wrong. Kaufmann moved Nietzsche close to Socrates and showed connections between his philosophy and that of Hegel . Kaufmann's Nietzsche image is still powerful today, especially in the USA, but was also criticized as being too whitewashed.

In the mid-1950s, as part of a three-volume edition by Karl Schlechta, the falsifying activities of the Nietzsche Archives became known to a wider public for the first time . Schlechta claimed to be the first work and parts of the estate to be published using recognized literary methods. However, its edition was also criticized as inadequate. Meanwhile Karl Löwith and Jürgen Habermas saw Nietzsche's effect on philosophy and zeitgeist coming to an end:

“It is to be assumed [...] that Nietzsche will finally be ready for dissection when this new edition [sc. the Colli Montinari edition] will be ready. "

- Löwith, 1964

“Between the wars, especially in Germany, Nietzsche's work exerted a peculiar fascination. [...] Nietzsche shaped and strengthened a mentality back then [...] All of this is behind us and has become almost incomprehensible. Nietzsche is no longer contagious. "

- Habermas, 1968

Since the 1970s

The Italian philosopher Giorgio Colli and his student, the Germanist Mazzino Montinari , after reviewing all the materials, decided in 1962 to publish a completely new Critical Complete Edition ( KGW ), which appeared from 1967 to 1980 , instead of a planned Italian translation . In 1972 the annually published Nietzsche Studies were also founded. Curt Paul Janz published Nietzsche's musical legacy in 1975 and published a three-volume biography in 1979, which published many materials on Nietzsche's life for the first time. Colli, Montinari and their successors also began with the critical edition of the letters ( KGB ).

In the 1970s there was also a wave of Nietzsche interpretations in modern French philosophy. Nietzsche served post-structuralism and deconstruction as a source of inspiration. Thinkers like Gilles Deleuze , Jacques Derrida , Michel Foucault , Félix Guattari and Pierre Klossowski took up his work and reinterpreted it. Through post-structuralism, parts of Nietzsche's thinking were reintroduced into American philosophy, for example with Richard Rorty . Arthur C. Danto and Alexander Nehamas are other important people in the history of the US . In Italy, for example, Gianni Vattimo attempted to take up Nietzsche and Heidegger's ideas and thus to interpret postmodernism philosophically. There is also a Nietzsche Society in Korea that publishes its own specialist journal (Nietzsche Younku).

With the publication of the 15-volume Critical Study Edition ( KSA ) in 1980, which, identical to the KGW, includes all of Nietzsche's philosophical works and legacy from 1869, a complete, unadulterated edition of Nietzsche's writings is available for the first time. The KSA is now regarded as the standard edition; Youth publications, philologica and an extended apparatus can be found in the KGW. With today's technical possibilities, there are also digitized editions of works, letters and bequests. Above all, Mazzino Montinari, who died in 1986, contributed to a new image of Nietzsche as the spiritus rector of the critical editions, founder and contributor to the Nietzsche studies .

The earlier, often very different and contradicting Nietzsche interpretations of the people mentioned are used today e.g. Sometimes viewed with skepticism. According to Werner Stegmaier's “contextual interpretation”, the contradictions of Nietzsche's statements then resolve themselves when they are understood in the literary contexts in which Nietzsche put them.

Nietzsche's anticipation of approaches of the 20th century critical of language and philosophy, his criticism of the concept of truth and his perspectivism also receive special attention . Recently, his criticism of Christianity and religion has been emphasized again in the German-speaking area. Hermann Josef Schmidt tried to uncover their biographical and psychological origins in a monumental study of Nietzsche's childhood and youth. Another area of ​​recent Nietzsche research is the discovery and evaluation of the sources used by Nietzsche.

The thesis that was widespread in the 1920s and 1930s that Adolf Hitler, like Benito Mussolini, was a staunch Nietzsche supporter , was recently re- introduced into the discussion (2016) by the political scientist and criminologist Michael Günther in his work Hitler and Nietzsche . Günther tries to prove that Friedrich Nietzsche worked de facto towards a "new Napoleon" and a "Führer Thier" in the style of Hitler in order to enforce his revolutionary "revaluation of all values" - and was thus partially successful. Friedrich Nietzsche, as a propagandist of a “revolution from above”, is contrasted directly with Karl Marx's class struggle approach - an approach that can in principle also be found in Ernst Sandvoss in the 1960s. It remains to be seen whether this train of thought, which has been buried for decades, will prevail, or at least lead to renewed discourse.

See also

literature

  • Steven E. Aschheim: Nietzsche and the Germans. Cult career. Stuttgart 1996 (orig. 1992)
  • Michael Günther: Hitler and Nietzsche or how a philosopher still made history. A crime-sociological study , Deutscher Wissenschaftsverlag, Baden-Baden 2016
  • Thomas Körber: Nietzsche after 1945: on the work and biography of Friedrich Nietzsche in German-language post-war literature . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2006, ISBN 978-3-82603220-2
  • Richard Krummel : Nietzsche and the German Spirit . Bibliography. 4th vol., Berlin 1998-2006
  • Georg Lukács : From Nietzsche to Hitler - or: Irrationalism in German politics. Frankfurt 1966
  • Ernst Nolte : Nietzsche and Nietzscheanism. Herbig, Munich 1990; exp. New edition 2000
  • Julia Maria Pollich: Man without God, deified man. Nietzsche's thinking in philosophical reflection and narrative practice of the 20th century: Pirandello, Unamuno, Bataille and Sollers , transcript Verlag, Bielefeld 2020, ISBN 978-3-8376-4969-7
  • Manfred Riedel : Nietzsche in Weimar. A German drama. Reclam, Leipzig 1997
  • Alfons Reckermann : Readings of Nietzsche's philosophy: their reception and discussion in France, Italy and the Anglo-Saxon world 1960-2000 . de Gruyter, Berlin 2003, ISBN 978-3-11017452-6
  • Renate Reschke , Marco Brusotti: “Some are born posthumously.” Friedrich Nietzsche's effects . de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-026087-8 .
  • Ernst Sandvoss : Hitler and Nietzsche. A study of the history of consciousness. Goettingen 1969.
  • Andreas Urs Sommer : Nietzsche and the consequences . 2nd, expanded edition. JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2019. ISBN 978-3-476-05545-3 .
  • Werner Stegmaier , Daniel Krohabennik (ed.): Jewish Nietzscheanism . de Gruyter, Berlin 1997, ISBN 978-3-11015361-3
  • Bernhard Taureck : Nietzsche and Fascism. A political issue. Leipzig 2000
  • Ferdinand Tönnies : The Nietzsche cult. First in 1897. New ed. v. G. Rudolph, Berlin 1990
  • Philipp von Wussow: Übervolk. In: Dan Diner (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Jewish History and Culture (EJGK). Volume 6: Ta-Z. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2015, ISBN 978-3-476-02506-7 , pp. 201-207.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Rudolf Steiner: Nietzsche - A fighter against his time. (PDF; 729 kB) 1895.
  2. ^ Ernst Troeltsch: Gesammelte Schriften, Volume 3: The historicism and its problems, 1st book: The logical problem of the philosophy of history, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 1922, 506
  3. ^ Corinna Daniels: Zarathustra in no man's land. In: welt.de . December 27, 2000, accessed October 7, 2018 .
  4. ^ Hofmiller, Josef: Nietzsche In: Süddeutsche Monatshefte , 29th year, Issue 2 (November 1931), p. 131; quoted approvingly by Podach, Erich in Ein Blick in Notebooks Nietzsche , Heidelberg 1963, p. 10 f.
  5. ^ Heidegger, Martin: Nietzsche . Two volumes, Pfullingen 1961. An introductory summary of Heidegger's Nietzsche interpretation is also his text Nietzsche's word "God is dead" In: Holzwege . Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1950. Heidegger's Nietzsche interpretation is inconsistent. Between the Rector's speech (1933) and in the first volume of the Nietzsche interpretation, Heidegger stands behind Nietzsche's philosophy of will, in the second volume it is precisely the will that prevents openness and makes new thinking impossible. In the winter semester of 1938/39 he organized a seminar on Nietzsche. Martin Heidegger: On the interpretation of Nietzsche's II. Untimely consideration. Vol. 46 of the complete edition, ed. by Hans-Joachim Friedrich. Vittorio Klostermann Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2003.
  6. ↑ Karl Jaspers: Nietzsche. Introduction to understanding his philosophizing . de Gruyter, Berlin and New York 1981 (first edition 1935), ISBN 3-11-008658-1 .
  7. ↑ In the complete edition of Löwith's Complete Writings , Stuttgart 1981–1988, s. especially Volume 4: From Hegel to Nietzsche and Volume 6: Nietzsche .
  8. ↑ Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno: Dialectic of Enlightenment . Paperback edition, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-596-27404-4 , citations p. 127 and 123
  9. ^ Franz Mehring: Philosophical essays. Berlin / GDR 1961, pp. 159–166
  10. ^ Franz Mehring: Philosophical essays. Berlin / GDR 1961, pp. 167–172
  11. ↑ Quoted in Franz Mehring: Philosophical essays. Berlin / GDR 1961, p. 174 f.
  12. ↑ Quoted in Franz Mehring: Philosophical essays. Berlin / GDR 1961, pp. 175–181
  13. ↑ Steven Aschheim, Nietzsche and the Germans. Cult career. Stuttgart 1996 (Orig. 1992), p. 252. Aschheim's book itself, like Richard Frank Krummel's Nietzsche and the German Spirit, is above all a collection of material.
  14. ↑ Langreder, Hans: The discussion with Nietzsche in the third Reich , dissertation at the University of Kiel, 1971. Steven Aschheim, Nietzsche and the Germans. Cult career. Stuttgart 1996 (Orig. 1992), p. 252, names this document as the only exception, but considers it inadequate.
  15. ^ Langreder, Hans: The discussion with Nietzsche in the Third Reich , dissertation at the University of Kiel, 1971, p. 59
  16. ^ Langreder, Hans: The discussion with Nietzsche in the third Reich , dissertation at the University of Kiel, 1971, p. 71
  17. ↑ Josef Hofmiller: Nietzsche In: Süddeutsche Monatshefte , 29th year, Heft 2 (November 1931), p. 128: “Baeumler has put together in his edition [...] what one could call the fascist Nietzsche. This is exactly how one could publish a Bolshevik Nietzsche ”. See also Mazzino Montinari: Nietzsche between Alfred Baeumler and Georg Lukács . in: ders .: Nietzsche read , pp. 169–206.
  18. ↑ On Nietzsche's ambiguous attitude towards Judaism, cf. Thomas Mittmann: Friedrich Nietzsche. Opponents of Jews and anti-Semites. Erfurt: Alan Sutton 2001
  19. ^ F. Nietzsche: Thus spoke Zarathustra. Third part. Of the three bad guys, 2: lust for domination: the glow scourge of the hardest-hearted ... lust for domination: the earthquake that breaks and breaks open everything rotten and hollow; the rolling, rumbling punitive breaker of whitewashed graves; the flashing question mark next to premature answers. - Ibid., The Speeches of Zarathustra, On War and the People of War: You say that it is a good cause that even sanctifies war? I tell you: it is the good war that sanctifies everything.
  20. ↑ Georg Lukács: From Nietzsche to Hitler in ders .: The destruction of reason . Berlin (East): Aufbau-Verlag 1954
  21. ^ Wolfgang Harich: Revision of the Marxist Nietzsche image? In: Sinn und Form 5/1987, pp. 1018-1053, here p. 1053
  22. ↑ Karl Löwith: Erich F. Podach: Nietzsche's works of collapse and a look in Nietzsche's notebooks (review), in: Die neue Rundschau No. 75 (1964), pp. 162-168, quoted from Karl Löwith, Complete Writings, Volume 6 , P. 534
  23. ↑ Jürgen Habermas: Afterword In: Friedrich Nietzsche: Epistemological Writings , Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1968, pp. 237–261, here p. 237
  24. ↑ See Choung, Dong-Ho, Nietzsche in Korea, Nietzsche Studies 25, 1996, pp. 380–391
  25. ↑ Werner Stegmaier: Nietzsche's Liberation of Philosophy. Contextual interpretation of Book V of the Gay Science. Berlin / Boston: de Gruyter 2012.
  26. ↑ So in the works of Johann Figl , Jörg Salaquarda and Andreas Urs Sommer
  27. ^ Hermann Josef Schmidt: Nietzsche absconditus or reading traces with Nietzsche. Berlin / Aschaffenburg 1991–1994, 4 volumes (approx. 2500 pages)