Tschandala

Tschandala is an older German and Swedish transcription of the word Chandala . The spelling Tschandala was used by Friedrich Nietzsche and August Strindberg .

Nietzsche's "Tschandala"

Use of the term by Nietzsche

Nietzsche uses the term in his writings Götzen-Twilight and Der Antichrist . In it he presents the “ Manu Law Book ” with its caste system as an example of an intelligently planned “breeding” of people against the attempt of Christianity to “ tame ” people.

Nietzsche pays particular attention to the “Tschandala”, which he sees in Manu as a product of the uncontrolled mixture of races and classes, or, as Nietzsche quotes Manu, as “the fruit of adultery, incest and crime”.

Nietzsche first describes methods of Christian human improvement. The central metaphor is the trained predator in the menagerie, which is apparently improved, in reality weakened and deprived of its liveliness. Nietzsche sees the Germanic peoples trained by Christianity as a correspondence.

The Manu code, on the other hand, is aimed at breeding a high human race and must therefore be adamant against any racial mixture. Nietzsche describes this social organization as "terrible" and "contradicting our feelings", but as the purest and most original expression of " Aryan humanity." He lays down the brutal rules for dealing with the Tschandala, which basically amount to humiliation and physical annihilation, as a struggle of the Strong against the mass of the weak from:

“But this organization also had to be terrible - not this time in the fight with the beast, but with its opposite concept, the non-breeding man, the mishmash man, the chandala. And again she had no other means to make him harmless, to make him weak, than to make him sick - it was the fight with the 'large number'. "

According to Nietzsche, however, Christianity , which emerged from Judaism , is the religion of Tschandala. He indicates that Judaism actually comes from the "Tschandalas":

“Christianity, from Jewish roots and only understandable as a plant of this soil, represents the counter-movement against any moral of breeding, of race, of privilege: - it is the anti- Aryan religion par excellence: Christianity is the revaluation of all Aryan values, victory the Tschandala value, the gospel preached to the poor, the lowly, the total uprising of all the trampled, miserable, wrongdoers, badly come against the 'race' - the immortal Tschandala revenge as a religion of love ... "

In his work The Antichrist , Nietzsche once again praises the Manu code. Although it uses the “holy lie” as a means, like every morality, its end is infinitely higher than that of Christianity. Nietzsche sets the worldview of the “most spiritual” and “strongest” people, who can affirm everything, even the existence of the chandalas, against the envious and vengeful instinct of the chandalas themselves (compare master morality and slave morality ). Nietzsche used the term Tschandala to refer to various opponents, including socialist currents of his time.

Also in some of Nietzsche's posthumous notes his preoccupation with the Manu code of law can be found, which he also criticizes in places. In a letter to Heinrich Köselitz dated May 31, 1888, Nietzsche declared the Jews to be the “Tschandala race”, which had converted the “Aryan” ethics of the Vedas into a priestly ethic and thus destroyed the original meaning.

Nietzsche's erroneous source

Nietzsche drew his supposed knowledge from the book Les législateurs religieux , published in 1876 . Manou, Moïse, Mahomet by the French Indologist and writer Louis Jacolliot . According to ( Lit. ) Annemarie Etter, this translation of the Manusmriti differs significantly from other sources, also in the places used and cited by Nietzsche. For example, the respect for women that Nietzsche emphasized and which is contrary to Christianity is not found in the usual versions of the text.

In his interpretation of the Tschandala, which Nietzsche repeatedly combines with Jewish and Christianity, Nietzsche apparently followed a lengthy excursion by Jacolliot, in which, according to Etter, he developed an "unbelievable, absurd and scientifically completely untenable theory". According to Jacolliot's theory, all Semitic peoples, especially the Hebrews, are descendants of emigrated Tschandala tribes. Even if Nietzsche never expresses this so directly, some of his utterances clearly go in this direction - although, as Etter states, Nietzsche would have had the opportunity to describe Jacolliot's work as "a pseudoscientific publication with grossly misleading conclusions based on completely arbitrary assumptions" to recognize. Instead, Jacolliot's "enthusiastic admiration for ancient Eastern wisdom and civilization with a more or less open and pronounced anti-Semitism and antichristianism" was taken over by Nietzsche quite uncritically and was very powerful.

Strindberg's story

The Nietzsche admirer August Strindberg published a story in 1889 with the title Tschandala . It is set in an old Swedish castle at the end of the 17th century. A family spends a summer in the castle and meets various strange people there.

Text bases and footnotes

Nietzsche's writings are cited after the critical study edition of the works or letters (KSA or KSB).

1. ↑ In the section "The 'improvers' of mankind" (KSA 6, pp. 98-102)
2. ↑ Chapters 56 and 57 (KSA 6, pp. 239–244).
3. ↑ Nietzsche: Götzen-Dämmerung , section “The 'improvers' of humanity” (KSA 6), p. 101.
4. ↑ Nietzsche: Götzen-Dämmerung , section “The 'improvers' of mankind” (KSA 6), p. 100.
5. ^ Nietzsche: Götzen-Dämmerung , section "The 'improvers' of humanity" (KSA 6), p. 101 f.
6. ↑ KSB 8, No. 1041, pp. 324–326.

literature

• Christian Benne: So spoke Confusius: A forgotten chapter from Nietzsche's Viennese early reception , in: Orbis Litterarum 57/5 (2002), pp. 370–402.
• Koenraad Elst : Manu as a Weapon against Egalitarianism. Nietzsche and Hindu Political Philosophy, in: Siemens, Herman W. / Roodt, Vasti (eds.): Nietzsche, Power and Politics. Rethinking Nietzsche's Legacy for Political Thought, Berlin / New York 2008, 543-582.
• Annemarie Etter: Nietzsche and the law book of Manu in: Nietzsche studies 16 (1987), pp. 340–352
• Arthur Moeller van den Bruck : Tschandala Nietzsche , Berlin / Leipzig 1899.
• Andreas Urs Sommer : Ex oriente lux? On the supposed 'Ostorientierung' in Nietzsche's Antichrist , in: Nietzsche-Studien 28 (1999), pp. 194-214
• August Strindberg : Tschandala , 1889, ISBN 3458344411