Walter Kaufmann was born on the 1st of July, 1921 in Freiburg, Germany and died in 1980.
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| Walter Kaufmann 1921-1980 |
Kaufmann was raised a Lutheran. At age 11 he converted to Judaism and discovered that his grandparents had all been Jewish. He emigrated to the United States in 1939 and became a naturalised citizen in 1960. Kaufmann contributed to the war effort by serving the US Intelligence and then fought on the European front for 15 months.
Kaufmann completed a PhD in the philosophy of religion at Harvard. Later, Kaufmann dismissed all religious values and practices, and worked as a tenacious apologist for Nietzsche. His excellent English translations of Nietzsche's complete works have revolutionised his reception in the English speaking world. These translations replaced the distortions introduced by the William Ashton Ellis editions*. Kaufmann has done more to rehabilitate Nietzsche's reputation and facilitate his general reception by the post-modernist movement than any other writer in the English language.
A former disciple and intimate friend of Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche once addressed Wagner as Meister, before his decisive break with him. After his break, Nietzsche spent his life writing endless shrill tirades and highly emotive polemics against Wagner before finally going mad. Nietzsche was enshrined as an official icon of National Socialism along with Wagner:
This association with National Socialism obviously severely damaged Nietzsche's reputation, but Kaufmann worked tirelessly to restore Nietzsche's tarnished image. Unfortunately, part of Kaufmann's apologia consisted of a process of systematic blame-shifting onto Wagner. It is a blame-shifting that has been spectacularly successful. Not the poor innocent victim of Nazi propaganda, Nietzsche, but instead Wagner is now alleged to be the sole arch proto-Nazi ideologue and "prophet".
Theodor Adorno was another writer, who, like Kaufmann, was more intellectually sympathetic to Nietzsche than to Wagner. Once you add in Adorno's Nietzschean polemic in his Essay on Wagner (Versuch über Wagner), then, along with Kaufmann, you get the cornerstones for the post-war transformation of Wagner into the whipping boy and scapegoat for the whole of National Socialism. The most extreme version of this can be found in Joachim Kohler's claim that Hitler was merely Wagner's "disciple", an automaton, who secretly enacted Wagner's politico-operatic script on the world stage. The whole of World War II and the Holocaust are bizarrely reduced to nothing but grand opera, with Hitler as its chief conductor! Bemused historians have all just scoffed at such Nazi opera conspiracy theories.
Here is a good example where I have caught Kaufmann out in an act of dubious blame shifting from Nietzsche to Wagner. On p 41 of his book Nietzsche Philosopher Psychologist Antichrist, Kaufmann writes:
Lou Salomé came closest to being accepted by Nietzsche for the role that neither Elisabeth nor Cast could fill. In fact, the only other serious candidate was Heinrich von Stein. who never ceased being a Wagnerian and Nietzsche quickly abandoned hope. The three days the two men spent together in the Engadin, when von Stein came to visit Nietzsche, may have meant much to both: but in a letter to his sister. only a few months later, Nietzsche refers to the youth with cutting condescension. In Ecce Homo. The episode is mentioned twice:
This excellent human being. who had waded into the Wagnerian morass (and even into the Dühringian one [i.e. anti-Semitism]) with all the impetuous simplicity of a Prussian junker, was, during these three days, quasi changed by a gale of freedom, as one who is suddenly lifted to his own height .... I kept saying to him that this was due to the good air up here . . . and that one was not 6000 feet above Bayreuth for nothing – but he would not believe me [Ecce Homo I 4].
Once when Dr. Heinrich von Stein complained quite honestly that he did not understand a word in my Zarathustra, I said this was quite in order . . . [Nietzsche: Ecce Homo III 1].
The comment inserted in square brackets by Kaufmann into the quote from Ecce Homo has been highlighted in red
By attempting to falsely associate Dühring with Wagner, Kaufmann is trying to concoct a false accusation against Wagner of a vicious racially-based Dühringian anti-Semitism. In actual fact, Wagner had dismissed Dühring's anti-Semitic writing as being singularly "appalling". Cosima notes that Wagner was "horrified" to discover that, a visitor to their house (Stein) was a Dühringian. Far from being associates, Dühring had joined Nietzsche in launching on interminable hostile polemics against Wagner. The attempt to accuse Wagner of being an advocate of Dühringian racial anti-Semitism are completely false. Kaufmann is clearly supporting and perpetuating a specious argument by association to manufacture a trumped up accusation of racial and exterminationist Dühringian anti-Semitism for self-serving rhetorical effect. Furthermore, while notorious as one of the fathers of racial anti-Semitism, Dühring did write more than anti-Semitic works. Friedrich Engels devoted a whole book to his political writings, known popularly as Anti-Dühring. However, Dühring was a left-wing thinking who for a while counted August Bebel (a Marxist politician and one of the founders of the SPD) as an admiring reader. Like Engels, Bebels, Feuerbach, Bakunin, and Wagner, Dühring belonged on the wrong side of the political fence to the fascists.
In another blame shifting passage, Kaufmann writes on p37 of Nietzsche Philosopher Psychologist Antichrist:
Hitler, of course, knew fifty times as much about Wagner as he did about Nietzsche, and Wagner's essays, unlike Nietzsche's, did not have to be expurgated by the Nazis before being used in schools.This is an astonishing statement and how he arrived at the calculation of how "Hitler, of course, knew fifty times as much about Wagner as he did about Nietzsche". There is no bibliographic citation to back this statement up. As usual we are only given assurances that "of course" this is true—"of course" the moon is made of cheese and "of course" the earth is flat. Of course.
Timothy Ryback in Hitler's Private Library: The Books that Shaped his Life tells us that:
Other sources attesting to Hitler's interest in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are notoriously unreliable. Ernst Hanfstaengl claimed that Schopenhauer had been Hitler's "philosophical god in the old Dietrich Eckart days"—Eckart himself attributes several Schopenhauer remarks to Hitler in his "Conversation"—but that following the meeting with Nietzsche's sister, Hitler became a convert. "From that day at Potsdam the Nietzschean catchphrases began to appear more frequently—the will to power of the Herrenvolk, slave morality, the fight for the heroic life, against reactionary education, Christian philosophy and ethics based on compassion," Hanfstaengl confidently recalled though he mistakenly placed the encounter in Potsdam rather than Weimar. "Schopenhauer, with his almost Buddhist gentleness, was buried forever, and the Gauleiters started to take their inspiration from a savage parody of Nietzsche."
There is a great deal more evidence to suggest that Hitler showed far greater familiarity with Nietzsche's theoretical writings than any of Wagner's equally extensive prose writings and letters.
Kaufmann continues:
One is reminded that another English Wagner enthusiast, a generation ago, also considered Bayreuth the greatest of all monuments of German art and culture, moved there after Wagner's death, asked Frau Cosima for the hand of Wagner's daughter, married her, and was entrusted by the Frau Meisterin with the task of propagating Wagner's heritage. This was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who abominated Nietzsche, preached the gospel of Teutonism and a new "Aryan" Christianity, and wrote Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, a two volume work to which the Nazis' Alfred Rosenberg later wrote the sequel in Der Mythus des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts. Now it might seem that the real Wagner was perhaps as different from the Wagner legend as Nietzsche was from his. Thus Newman says that "the true founders of Wagnerism as a 'faith', a religion, were Cosima and Houston Stewart Chamberlain."
My emphasisIndeed, the "real Wagner" is totally different to the one of legend.
As to how much Hitler knew about Wagner as a social and political thinker, I have already discussed how his library contained not a single volume of Wagner's prose writings. None of Wagner's prose writings were ever used in schools by the National Socialists, whether in "expurgated" form or otherwise. On the other hand, when Leni Reifenstahl asked Hitler, he seemed familiar with Nietzsche (see Hitler's Private Library). Furthermore, some testimonies suggest that amongst the books that Hitler carried in his backpack while serving in the First World War included Nietzsche (see Thomas Weber: Hitler's First World War). Later, as the tide of the war on the Eastern Front was turning against the Dritte Reich, Hitler was want of launching on tirades against his generals accusing them and his troops of lacking the "Macht des Willens", a phrase awfully like Nietzsche's "Wille zur Macht".
The reasons why Hitler chose to fight on in the summer of 1944 were varied. He continued to speak about destiny and fate, about the miraculous escape of Frederick the Great, and there can be little doubt that he believed in such things. Above all he believed in the force of will After the Normandy landings and as the Eastern Front was rolled back, Hitler told Jodl, 'My task, especially since the year 1941, has been never to lose my nerve under any circumstances.' It was willpower that had turned the half-blind, gassed and penniless ex-soldier of 1918 into the dictator of Germany. His faith in will power had been reinforced by the success of his Standfast Order in the winter of 1941. By 1944 his confidence in it was absolute.
Rupert Matthews. Hitler: Military Commander. Arcturus Publishing (my bold emphasis).
Even the talk about "destiny and fate" sound like Nietzsche and his "amor fati". Hitler fanatically believed to the point of delusion that "die Macht des Willens" (the power of the will) could overcome the unrelenting onslaught of the Red Army counter-offensive to deliver him the "Triumph of the Will".
Hitler was asking too much of the German Army. Major General Hans von Greiffenberg, chief of staff of Army Group Centre, said: ‘It is highly doubtful whether the Führer's order to stand fast – whatever the cost – was justified from a military point of view. He was determined to withstand the enemy - but the losses forced on our troops by making such a stand were extremely high. Hitler was strongly influenced by the example of Napoleon in 1812. But there was no proof whatsoever that a retreat, once started, had to lead to the collapse and disintegration of the entire front.
Then Greiffenberg observed: ‘Hitler did not want to realise what was really happening. Instead, he began to believe that all difficulties could be overcome by sheer, unbending willpower. This was the moment when the Führer finally lost touch with the realities of the war in the east.'
Michael Jones: The Retreat. P115 of EPUB edition (my bold emphasis)
Sir Ian Kershaw writes in his Hitler biography:
On generals .... who combined high military skills with something approaching Hitler’s own philosophy and acceptance of his ruthless and unbending demands of his troops, met with his favour. His refusal to accept that willpower alone could not overcome massive superiority of the enemy in numbers and equipment would cost countless thousands of his soldiers’ lives in needless sacrifice. It mattered not to him. According to his remorselessly cruel logic, their weakness had condemned them. Their individual loss meant nothing in the nation’s struggle for its very existence. And when the German people, despite heroic efforts, showed themselves, too, to be incapable of withstanding superior enemy might, he was prepared to accept that they deserved to go under. They had ultimately proved themselves weak; they had not matched up to his demands of them; they had been, as he told one of his generals, in the end, unworthy of him.
Kershaw: Hitler 1936-1945 Nemesis (my emphasis)
Note that the word Untergang – the going under – occurs repeatedly throughout Nietzsche's Zarathustra. Nietzsche constantly plays on the words Unter (under) and Über (under), such as his Übermensch. Nietzsche's use of the word Untergang unquestionably comes from Wagner. However, Wagner's use of the term is often in the sense of a liberal Utopian "revelation" and destruction of l'ancien regime. In Nietzsche, it retains its sense of a destruction of the old-world bourgeois regime, but it loses its politically liberal sense. It thus acquires all of the pseudo-radical, pseudo-revolutionary character of fascist ideology.
Kaufmann conveniently ignores the fact that Alfred Rosenberg's Mythus draws heavily on Nietzsche, and the fact that Rosenberg is also generally dismissive of Wagner. Rosenberg condemns Wagner as being "neither heroic nor Germanic" (Frederick Spotts: Bayreuth p166). Nor should it be forgotten that it was Nietzsche himself who said that "Wagner is the antidote against everything German par excellence" (Wagner ist das Gegengift gegen alles Deutsche par excellence — Ecce Homo II 6). It is precisely because there is a strongly anti-Germanic strain in Wagner, the annihilator of the warmongering Germanic gods par excellence, that Rosenberg sought to install the war-loving Nietzsche in place of the pacifist and socialist Wagner as the central Prophet of National Socialism.
Predictably, Kaufmann even goes so far to claim that Nietzsche turns against Rosenberg on p194:
It was this generation, of which Wagner and Förster were notable spokesmen – and whose heritage Chamberlain passed on to Rosenberg – that Nietzsche turned against in his Antichrist.
Kaufmann: Nietzsche Philosopher Psychologist AntichristOnce again Kaufmann is pushing a dubious argument by association. Wagner was entirely hostile to the proto-Nazi ideologues such as Bernard Förster and Adolf Stöcker. Wagner wrote emphatically to his Jewish friend, Angelo Neumann, saying that "I distance myself completely from the modern anti-Semitic movement". Bernard Förster was interestingly married to Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth Bernard-Förster, who was almost single-handedly responsible for the nazification of Nietzsche's public image.
Nor is any reference to Alfred Rosenberg in Antichrist. Nor could there be: Nietzsche was dead by the time Rosenberg wrote Mythus, just as Wagner was dead by the time Chamberlain wrote his Grundlagen. In fact, Wagner never once met Chamberlain, although countless books repeat the myth that he had. Chamberlain was very much more the adopted child of Cosima's ideological bent. She was much more viciously anti-Semitic and as the grand Meisterin, drove Bayreuth towards embracing Hitler several decades after Wagner's death. Yet Nietzsche adored Cosima. In his madness, he called her Ariadne, and claimed that he was married to her:
Nietzsche never outgrew his fascination [for Cosima]: In his late notes and poems she appears as Ariadne, while he increasingly identifies himself with Dionysus – and Wagner must occasionally take the role of Theseus. It was not until the first days of his insanity, however, that he sent out several notes that revealed who Ariadne was. Cosima herself received a sheet of paper with the sole inscription: "Ariadne, I love you. Dionysus." And on March 27, 1889, in the asylum at Jena, Nietzsche said: "My wife, Cosima Wagner, has brought me here."
. . . Hans von Bülow, deserted by Cosima, visited Nietzsche in March 1872 and in their conversation likened himself to Theseus, and Cosima to Ariadne, who had now abandoned him for the superior and godlike Wagner-Dionysus. (In the legend it is Theseus who abandons Ariadne.) In Nietzsche's earlier notes, says Frau Förster-Nietzsche, Dionysus is Wagner
Kaufmann: Nietzsche Philosopher Psychologist Antichrist. p32
As for Kaufmann's claims about Wagner's alleged chauvinistic Teutonism, in addition to Nietzsche's statement about him being "the antidote against everything German par excellence", here, for example, is what Cosima records of Wagner's words in her diary entry for the 2nd February 1880:
Where are there Germans left anywhere? The heroic breeds all disappeared during folk-migrations leaving only philistines behind. The Prussian are at it, and from time to time, the French – and when they are too overly proud to strike at – the French, remain the Gods and Masters of the world.
After all, in Götterdämmerung, Wagner totally and utterly annihilates the barbaric German gods. By "Germans", Wagner even makes it quite clear that he means all Germanic peoples including those from "Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland" (Wollen Wir Hoffen?). Elsewhere, Wagner writes that "there were no people [Volk] in history to whom the original name Deutsch can be attributed" (Was ist Deutsch?). By this definition even the English and Americans are Germanic people. The English language is a Germanic language.
Kaufmann also goes on about how there is no Darwinism in Nietzsche. This is despite statements from Nietzsche that "man is but a bridge between ape and Overman". Admittedly, you could take the expression "anti-Darwin" used by Nietzsche literally here:
Anti-Darwin: As for the famous "struggle for life" is concerned, it seems to me the time more often claimed more than proven. It happens, but as an exception, the overall aspect of life is not the plight of the needy, the hungry, as much as it is of wealth, opulence, even the absurd waste - where there is fighting, one fights for power ... One should not confuse Malthus with nature. - Assuming, however, there is this fight - and in fact, it happens - so it is unfortunately the opposite, to what the school of Darwin hopes, as one might perhaps wish with it: namely, to the detriment of the strong, the privileged, the fortunate exceptions. Species do not grow in perfection: the weak are always the master over the strong - that is, they exist in great numbers, they are also smarter ... Darwin forgot the spirit (- that is English!), the weak have more spirit ...
Anti-Darwin. – Was den berühmten »Kampf ums Leben« betrifft, so scheint er mir einstweilen mehr behauptet als bewiesen. Er kommt vor, aber als Ausnahme; der Gesamt-Aspekt des Lebens ist nicht die Notlage, die Hungerlage, vielmehr der Reichtum, die Üppigkeit, selbst die absurde Verschwendung – wo gekämpft wird, kämpft man um Macht... Man soll nicht Malthus mit der Natur verwechseln. – Gesetzt aber, es gibt diesen Kampf – und in der Tat, er kommt vor –, so läuft er leider umgekehrt aus, als die Schule Darwins wünscht, als man vielleicht mit ihr wünschen dürfte: nämlich zu Ungunsten der Starken, der Bevorrechtigten, der glücklichen Ausnahmen. Gattungen wachsen nicht in der Vollkommenheit: die Schwachen werden immer wieder über die Starken Herr – das macht, sie sind die große Zahl, sie sind auch klüger... Darwin hat den Geist vergessen (– das ist englisch!), die Schwachen haben mehr Geist...
14. Anti-Darwin: Nietzsche - W Bd. 2, 999
In other words, the modern world increasingly "degenerates" towards increasing liberalism, rule by the mob and their "chandala values" (Nietzsche Werke: Band 2, 982) – namely, towards democracy or socialism. Nietzsche wishes to reverse this liberalising historic trend to the rule by "the herd", with a counter revolutionary backlash of the "strong, the privileged, the fortunate exception": the masterly Overman.
Nietzsche's Overman, with all of his contempt for the "herd mentality" of democracy, his abject contempt for compassion, and exaltation of war, seems the perfect messianic fascist Leader. The Overman, fatalistically driven to his Untergang by the Will to Power, is at first the dark outsider, misunderstood by the masses, his vision of life and the world will one day become the word of their prophet:
The most hushed words are they that harbour the storm. Thoughts that arrive on dove's feet steer the world.
Die stillsten Worte sind es, welche den Sturm bringen. Gedanken, die mit Taubenfüßen kommen, lenken die Welt.
Zarathustra: Die stillste Stunde Nietzsche-W Bd. 2, 401
That said, before getting too carried away, one must keep in mind what Hitler said to Leni Riefenstahl:
"No, I can't really do much with Nietzsche" Riefenstahl recalls Hitler telling her. “He is more an artist than a philosopher; he doesn't have the crystal-clear understanding of Schopenhauer. Of course. I value Nietzsche as a genius. He writes possibly the most beautiful language that German literature has to offer us today, but he is not my guide.”
Timothy Ryback: Hitler's Private Library, p60
Other sources do suggest that Hitler read Schopenhauer, which has always struck commentators as strange considering Schopenhauer's pacifism, and his doctrine of the renunciation of the Will:
In the consciousness that has reached the highest grade, that of man, egoism, as well as knowledge, pain and pleasure, must have reached its highest grade also, and the conflict of individuals which is conditioned by it must appear in its most terrible form. . . . [W]e see its terrible side in the lives of great tyrants and miscreants, and in world-desolating wars; now its absurd side, in which it is the theme of comedy, and very specially appears as self-conceit and vanity.
Book IV. World as Will and Representation.
This picture of a comically self-conceited tyrant, with toothbrush moustache, waging "world-desolating wars" is the perfect caricature of Hitler. And the very idea of the Triumph of the Will, rather than its renunciation, seems a positively grotesque inversion of Schopenhauer. However, one must consider whether by associating himself with Schopenhauer and Wagner, Hitler was cynically trying to cultivate a political image as a music loving, peacenik vegetarian, and patron of the arts.
For many years I too was blindly enthralled by Kaufmann's valiant apologia on Nietzsche's behalf. Now, taken more at face value, Nietzsche only seems creepy and even perverse to me. Nietzsche is brilliant and dazzling with words, and I can see why, like Rosenberg and Hitler, they are in his thrall. For many years I was too, until, once I was a little older and wiser, it dawned on me that I was only kidding myself. Sadly, it seems that Nietzsche's supporters have been forced to use Wagner as their scapegoat in a perverse crusade to cleanse Nietzsche's tainted reputation by blameshifting onto Wagner. Some will say that I am doing the same thing to Nietzsche to protect Wagner, but I have had enough of Nietzsche. It is time to come clean about him and be honest.
Still, I would caution getting too carried away in saying that Hitler is the embodiment of the Overman etc. Timothy Ryback informs us that in fact Fichte held a much more dominant position in Hitler's private library than either any other major philosopher:
Of all the philosophical stars in the constellation of Nazi ideology few blazed as intensely during the Third Reich or faded as quickly afterward as this late-eighteenth-century advocate of belligerent German nationalism. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche may have lent themselves conveniently to Nazi-era sound bites, but it was Fichte who provided the philosophical foundations for the toxic blend of Teutonic singularity and vicious nationalism. No one less than Dietrich Eckart** identified Fichte, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche as the philosophical triumvirate of National Socialism. Arnold Fanck acknowledged this fact when he recommended Fichte's works as Riefenstahl's peace offering to Hitler.
Today, the Fichte volumes represent the only serious works of philosophy among Hitler’s surviving books. Although there are more than a hundred pages of marginalia in the Fichte volumes, close scrutiny of several intrusions, especially the words "sehr gut" scrawled In the margin of page 594 of volume four, suggests an authorship other than Hitler's. In addition. the potentially most revealing volume, which contains Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation as well as an essay on rhetorical technique, is missing.
Despite the absence of these seminal works of German philosophy, the remnant Hitler library contains a cache of books that is almost certainly more central to the shaping of the dark core of Hitler's worldview than the high-minded musings of Schopenhauer, Fichte, and Nietzsche: more than fifty volumes inscribed to Hitler between 1919 and 1935 by Julius Friedrich Lehmann, an individual who has the dubious double claim to being both the single most generous contributor to Hitler’s private book collection and the public architect for the Nazi pseudoscience of biological racism.
Timothy Ryback: Hitler's Private Library, p61 EPUB edition
Notes:
* Kaufmann has created a revolution by his pioneering translation of Nietzsche into English. Of course, others have tried their hand at improving on him, but Kaufmann is still unsurpassed. In the meanwhile, the English language speaking world is still stuck with the dreadful William Ashton Ellis translations of Wagner. Even Michael Tanner calls these translations "bizarre" and blames him for many of the misunderstandings that have arisen. I have read some of the Ellis translation of Nietzsche's Zarathustra, and, apart from the bizarre King James English, it is consistently faithful to the original German. It is much better than the frightening distortions introduced by Ellis into his Wagner translations. Ellis tries to wringe a proto-Nazi sounding ideological programme out of every word of Wagner's and frequently changes the text completely to fit with his personal bias. Not surprisingly, Chamberlain thought highly of Ellis and wrote of "Mr. William Ashton Ellis' admirable translations of Wagner's prose writings" (introduction to the Röckel letters).
** At the time of his death, even Eckhart of the Thule Society thought Hitler had gone stark raving mad:
Eckart apparently felt estranged from Hitler at the time of his death from heart failure in December 1923. It was ironic that this tireless promoter of Hitler as the German messiah came to feel that his protégé had developed delusions of grandeur. "The way Adolf is carrying on now goes beyond me. The man is plain crazy,” he said, complaining of the total identification of Hitler with the movement, whose existence beyond Hitler became increasingly incomprehensible.
David Luhrssen: The Hammer of the Gods, p 173.
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