Whyte 2008

Angeles, London, New Delhi Journal of Contemporary Contemporary History Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications, Los Angeles, and Singapore, Vol 43(2), 171–194. ISSN 0022–0094. DOI: 10.1177/0022009408089028

Max Whyte The Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche in the Third Reich: Alfred Baeumler’s ‘Heroic Realism’

The nazis, it has long been held, were not interested in ideas.1 Arendt’s influential thesis of the ‘banality of evil’ in the Third Reich has only recently been subjected to comprehensive criticism. New studies have revealed the perpetrators of National Socialism’s crimes as ideologically driven activists, not inane bureaucrats and pedantic penpushers.2 Though by no means the most active architects of nazi policy, few in the Third Reich were more self-consciously concerned with the ‘idea’ of National Socialism than its philosophers. And few held greater sway over their attempts to furnish nazi Germany with a philosophical raison d’être than Friedrich Nietzsche. Numerous German intellectuals considered Nietzsche the herald of the ‘German awakening’ and sought to locate his philosophy at the very core of National Socialist ideology. The identification of Nietzsche as the prophet of Hitlerism also spread beyond Germany through the polemical works of AngloAmerican and Marxist philosophers.3 Yet, in a process that began soon after the war and has grown in strength ever since, Nietzsche has been rehabilitated into the pantheon of great philosophers as an essentially benign thinker largely concerned with the shaping of the self and the soul, while the ‘nazified’ Nietzsche has been summarily dismissed as a crass and manipulative misinterpretation.4 As one commentator notes, ‘perhaps no opinion in Nietzsche 1 H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York 1976), and also H. Mommsen, trans. P. O’Connor, From Weimar to Auschwitz: Essays in Germany History (London 1991). I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council of Great Britain, which made the research for this paper possible. 2 See, for example, U. Herbert, Best: Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 [Best: Biographical Studies of Radicalism, Ideology, and Reason] (Bonn 2001); Y. Lozowick, trans. H. Watzman, Hitler’s Bureaucrats: The Nazi Security Police and the Banality of Evil (London 2002); M.T. Allen, The Business of Genocide: The SS, Slave Labor, and the Concentration Camps (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002); M. Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten: Unbedingten: das Führungskorps Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamte Reichssicherheitshauptamtess [Generation of the Unbound: the Leadership of the Reich Security Main Office] (Hamburg 2002); and R. Bessel’s review, ‘Not Only Obeying Orders’, Times Literary Supplement , 24 January 2003. 3 C. Brinton, Nietzsche (New York 1941); B. Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London 1946), chap. XXV; W.M. McGovern, From Luther to Hitler (Cambridge, MA, 1941); and G. Lukács, trans. P. Palmer, The Destruction of Reason ([1955] London 1980), chap. III. 4 See most notably W. Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist ([1950] Princeton 4th edn 1974) and A. Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA, 1985).

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scholarship is now more widely accepted than that the nazis were wrong and/or ignorant in their appropriation of Nietzsche’. ‘Nietzsche’, another summarizes, ‘has in fact been de-nazified’.5 The claim that the National Socialists simply falsified the ‘true Nietzsche’ has spawned a certain interpretative myopia, a failure to engage with Nietzsche’s concrete, historical role in the ideological apparatus of the nazi regime. A comprehensive analysis of what Steven Aschheim calls the ‘historical transmission belts’6 between Nietzsche and nazism is predicated on a serious examination of those philosophers who saw in his work both the anticipation and the justification of the new regime. Of supreme importance in this respect was Alfred Baeumler: an established philosopher in Germany prior to Hitler’s rise to power, author of the influential Nietzsche: The Philosopher and Politician (1931)7 and Professor of Pedagogy and Politics in Berlin from 1933 to 1945. A close personal and professional ally of Alfred Rosenberg — the selfproclaimed ‘chief ideologist’ of National Socialism — and the primary liaison between the universities and the so-called Amt Rosenberg ,8 Baeumler came closer to the centres of power in the Third Reich than any other philosopher. His ideas, as Charles Bambach observes, constituted a ‘kind of intellectual and philosophical nexus’ within which National Socialist ideology developed in the 1930s.9 The appropriation of Nietzsche for the National Socialist cause was not conducted solely within the academic realm, of course. Nietzsche reached a popular audience in the Third Reich through a number of channels, from Gottfried Benn’s poetry10 to Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda addresses, and the Continental philosophers have contributed, in a very different way, to the image of the non-political Nietzsche. For the likes of Deleuze and Foucault, Nietzsche’s philosophy was more anarchic, more mercurial, more postmodern. G. Deleuze, trans. H. Tomlinson , Nietzsche and Philosophy (New York 1983) and M. Foucault, trans. D. Bouchard, ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in Language Countermemory, Practice (Ithaca 1977). German scholars, it should be noted, remain far more reserved about labelling Nietzsche as the great liberator. See in particular J. Habermas, trans. F. Lawrence, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA, 1987) and B. Taureck, Nietzsche und der Faschismus: Eine Studie über Nietzsches politische Philosophie und ihre Folgen [Nietzsche and Fascism: A Study of Nietzsche’s Political Philosophy and its Consequences] (Hamburg 1989). 5 T.B. Strong, ‘Nietzsche’s Political Misappropriation’, in B. Magnus and K.M. Higgins (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche (Cambridge 1996), 131, and K.R. Fischer, ‘A Godfather too Far’, in J. Golomb and R.S. Wistrich (eds), Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? (Princeton 2002), 294. 6 S.E. Aschheim, ‘Nietzsche, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust’, in J. Golomb (ed.), Nietzsche and Jewish Culture (London 1997), 6. 7 A. Baeumler, Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker (Nietzsche: The Philosopher and Politician) (Leipzig 1931). 8 Officially, the ‘Office for the Surveillance of the Whole Intellectual and Ideological Education and Training of the NSDAP [ Amt für die Überwachung der gesamten geistigen und weltanschaulichen Schulung und Erziehung der NSDAP ]’. 9 C. Bambach, Heidegger’s Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca 2003), 275. 10 See J. Wulf, Kultur im Dritten Reich , Band Band 2, Literatur und Dichtung: Eine Dokumentation [Culture in the Third Reich, vol. 2, Literature and Poetry: A Documentation ] (Frankfurt 1989), 131.


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field-grey military editions of his works published to inspire the German soldiers during the second world war.11 Yet Baeumler, who consciously fashioned himself as a public intellectual as well as a philosopher, also made a considerable impact on the non-academic reception of Nietzsche. He wrote all the afterwords to the extremely popular ‘pocket editions’ (Taschenausgaben) of Nietzsche’s works, published in 1930 by Alfred Kröner, and repeatedly stressed Nietzsche’s contemporary relevance in public speeches, radio broadcasts, and articles for the main National Socialist newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter .12 Despite his intellectual and biographical importance, Baeumler has been largely ignored by intellectual historians, or else quickly dismissed as an opportunistic, ‘ersatz’ scholar. For Walter Kaufmann, ‘philosophically, Bäumler [sic] was a nobody’. Carol Diethe characterized Baeumler as an academic charlatan, who ‘bent and twisted Nietzsche’s thought on every page’; David Farrell Krell found it ‘pointless and unpleasant’ to even discuss his work; and in what is the most comprehensive and authoritative work on the subject to date, Jacob Golomb dismissed Baeumler’s ‘notorious’ and ‘uncritical’ interpretation of Nietzsche as ‘a kind of intellectual Siegfried’, and suggested that despite Nietzsche’s radically anti-liberal and anti-humanist vision of progress, ‘he could have only despised and abhorred’ the totalitarian regimes that invoked his spirit.13 The real issue, however, is neither Nietzsche’s ‘personal responsibility’ for National Socialism, nor the ‘actual’ concordance between his philosophy and National Socialist praxis. Trawling through Nietzsche’s texts in order to prove fascist or anti-fascist tendencies is otiose. There is enough variance in his corpus of work to support either reading (and many others besides). The relationship between Nietzsche and National Socialism is better understood in terms of what did happen, rather than what ought to have happened, and 11 In his infamous ‘total war’ speech at the Berlin Sportpalast on 18 February 1943, shortly after the German defeat at Stalingrad, for example, Goebbels pronounced: ‘As we so often have in the past, so again shall we now bear the hardest burdens. And we shall once on ce more justify the words of the philosopher [Nietzsche]: “That which does not kill me makes me stronger”’. H. Heiber (ed.), Goebbels-Reden [Goebbels’ Speeches], vol. 2, 1939–1945 (Düsseldorf 1972), 168. 12 See, for example, A. Baeumler, ‘Um Theologie und Wissenschaft. Zum Descartes-Kongreß’ [On Theology and Scholarship. To the Descartes Congress], Völkischer Beobachter , 30 July 1937, 1–2; A. Baeumler, ‘Friedrich Nietzsche. Zu seinem 100. Geburtstag am 15. Oktober’ [Friedrich Nietzsche: On his 100th Birthday on 15 October], Völkischer Beobachter , 13 October 1944, 1–2; ‘Deutsche Geistesgeschichte seit der Reformation. Vortrag von Professor Dr. Alfred Baeumler’ [German Intellectual History Since the Reformation. Speech by Alfred Baeumler], Völkischer Beobachter , 1 October 1935, 5; and ‘Eine Nietzsche-Revision. Zu einem Vortrag Prof. Baeumlers’ [A Revision of Nietzsche: On a Speech by Professor Baeumler], Völkischer Beobachter , 13 March 1945, 2. 13 W. Kaufmann’s introduction to F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power , ed. W. Kaufmann (New York 1968), xiii; D.F. Krell’s ‘Analysis’ of M. Heidegger, trans. D.F. Krell Nietzsche (4 vols, New York 1979–87), IV, 270; C. Diethe, Nietzsche’s Sister and the Will to Power: A Biography of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche Förster-Nietzsche (Urbana and Chicago 2003), 156; and J. Golomb and R.S. Wistrich (eds), Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? , op.cit., 42, 5, 14.


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certainly not in terms of Nietzsche’s supposed approval or disapproval from beyond the grave. However problematic, National Socialist appropriations of Nietzsche cannot be simply bypassed as instances of ‘misinterpretation’. The ‘nazified’ Nietzsche has to be fully unpacked before it can be left behind. Baeumler’s elucidation of Nietzsche as the envoy of a new spirit of ‘heroic realism’ served as a crucial counterpoint for the Nietzsche reception in the Third Reich. An analysis of its origins, content and impact affords an illuminating perspective on the darker side of Nietzsche’s historical legacy. A quadrilateral of roughly chronological themes will frame the following case study: identification, legitimization, indoctrination and confrontation. The identification of Nietzscheanism Nietzscheanism and National National Socialism evolved from an image of Nietzsche created by a generation of right-wing thinkers in the interwar period. Baeumler’s Nietzsche: The Philosopher and Politician , which set the tone for the politicization of Nietzsche during the 1930s and 1940s, had several historical precedents and was extensively conditioned by the intellectual trends of Weimar Germany. His intellectual endeavour to ‘wrest Nietzsche from the claws of the liberals’14 was seemingly vindicated by the triumph of National Socialism in 1933. The ‘German spring’ further fuelled Nietzschean enthusiasms, as the philosophers of the new Reich — and especially Baeumler and Heidegger — sought to imbue the political upheavals with a deeper, world-historical significance. Interpreted as a Nietzschean transvaluation, a new beginning, 1933 marked the legitimization of the Nietzsche/National Socialist synthesis. An attempt at indoctrination followed, in order to secure firmly Nietzsche’s reputation as a (proto-)nazi philosopher. Yet the effort to place Nietzsche at the heart of National Socialist ideology did not go unchallenged. On the contrary, resistance and confrontation from numerous quarters provided ample nuance to the Nietzsche reception in the Third Reich. Nietzsche was not co-opted by the nazis en masse — the ‘polycratic chaos’ endemic to the political system also functioned at the level of ideology. Baeumler’s portrait of Nietzsche secured a dominant, but not totalizing influence, and the cracks that spread across its surface adumbrated the tensions at work in the uses (and abuses) of a philosopher who had always stressed his aversion to ‘believers’. Alfred Baeumler was born in 1887 in Neustadt an der Tafel, then part of Austria, and studied in Munich, Bonn and Berlin: first art history (inter alia under Heinrich Wölfflin), and then philosophy and aesthetics. After fighting for the Austrians in the first world war, he became a German citizen and continued his studies at the Technical University Dresden, where he became an associate professor in 1928 and a full professor the following year. Baeumler’s academic career took off in turbulent times. The general crisis of ideology in the Weimar Republic had brought about a pronounced politicization of philosophy. For a generation of postwar thinkers, indeed, philosophy and politics A. Baeumler, ‘Lebenslauf’ (‘Resumé’), 7 October 1934: Philosophisches Archiv der Universität Konstanz, AB 019–03–01. 14



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were indistinguishable spheres of interest.15 Baeumler’s philosophical development in the 1920s — from Kant’s aesthetics, through Hegel, Kierkegaard and Bachofen, to Nietzsche — paralleled an increasing commitment to the politics of the radical Right. His Nietzsche interpretation marked the culmination of a process of reciprocal philosophical and political exchange: not only did Baeumler make Nietzsche serviceable for National Socialism; Nietzsche made Baeumler more susceptible to the National Socialist alternative. The politicization of Nietzsche was nothing new, however. As early as the 1870s, Nietzsche was being read in distinctly political terms by the ‘Pernerstorfer Circle’: a group of Viennese students led by Engelbert Pernerstorfer, including Gustav Mahler, Victor Adler and the historian Heinrich Friedjung.16 Nietzsche’s prognosis of European degeneracy, and his parallel demand for a re-evaluation of the stifling morality of the herd, appealed to all who perceived the roots of spiritual decline in the liberal, bourgeois structures of modernity. Individual isolation, social disintegration and cultural decline became leitmotifs of fin-de-siècle art, philosophy and literature. In Germany, as abroad, the Great War was greeted as a world-historic turning point.17 For the massed legions of the middle classes at least, the surge of national unity, combined with the idea of cultural, social and political rebirth, appeared to furnish the modern world with meaning and purpose.18 From the outset of the war, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche sought to popularize her brother as a German nationalist and posthumous comrade in arms: If ever there was a friend of war, who loved warriors and those who struggle, and placed his highest hopes on them, then it was Friedrich Nietzsche. ‘My brothers in War! I love you completely, I am and I was one of your kind’. That is why so many young heroes are marching into enemy territory with Zarathustra in their pocket. My brother could never sufficiently stress the purifying, uplifting and sublime effect of war, and as I have already mentioned, he received one of his deepest philosophical insights precisely during the period of his war experience.19 See K. Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik: die politischen Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933 [Anti-Democratic Thinking in the Weimar Republic: The Political Ideas of German Nationalism between 1918 and 1933] (Munich 1962) and J. Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge 1984). 16 See W.J. McGrath, Dionysian Dionysian Art Art and Populist Populist Politics Politics in Austria Austria (New Haven 1974), 53–83. 17 See R.N. Stromberg, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914 (Lawrence, KS, 1982) and R. Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (London 1980). 18 The working-class youth, it should be stressed, was rather less willing to view the outbreak of war as a moment of ‘spiritual renewal’. 19 E. Förster-Nietzsche, ‘Nietzsche und der Krieg’, Der Tag , 10 September 1914, 9, reprinted in Hamburgischer Correspondent , 15 September 1914, 2, cited in C. Diethe, Nietzsche’s Sister and the Will to Power , op. cit., 138. The portrait of Nietzsche as a bellicose German nationalist was also prominent in British political propaganda. See N. Martin, ‘Nietzsche as Hate-Figure in Britain’s Great War: “The Execrable Neech”’, in F. Bridgham (ed.), The First World War as a Clash of Cultures (Rochester, NY, 2006), 147–66. Elisabeth and the staff at the Nietzsche Archive held Baeumler in high regard as the chief protagonist in securing Nietzsche’s legacy for the political 15


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Prior to 1914, Nietzscheanism had been a primarily left-wing phenomenon. In 1892, Franz Mehring — the leader of the SPD — suggested that Nietzsche’s disdain for the world of the bourgeoisie might allow his work to be considered a ‘moment of passage to socialism’.20 Through the course of the Great War, however, the politics of the Nietzschebild were Nietzschebild were transformed. Reconstructed as an essentially Germanic figure, Nietzsche soon became a hero for the Right. Thomas Mann, writing in 1918, captured the spirit of this enkindling: ‘the colossal manliness of [Nietzsche’s] soul, his antifeminism, his opposition to democracy — what could be more German?’21 Mann’s favourable attitude towards Nietzsche had been shaped by the publication earlier that year of Mythology.22 An affiliate of the George Ernst Bertram’s Nietzsche: Attempt at Mythology. Circle, Bertram taught in Bonn before becoming the professor of German language and literature in Cologne in 1922. His Nietzsche text made an immediate and extensive impact in Germany, and was reprinted a further seven times before 1929. Its success stemmed from a highly stylized and poetic treatment of the eponymous subject. Guided by the dictum ‘great men are inevitably our creation, just as we are theirs’, Bertram removed Nietzsche from all contextual manacles in order to recast the ‘legend of a man’.23 In Nietzsche’s own life — replete with tensions, contradictions and tragedy — he saw the underlying essence of German culture. In Nietzsche’s ‘saving will and saving instincts’ he found inspiration for a new German Reich — the stimulus to expose a ‘secret Germany’. The mythologized Nietzsche was presented as a Germanic, Dürerean knight, unswervingly pursuing the Holy Grail of spiritual salvation. Elevated to the status of a mythical prophet, Nietzsche came to symbolize ‘the lightening breakthrough of the self-knowledge of the Volk at the moment of its greatest inner danger’.24 Right. After the National Socialists seized power in 1933, Elisabeth invited him to become a coworker at the Archive. Baeumler declined on account of his un iversity commitments, while promising: ‘I will not cease to serve the great cause of Friedrich Nietzsche with all my powers.’ Letter from Schiller-Archiv , Weimar, 72 BW A. Baeumler to E. Förster-Nietzsche, 22 May 1933: 1933 : Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv 144. 20 Cited in M. Warren, ‘Nietzsche and Political Philosophy’, Political Theory 12(2) (May 1985), 210, n. 7. For more on Nietzsche’s influence on fin-de-siècle politics, see R. Hinton Thomas, Nietzsche in German Politics and Society, 1890–1918 (Manchester 1983). 21 T. Mann, trans. W.D. Morris, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man , ([1918] New York 1983), 57. 22 E. Bertram, Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie [Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology], ([1918] 7th edn Bonn 1929). Mann and Bertram’s close friendship deteriorated around 1927 as Bertram embraced National Socialism while Mann belatedly but steadfastly endorsed the Weimar democracy, a shift precipitated by the assassination of Walter Rathenau in 1922. On the relationship between the two men and their initially similar, but ultimately divergent, appreciation of Nietzsche, see M.A. Ruehl, ‘A Master from Germany: Thomas Mann and the Faustian Charm of Albrecht Dürer’s Ritter, Tod und Teufel ’’, ’’, in R. Görner (ed.), Images and Words. Literary Representations Representations of Pictorial Themes (Munich 2005), 11–65. E. Bertram, Nietzsche , op. cit., 2. 23 Ibid., 79. The identification of the Germanic hero with the knight in Albrecht Dürer’s ‘Ritter, 24 Tod und Teufel’ had been popularized in Willibald Hentschel’s Varuna, das Gesetz des auf



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Baeumler’s Nietzsche: The Philosopher and Politician was conceived as a philosophical response to Bertram’s heroic biography.25 In a letter to Dr. Arthur Hübscher (the then President of the Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft) from 1949, Baeumler made explicit that ‘the immediate psychological preconditions of my [Nietzsche] book lay in a vividly felt disaccord with Ernst Bertram’s lyricization of Nietzsche and in my concern with the Greeks’.26 Baeumler annexed Bertram’s völkisch and ‘Germanified’ characterization of Nietzsche, but sought to delineate the coherent philosophical system behind the legend. Crucially, the violent dynamism of German tragic culture was not to be identii dentified — à la Bertram — with the Dionysian spirit of music, but with heroism, self-overcoming and martial ideals. Bertram’s attempted mythologization of Nietzsche only obscured the realist essence of his philosophy: The book by Ernst Bertram . . . shows us a Nietzsche Nietz sche that does not start out from f rom the Will to Power . . . The fundamentally Greek character of his philosophy is entirely misunderstood, and his malleable concept of justice distorted into a Christian and dialectical non-concept [Unbegriff ]. ].27

Baeumler’s identification of an objective Nietzschean system marked a break not only with Bertram, but also with his own earlier (and rather less adulatory) reflections on Nietzsche. In his 1926 introduction to a selection of Bachofen’s works, for example, he pinpointed the excessive subjectivity in Nietzsche’s account of the birth of tragedy as the root of its ultimate ulti mate incoherence: A simple reflection demonstrates the impossibility of tragedy’s development out of Dionysian enthusiasm. The delight with which the dancer feels himself transformed into the god is the climax of the Dionysian orgy. As a climax, however, this inner process is also an end . It is entirely unclear how an objective structure could arise out of ecstasy, a subjective process in the participant that will always remain subjective. The enthusiastic experience itself lacks not only any moment of form but also any point of departure d eparture for a formative force. The ecstatic-

steigenden und sinkenden Lebens in der Völkergeschichte [Varuna: The Law of Ascending and Descending Life in the History of the Nations], ([1907] Leipzig 4th edn 1924–25). Both Bertram and Mann drew attention to Nietzsche’s love for Dürer’s etching: see Bertram’s chapter ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel’, in Nietzsche , 42–63, and Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Nonpolitical Man , 399. In his Ritter, Tod und Teufel: Der heldische Gedanke [Knight, Death and the Devil: The Heroic Idea] (Munich 1924), Hans Günther — later to become the chief racial theorist of the Third Reich — stressed the völkisch characteristics of the knight: heroism, loyalty, honesty and, crucially, racial purity. References from G.L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (New York 1964), 205–9. 25 Thomas Mann had recommended Nietzsche: Attempt at Mythology as ‘truly charming’ (wahrhaft liebenswert ) to Baeumler Baeumler over over a decade decade before before the publicat publication ion of Nietzsche: The Philosopher and Politician . T. Mann to A. Baeumler, 7 March 1920: cited in M. Baeumler, H. Brunträger and H. Kurzke (eds), Thomas Mann und Alfred Baeumler: Eine Dokumentation [Thomas Mann and Alfred Baeumler: A Documentation] (Würzburg 1989), 92. 26 A. Baeumler to Dr. Arthur Hübscher, 8 November 1949: document obtained by the author from Marianne Baeumler (the original copy lies in the archive of the Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft in Frankfurt). 27 A. Baeumler, Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker , op. cit., 78–9.


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ally enraptured character who has felt the presence of god sinks in the end exhausted to the ground. His experience has a clearly limited trajectory, and nothing points beyond the inner process.28

By the end of the decade, however, doubts concerning the Nietzschean ‘lonely subject’29 had evaporated. Ernst Niekisch, the founder of German National Bolshevism, reported that by 1927 Baeumler was in the process of ‘switching allegiances from Bachofen to Nietzsche’ and that he ‘absolutely considered himself the heroic philosopher’.30 Baeumler’s reinterpretation of Nietzsche synthesized synthesized his philosophical and political ambitions; it flattered his own ‘heroic’ pretensions, and informed and encouraged his growing fascist affinities. It was after all Nietzsche, ‘the philosopher of activism’, who had opposed the Christian proscription of the political sphere. Genuine philosophical work resulted ‘not from the desire to display, not from the acknowledgement of “extramundane” values, but from practice, from the ever repeated deed’.31 Politics, so it seemed, was destiny. Baeumler joined Alfred Rosenberg’s Fighting League for German Culture (Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur) in 1929.32 The following year he heard Hitler speak in Dresden and from then on ‘set’ himself ‘in the service of the movement’.33 Having already met the Führer for an hour-long interview in the Brown House in Munich in early 1931, he received an invitation to lecture to the Saxony SA in May. While taking part in a ‘night exercise’ before the talk, Baeumler and the SA men were attacked by a ‘strong Communist gang’. In his own words, ‘a number of SAMen were wounded: a thrown brick shattered a bone in the middle of my left hand. After that, I sent my recently published Nietzsche book to Hitler with a dedication’.34 Forged in the violence, the identification of Nietzsche and National Socialism, in Baeumler’s mind at least, was complete. Nietzsche: Nietzsche: The Philosopher and Politician was a direct attempt to politicize Nietzsche in the service of the radical Right (the liberal Berliner Tageblatt 28 A. Baeumler, ‘Einleitung: Bachofen, der Mythologe der Romantik’ [Introduction: Bachofen, the Mythologist of Romanticism], in J.J. Bachofen, Der Mythus von Orient und Occident , ed. M. Schröter (Munich 1926), lxxii. Baeumler’s introduction was later reprinted as a single monograph, entitled Das mythische Weltalter (Munich 1965). 29 A. Baeumler, ‘Einleitung’, op. cit., ccxlii. 30 Ernst Niekisch, Gewagtes Leben. Begegnungen und Begebnisse [Harzardous Life. Encounters and Events] (Cologne 1958), 252. 31 A. Baeumler, ‘Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus’ [Nietzsche and National Socialism], in his Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte [Study of German Intellectual History] (Berlin 1937), 283–5. 32 For more on the Kampfbund, see A. Steinweis, Steinweis, ‘Weimar Culture and the Rise Rise of National Socialism: The Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur’, Central European History 24(4) (1991), 402–23; R. Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner [The Amt Rosenberg and its Enemies], (Munich 2nd edn 2006), 27–53; and E. Piper, Alfred Rosenberg: Hitlers Chefideologe [Alfred Rosenberg: Hitler’s Chief Ideologue] (Munich 2005), 259–75. 33 A. Baeumler, ‘Lebenslauf’, 7 October 1934: Philosophisches Philosophisches Archiv der Universität 34 A. Baeumler, ‘Daten im politischen Werdegang des Prof. Baeumlers’ [Dates in the Political Development of Prof. Baeumler], undated, ca. 1934: 1934 : Bundesarchiv , Berlin-Zehlendorf, NS 8/ 136. Konstanz, AB 019–03–01.



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rather appositely reported its appearance under the headline ‘Nietzsche as Fascist’).35 In parallel to this publication, however, Baeumler worked extensively as an editor of Nietzsche’s texts — thereby exerting a more oblique influence on the Nietzsche reception in the 1930s. The exclusive copyright held by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and the Nietzsche Archive on Nietzsche’s writings expired on 31 December 1930, enabling private publishers to produce new and affordable editions. Baeumler was commissioned to write the afterwords to the 1930 Kröner edition of Nietzsche’s main text (which continued to be published after 1945 in an unaltered form) and to edit Reclam’s 1931 fourvolume Nietzsche Ausgabe .36 He seized on both opportunities to advance his interpretation of Nietzsche as the monolithic philosopher of heroic realism. His didactic proclivities did not go unnoticed, however. The Reclam compendium, in particular, incurred the ire of the influential Nietzsche scholar, literary critic and Bavarian schoolmaster Josef Hofmiller.37 In a vitriolic article in his journal, the Süddeutsche Monatshefte, Hofmiller decried the fact that Baeumler’s Nietzsche: The Philosopher and Politician (included in the fourth volume) and Karl Hecker’s biography of Nietzsche (included in volume one) together took up 435 pages, whilst the works of Nietzsche’s middle period — most notably Human, All-too-Human , Daybreak and The Gay Science — had been largely effaced. Speculating that a ‘poorer construction [of Nietzsche’s work] was unthinkable’, he inveighed against the editor’s attempt to create a ‘rigid and systematic Nietzsche’38 — ‘for this system is not the system of Nietzsche, but the system of Baeumler’.39 Baeumler retorted that an ‘understanding for Nietzsche the systematizer’ could no longer be ‘shrugged off with a few remarks’. The mark of a philosopher was producing a system, and Nietzsche ‘had left behind a closed system, no smaller or less significant than that of Leibniz’. Nietzsche’s literary talents, according to Baeumler, paled into insignificance compared to this philosophical achievement: Once Nietzsche the philosopher has become visible, Nietzsche the writer [ Schriftsteller], the ‘free-spirit’, aphorist and moralist, necessarily recedes into the background. 40 35 See A. Baeumler, ‘Auszüge aus “Mein Weg als Schriftsteller”, 1957’ [Excerpts from “My Path as a Writer”, 1957], in M. Baeumler et al., Thomas Mann und Alfred Baeumler , op. cit., 250. 36 Nietzsche Werke. Auswahl in vier Bänden [Selected Works of Nietzsche in Four Volumes] (Leipzig 1931). 37 The following account of the dispute between Hofmiller and Baeumler draws extensively on Nietzsche-Archivs: Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Fritz Koegel, D.M. Hoffmann, Zur Geschichte des Nietzsche-Archivs: Rudolf Steiner, Gustav Naumann, Josef Hofmiller: Chronik, Studien und Dokumente [On the History of the Nietzsche Archive: Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Fritz Koegel, Rudolf Steiner, Gustav Naumann, Josef Hofmiller: Chronicle, Studies, Documents] (Berlin 1991), 106f. 38 J. Hofmiller, ‘Neuerscheinungen’ [New Publications], Süddeutsche Monatshefte, May 1931, 608. 39 J. Hofmiller, ‘Nietzsche bei Reclam’ [Nietzsche by Reclam], Süddeutsche Monatshefte, July 1931, 759. 40 A. Baeumler, ‘Nietzsche — Schriftsteller oder Philosoph’ [Nietzsche: Writer or Philosopher], Süddeutsche Süddeutsche Monatshefte, June 1931, 686.


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There can be no doubt, however, that Baeumler deliberately omitted key writings from Nietzsche’s ‘free spirit’ phase in order to conceal the ambiguities and perspectivism that lurked therein. The Nietzschean system that he proclaimed in Nietzsche: The Philosopher and Politician was instead drawn from The Will to Power , the posthumous collection of Nietzsche’s fragments from the years 1883–88 compiled under the auspices of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Förster-Nietzsche. For Baeumler, Nietzsche’s published works displayed ‘many different faces’, making it ‘difficult, though not impossible, to see the unity of the life’s work’.41 Only the Nachlass, Nietzsche’s ‘philosophical magnum opus’, systematically revealed the unity of his creative output and the ‘fundamental results of his thought’.42 First published in 1901, The Will to Power was expanded from 483 to 1067 aphorisms in the second edition of 1906. Guided by a right-wing, nationalist agenda, Elisabeth had sought to create an orderly Nietzschean masterpiece. In practice, a fraction of notes was selected, often revised, and forced into a framework that had long since been abandoned by Nietzsche. The Will to Power presented a doctrinal, indurate Nietzsche, whose theories of the Übermensch, the will to power and eternal recurrence took on an ontological significance that overshadowed the intricacies, nuances and ambivalences of his early-published works. That said, The Will to Power cannot be dismissed as sheer apocrypha. Towards the end of his life, Nietzsche became aware of an increasing divergence between his thought and the medium of publication: ‘my philosophy, if that is what I am entitled to call what torments me down to the roots of my nature, is no longer communicable, at least not in print’. Transposing ideas into notes, which Nietzsche did assiduously, seemed at least ‘less impossible’.43 Baeumler was certainly not alone in championing The The Will Will to Power as the decisive Nietzschean text. Heidegger, too, insisted that what Nietzsche published during his lifetime was ‘always a foreground’ and that ‘his philosophy proper was left behind as posthumous, unpublished work’.44 From the reams of the Nachlass, Baeumler teased out a concise but wideranging political philosophy. The political perspective, he argued, provided a crucial Archimedean point and ‘the key to understanding all of Nietzsche’s concrete demands and goals’.45 Baeumler interpreted the thesis of the will to power in the most literal and militaristic terms as a doctrinal truth, founded on a Heraclitean metaphysics of agonistic becoming. It formed the centre of Nietzsche’s system of thought, the ‘productive middle point that conditions and supports the particulars’.46 In order to establish the will to power as the A. Baeumler, Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker , op. cit., 7. Baeumler’s introductory lines to his ‘Nachwort’ to F. Nietzsche, Der Wille Zur Macht: Versuch einer Umwertung aller Werte [The Will to Power: Attempt at a Revaluation of all Values] (Leipzig 1930), 609. 43 F. Nietzsche to Franz Overbeck, 2 July 1885: cited in F. Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebook (Cambridge 2003), x. 44 M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, I, 9. 45 A. Baeumler, Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker , op. cit., 88. 46 A. Baeumler, ‘Nachwort’ to F. Nietzsche, Der Wille Zur Macht , op. cit., 699. 41 42



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vital core of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Baeumler ousted the theory of eternal recurrence and downplayed the significance of the Dionysian. The former, in particular, appeared to abolish the possibility of action altogether by chaining the will to a predetermined past and future. It constituted an ‘erratic boulder’47 to Baeumler’s system — one easier to roll aside than to accommodate: ‘in terms of Nietzsche’s system, this thought [of the eternal recurrence of the same] is of no consequence. It has no connection to the thought of the will to power and indeed, when thought through to its ends, it bursts asunder the coherence of the philosophy of the will to power’.48 Baeumler preferred to call ‘the image of the world that Nietzsche envisioned Heraclitean rather than Dionysian. Heraclitus from Ephesus — from whom originated the words: “war is the father of all things” — was the thinker whom Nietzsche regarded as his essential next-of-kin [Urverwandter] and whom he most admired throughout his life’. The endlessly evolving world was one of ‘becoming’, of ‘struggle and conquest’.49 Peace and stability were necessarily ephemeral. All human greatness and achievement stemmed from a primordial state of conflict. To perceive the world and human beings in this way was ‘to see them as they are: unexhausted and inexhaustible, creating and bringing forth out of the depths of the unknown, producing figures that come out of the mixing jug of existence according to a law of eternal justice, figures that fight one another, maintain themselves in the struggle or go under. If one wants a formula for this world-view, one may call it heroic realism’.50 From this most basic struggle there arose an ‘eternal justice’, a natural hierarchy of power. Enmity, culminating in war, was not merely an unfortunate contingency of life but its very essence. No overarching, rational telos governed human existence; only the dynamics of struggle, conquest, self-enhancement and annihilation. For Baeumler, Nietzsche’s deconstruction of transcendental values rendered traditional models of political and ethical organization obsolete. He was the great political theorist of the post-liberal era: ‘in the place of bourgeois moral philosophy, Nietzsche puts the philosophy of the will to power, i.e. the philosophy of politics’.51 The spiritual decline of the West, according to Baeumler, stemmed from mistaken assumptions about the nature of man — errors arising from the Enlightenment tradition and ultimately traceable to Christian morality. Nietzsche had shattered these illusions in the most uncompromising fashion. Democracy, liberalism, humanism and pacifism were superficial perversions of a natural order of rank (Rangordnung ) produced through struggle. Critically, Baeumler urged, the Nietzschean agon was to be interpreted as a conflict between groups, races and peoples. As an explicit 47 K. Löwith’s Appendix to his Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence of the Same (Berkeley 1997), 210–14. The Appendix was proscribed during the Third Reich, the critique of Baeumler therein being deemed ‘intolerable’ and ‘unwelcome’. See Ibid., 257, n. 21. 48 A. Baeumler, Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker , op. cit., 80. 49 Ibid., 80, 15. 50 Ibid., 15. 51 A. Baeumler, ‘Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus’, op. cit., 292.


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attempt to overcome the fetters of individualism, Nietzsche’s ‘great politics’ was driven by the feeling of power ‘which, from time to time, burst forth out of unvanquishable sources not only in the soul of the individual but also in the lower classes [niedere Schichten ] of the Volk’.52 Baeumler, along with other National Socialist theorists such as Ernst Horneffer and Kurt Hildebrandt, thus transformed Nietzschean philosophy into a collective politics, anchored on the struggle for dominance between opposing cultural world-views.53 The concept of agonistic politics, from which the victors emerged strengthened and revitalized, was central to the self-perception of the National Socialists. The primordial struggle for existence permitted no space for dialogue, compromise, diplomacy, or negotiation in the sphere of politics. As Goebbels pronounced in one of his election speeches: He who throws the dice for a prize also has to dare d are a wager, hence we have made Nietzsche’s words come true: ‘Have the courage to live dangerously.’ Obviously major projects cannot be carried out as long as dozens of parties get under one’s feet. These parties don’t make history, they only make a fuss. Today one man speaks for the Reich, and his voice echoes the voices of 66 million people. 54

Led by the Führer and inspired by Nietzsche, the challenge facing the Germans could not be clearer. ‘World-historically, Germany can only exist in the form of greatness. It has only this one choice: either to be the anti-Roman power of Europe, or to be nothing’.55 The unique characteristics of the Germanic Volk bestowed upon it a historical mission. ‘The old task of our race reappeared before Nietzsche’s eyes: the task to be leaders of Europe’.56 52 A. Baeumler, Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker , op. cit., 171–2. Baeumler alludes here, without acknowledgement, to Nietzsche’s reflections ‘On Great Politics’, in Daybreak, Bk. III, § 189. Nietzsche’s comments on the ‘lower classes’ are less than flattering in their original contex t, which continues: ‘There comes again and again the hour when the masses are ready to stake their life, their goods, their conscience, their virtue so as to acquire that higher enjoyment and as a victorious, capriciously tyrannical nation to rule over other nations (or to think it rules). Then the impulse to squander, sacrifice, hope, trust, to be over-daring and to fantasize springs up in such abundance that the ambitious or prudently calculating prince can let loose a war and cloak his crimes in the good conscience of the people.’ 53 Cf. K. Hildebrandt, ‘Die Idee des Krieges bei Goethe, Hölderlin, Nietzsche’ [The Idea of War in Goethe, Hölderlin, Nietzsche], in A. Faust (ed.), Das Bild des Krieges im deutschen Denken [The Image of War in German Thought], vol. 1 (Stuttgart and Berlin 1941), 406–7; E. Horneffer, Nietzsche als Vorbote der Gegenwart [Nietzsche as Herald of the Present] (Düsseldorf 1934). 54 J. Goebbels, cited in K. Löwith, trans. E. King, My Life in Germany Before and After 1933: A Report (London 1994), 148. 55 A. Baeumler, Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker , op. cit., 183. The Nietzsche-inspired dichotomy between ‘German’ and ‘Roman’ existence, previously popularized by Bertram and Stefan George, became a leitmotif of nazi philosophy. Roman culture, in contrast to GrecoGerman primordial authenticity, was derided in the Third Reich as ‘rootless’ (Heidegger), ‘superficial’ (Baeumler), ‘barbarian’ (Richard Oehler), Christian (Heinrich Härtle) and marred by miscegenation (Kurt Hildebrandt, who talked of the Roman ‘Negrification of the Volk’). For a survey of this rhetorical Kulturkampf , see C. Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, op. cit., 309–17. 56 A. Baeumler, Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker , op. cit., 182.



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This conclusion had little to do with Nietzsche, and everything to do with Baeumler’s own political prejudices. His reading of Nietzsche nevertheless resonated with the times. Baeumler was not alone among German philosophers in the early 1930s to invoke Nietzsche as a counterforce to the fetters of Western ‘civilization’. Of particular note in this respect — not least because of his status as the rising star of German philosophy — was Martin Heidegger. Though obscured by his later attempts at ‘self-choreography and autoexegetical purgation’,57 Heidegger’s initial support for the ‘German Revolution’ was also framed in explicitly Nietzschean terms. His postwar assertions that the Nietzsche lectures, delivered from 1936 to 1941 (though not published until 1961 and then in a significantly revised form), were an integral part of a political/philosophical re-evaluation and constituted a confrontation (Auseinandersetzung ) with National Socialism, tell only half the story.58 It was not until around 1940 that Heidegger came to comprehend both Nietzsche’s philosophy and Hitler’s politics (in contrast to his own ‘private National Socialism’) as paradigmatic expressions of Western nihilism. In the preceding decade, a political reading of Nietzsche and a Nietzschean grasp of politics had provided Heidegger with a philosophical explanation and vindication of nazism. Having become acquainted in the late 1920s, Baeumler and Heidegger were on good terms at the time of the National Socialist seizure of power. Heidegger had been impressed by Baeumler’s Bachofen introduction, which he recommended to his friend Elisabeth Blochmann.59 For his part, Baeumler considered Heidegger ‘the most important German philosopher since Dilthey’ and opined that Being and Time had ushered in a ‘new chapter of German philosophical thought’.60 Shared esteem seems to have formed the basis of a genuine, if shortlived friendship. In a letter to Walter Eberhardt from 1928, Baeumler expressed surprise that ‘Heidegger has spontaneously written to me requesting my curriculum vitae — he wants to bring me on board by proposing me as his successor [at Marburg].’61 Nothing was to come of this, though Baeumler invited Heidegger to lecture in Dresden in 1928 and again in 1932. Philosophical discussions were conducted while hiking in the Böhmerwald near Dresden and the Black Forest around Heidegger’s Todtnauberg cabin. We can only speculate about what the two men discussed during these get-togethers, but — given their interests at the time — Nietzsche would have been a likely topic of conversation. That they concurred on Nietzsche’s 57 C. Bambach, Heidegger’s Heidegger’s Roots, op. cit., 323. 58 Cf. Heidegger’s interview with Der Spiegel in 1966: ‘In 1936, I began the Nietzsche lectures. Anyone with ears to hear heard in these lectures a confrontation with National Socialism.’ M. Heidegger, trans. M.P. Alter and J.D. Caputo, ‘Only a God Can Save Us Now’, in M. Stassen (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Philosophical and Political Writings (New York 2003), 33. 59 See J. Storck (ed.), Martin Heidegger–Elisabeth Blockmann Briefwechsel, 1918–1969 (Marburg 1990), 50. 60 A. Baeumler, ‘Gutachten über Martin Heidegger’ [Advisory Opinion of Martin Heidegger], 22 September 1933: Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Munich, ED—318, Mappe 19. 61 A. Baeumler to W. Eberhardt, 17 May 1928: 19 28: cited in M. Baeumler et al., Thomas Mann und Alfred Baeumler, op. cit., 242–3, n. 9.


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contemporary relevance can be established independently in any case. For both, Nietzsche had not only exposed the nihilistic, hollow and degenerate structures of modern society, but also brought forth an alternative model in his rediscovery of the Ancient Greeks. Nietzsche’s celebration of the heroic, prerational and agonistic aspects of Greek life dovetailed smoothly with Heidegger’s narrative of philosophy as aletheia,62 his reformulation of truth as a violent confrontation with Being and his fascination with the Greek beginning. ‘The beginning is the strongest and mightiest. What comes afterward is not development but the levelling that results from spreading out; it is inability to retain the beginning; the beginning is emasculated and exaggerated’.63 Nowhere was this process of levelling out more visible, for Heidegger, than in Weimar Germany: politically and militarily impotent, socially retarded by the inauthentic structures of das Man and culturally threatened by ‘Jewish contamination’.64 Like Baeumler, Heidegger embraced the National Socialist seizure of power as a historical caesura and a ‘revolutionary awakening’ (Aufbruch) — a chance to recover and harness the potency of the Greek beginning in the service of a new German future. His rectorial address, ‘The Self-Assertion of the German University’,65 though containing only one explicit reference to Nietzsche, was saturated with Nietzschean terminology: strength, danger, struggle, will, overcoming, self-assertion and destiny. These goals, explicitly summarized by Baeumler as ‘heroic realism’, were the leitmotifs of Heidegger’s interpretation of the ‘German revolution’ and set the tone of his political enthusiasm for the following years. Commencing his Nietzsche course in the winter semester of 1936–37, Heidegger continued to view the political situation as a reflex and response to Nietzsche’s thought: ‘Europe still wants to cling to “democracy” and does not want to see that this would constitute its historical death. For democracy is, as Nietzsche clearly saw, only a degenerate form of nihilism . . . The phrase “God is dead” is not an atheistic proclamation but a formula for the fundamental experience of an event in the history of the West. I deliberately appropriated this phrase in my rectorial address of 1933’.66 Baeumler shared Heidegger’s conviction that Nietzsche’s return to the ancient Greeks and the concept of the agon represented ‘a turning back towards real possibilities in our own [German] nature’.67 For Heidegger, the identification of the Germans as Urvolk (‘archaic people’) — a characteristic 62 Traditionally translated as ‘truth’, for Heidegger aletheia had the more primordial meaning of ‘unconcealment’ (Unverborgenheit ). ). 63 M. Heidegger, trans. R. Manheim, An Introduction to Metaphysics (Yale University Press 1987), 62. 64 M. Heidegger to V. Schwoerer, 2 October 1929: cited in M. Stassen (ed.), Martin Heidegger: Philosophical Philosophical and Political Writings , op. cit., 1. 65 M. Heidegger, ‘The-Self Assertion of the German University’, reprinted in ibid., 2–11. 66 M Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 43, Nietzsche: Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst (Frankfurt am Main 1985), 193. 67 A. Baeumler, ‘Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus’, 250.



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shared only by the ancient-Greeks — was rooted in language affinities. For Baeumler, it was ‘the common veneration of manly, youthful enthusiasm that has led [the Germans] back to the Greeks through Winckelmann and Nietzsche’.68 Either way, the existence of a Greco-German kinship circumscribed a model for the ‘new man’, an übermenschlich countertype to the modern, bourgeois individual. While the synthesis of Nietzschean thought with National Socialist politics seemed to be proceeding smoothly, significant obstacles continued to impede the attempted Gleichschaltung . Nietzsche’s comments on heroism in the godless age, the will to power, and an ethical stance beyond good and evil could easily be given a fascist slant. His overwhelmingly critical attitude towards nationalism in general, and German nationalism in particular, was harder to reconcile with the nazi world-view. Convinced that Nietzsche’s ‘protesting spirit’ made him a quintessentially German figure, Baeumler would often cite nazi commentaries on Nordic sagas and add in passing: ‘these words could have been spoken by Nietzsche’, or, ‘this sounds as though it came from the Genealogy of Morals ’.69 Despite such spurious exegesis, Nietzsche’s antiGerman remarks were not totally incompatible with the National Socialist Weltanschauung . Baeumler insisted that Nietzsche’s anger was directed not against the German nation as such, but specifically against Bismarck’s Reich. Nietzsche’s concept of grosse Politik was a radical protest against the parliamentarianism, cultural atomism and kulturprotestantisch ethos of Bismarck’s kleindeutsch empire, and contained the promise of a new age of transEuropean politics to replace the marasmus femininus (feminine withering) of the German spirit.70 In retrospect, his hostility to the culture of the Second Reich aligned him even closer to the spirit of the Third. Nietzsche, that is, had become understandable only through and from within the National Socialist movement. Baeumler’s reading of Nietzsche also underpinned his support for National Socialist race theory. In the godless, post-humanist age announced by Nietzsche, only the ‘historical realities’ of ‘blood’, Volk and the nation retained a binding force on the individual.71 The fiction of a generalized humanity had given way to the essential truth of the race-struggle. Baeumler drew the predictable antisemitic conclusions from this proposition. ‘The Jew’, he argued, lacked ‘formative powers’ and had become productive in German intellectual history ‘only as a parasite’.72 Speaking to fellow nazi philosophers at a confer68 A. Baeumler, Männerbund und Wissenschaft (Berlin 1934), 147. 69 A. Baeumler, Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker , 94, 95. 70 F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power , § 125. 71 A. Baeumler, Alfred Rosenberg und der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts [Alfred Rosenberg and the Myth of the Twentieth Twentieth Century] Century] (Munich (Munich 1943), 70. 72 Ibid., 47; A. Baeumler, ‘Karl Marx: Der Jude in der d er deutschen Geistesgeschichte’ [Karl Marx: The Jew in German Intellectual History], in Weltkampf: Die Judenfrage in Geschichte und Gegenwart [World Struggle: The Jewish Question in History and the Present] 2 (May–August 1944), 68.


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ence in March 1939, he bemoaned the ‘decline in values from the Aryan to the Jew’. Nietzsche was presented as a saviour in the ‘struggle of life and death against the Jews’, for it was he who had first fi rst ‘uncovered the ressentiment of the Jews, which stems from the glorification of suffering’.73 Baeumler’s invocation of an all-or-nothing struggle against the Jews echoed Hitler’s infamous ‘prophecy’ of the ‘annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe’, made in a speech to the Reichstag only six weeks earlier.74 A conference minute recorded under his name, name, ‘the evaluat evaluation ion of the challenge challenge of the the Führer Führer to Jews’ Jews’ [die Würdigung der Kampfansage des Führers gegen Juden], suggests that the allusion was intended.75 How these racist imperatives were to be reconciled with Nietzsche’s own criticism of German antisemites was a thorny issue.76 The attempts of nazi theorists to deal with Nietzsche’s praise of the Jews tended more towards the absurd than the ingenious. Baeumler suggested that Nietzsche’s apparent ‘antianti-Semitism’, like his regard for the French, was a foil — intended to emphasize his animosity towards Bismarck’s Germany and to implore future generations of Germans to fulfil their world-historical potential.77 Richard Oehler’s interpretation that Nietzsche’s pro-Jewish comments were an ironic device to attract attention from a German audience displayed a similar indifference towards the plausible.78 In spite of the obvious lacunae, omissions and contradictions, however, Nietzsche was championed in the Third Reich as a powerful pioneer of race culture by the likes of Hans Günther, Heinrich Römer and the legal theorist Kurt Kassler. Nietzsche’s frequent discussions of breeding, his critique of humanism, and his demand that a biological ethic replace a theological/moral one were frequently portrayed as justifications of institutional racism. As Baeumler summarized: Here we encounter the basic contradiction: whether one proceeds from a natural life context or from an equality of individual souls before God. Ultimately the idea of democratic equality rests upon the latter assumption. The former contains the foundation of a new policy. It

73

Transcripts from the ‘German Philosophy Conference’ at Schloß Buderose, March 1939: Berlin-Zehlendorf, ndorf, NS 15/ 312, 59735f. 59735f. Bundesarchiv , Berlin-Zehle 74 See ‘Hitler’s Reichstag Speech’, 30 January 1939, cited in N.H. Baynes (ed.), The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, April 1922–August 1939 (New York 1969), vol. 1, 736–41. 75 Transcripts from the ‘German Philosophy Conference’ at Schloß Buderose, March 1939: Berlin-Zehlendorf, ndorf, NS 15/ 312, 59735f. 59735f. Bundesarchiv , Berlin-Zehle 76 Though Nietzsche should not be whitewashed as a ‘philo-Semite’, his writings after 1876 frequently denounced antisemites and detailed the multifarious contributions of the Jewish people to European culture. For more on this issue, see A.E. Eisen, ‘Nietzsche and the Jews Reconsidered’, Jewish Social Studies 48(1) (Winter 1986); M.F. Duffy and W. Mittlemen, ‘Nietzsche’s Attitude toward the Jews’, Journal of the History of Ideas 49(2) (April–June 1988); M. Brinker, ‘Nietzsche and the Jews’, in J. Golomb and R.S. Wistrich (eds), Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? ; J. Golomb (ed.), Nietzsche and Jewish Culture (London 1997). 77 A. Baeumler, Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker , 158. 78 R. Oehler, Friedrich Nietzsche und die deutsche Zukunft [Friedrich Nietzsche and the German Future] (Leipzig 1935), 87f.



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takes unexcelled boldness to base a state upon race. A new order of things is the natural consequence. It is this order which Nietzsche undertook to establish in opposition to the existing one.79

The National Socialists plainly concurred with Nietzsche that the breeding of a new man simultaneously entailed the ‘remorseless extermination [schonungslose Vernichtung ] of all degenerate and parasitic elements’.80 And though Nietzsche’s biologism was not predicated upon race, his imperative to ‘raise apes into men’ did, according to Römer, push open ‘a row of mighty doors that led to a racial view of life’.81 While Baeumler’s ideas shaped much of the initial i nitial discourse on Nietzsche in nazi Germany, his interpretation did not exert a homogenizing influence; even within the constraints of the Third Reich there was room for more than one Nietzsche. Despite suggestions to the contrary by certain nazis and some contemporary scholars, there was no generally accepted, monochromatic, ‘nazified’ Nietzsche to serve as the ideological precursor to Hitler. This ambiguity was touched upon in Heinrich Härtle’s popular handbook Nietzsche and National Socialism , published in 1937 and reprinted in 1939, 1942 and 1944. Härtle defined his text as ‘an attempt to make Nietzsche’s ideas fruitful to the National Socialist worldview’, explaining, ‘I do not count myself among the esoteric Nietzscheans; Nietzscheans; I merely want to present Nietzsche as a great ally in the present spiritual warfare’.82 He thus extolled the productive ideas in Nietzsche’s philosophy, most notably his critique of the Second Reich, democracy and Marxism, and his veneration of war and the breeding of a superrace. Displaying a palpable intellectual debt to Baeumler, under whose leadership he worked in the Amt Rosenberg , Härtle depicted Nietzsche as a heroic, Nordic pagan, who had opposed the cultural heritage of romanitas in all its forms — especially Christianity and Renaissance humanism.83 Yet Härtle also drew attention to some flaws fl aws in Nietzsche’s thought — the individualism, the elitism, the hostility towards the state and the misguided hope for a cosmopolitan Europe. Unlike Baeumler, Härtle suggested that a synthesis of Nietzsche’s ideas and National Socialist race theory was impossible. Though Nietzsche had demonstrated ‘the error and dangers of a doctrine teaching the equality of all that bears a human face’ — the impossibility, that is, of a universalist ethics — his understanding of the Volk remained purely ‘historical’ and ‘intuitive’:

79 A. Baeumler, ‘Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus’, 288–94. 80 F. Nietzsche, trans R.J. Hollingdale, Ecce Homo (London 1992), ‘Birth of Tragedy’, § 4. 81 F. Nietzsche, Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe , vol. 2 (Munich 1967), 406, ‘Nachlass Fragment’, Frühjahr–Herbst 1881; H. Römer, ‘Nietzsche und das Rassenproblem’ [Nietzsche and the Problem of Race], Rasse: Monatsschrift für den Nordischen Gedanken, 7 (1940), 59. 82 H. Härtle, Nietzsche und der Nationalsozialismus [Nietzsche and National Socialism] (Munich 1937), 7. 83 Ibid., 99–102.


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Nietzsche once attempted to explain the development of a Volk in this way: ‘When people have lived for a long time together under similar conditions (of climate, soil, danger, needs, and work), then something arises in which there is a certain “agreement”, a Volk.’ Something is lacking here, which for us is central: race.84

For Härtle, therefore, a good deal of sifting was required before Nietzsche could be made serviceable for National Socialism, and the movement ultimately had to part company with the philosopher on the way towards a more rigorous ‘scientific and biological’ conception of race.85 Despite the less sanguine reading, Härtle — like Baeumler — was prepared to explain Nietzsche’s deficiencies away as elements of the Zeitgeist of the late nineteenth century. Not all National Socialist philosophers were so charitable. Nietzsche’s detractors in the Third Reich were both numerous and audible. Ernst Krieck, an influential nazi ideologue who became the Professor of Pedagogy at Heidelberg in 1934 after briefly serving as the rector of the University of Frankfurt, inveighed passionately against the Nietzsche renaissance. Krieck viewed Nietzsche as a proponent of rampant individualism, utterly at odds with the völkisch spirit of National Socialism. Nietzsche’s philosophy, he insisted, ‘is no National Socialist ideology — and does not point the way to the future for the German people’. ‘All in all,’ he laconically surmised, ‘Nietzsche was an opponent of socialism, an opponent of nationalism, and an opponent of racial thinking. Apart from these three bents of mind, he might have made an outstanding nazi’.86 The intellectual historian Christoph Steding came to a similar conclusion in his 1938 The Reich and the Disease of European Culture , a mammoth text compiled in the 1920s following research (funded by a Rockefeller Foundation grant) conducted in several ‘Nordic’ countries and republished four times between 1940 and 1945. This was a work of history, in in its author’s own words, ‘which feels a Reich behind it and is obsessed by the task of the Reich’.87 Nietzsche, ‘the eternal spa guest [ewige Kurgast ]’, ]’, was endlessly derided for turning his back on Germany. His animosity to the Second Reich, Steding insisted, was a disgraceful manifestation of his anti-statism, philo-Semitism and petty intellectual concerns, and provided definitive proof of his ideological distance from Hitler’s Germany. Anti-Nietzschean criticism also came from nazi Wagnerians, who never forgave Nietzsche for the acrimonious split with the Meister. One such asperser was Curt von Westernhagen, who proclaimed in his vitriolic 1936 Nietzsche, Jews, Anti-Jews [Nietzsche, Juden, Antijuden ]: ‘in the armed encounter [Waffengang ] between the Jewish and the German essence, Nietzsche stood in the ranks of the Jews, out of inclination and calculation, with his heart and his 84 85 86

Ibid., 82. Ibid. E. Krieck, ‘Die Ahnen des Nationalsozialismus’ [The Ancestors of National Socialism], Volk im Werden 3 (1935), 184. 87 C. Steding, Das Reich und die Krankheit der europäischen Kultur [The Reich and the Disease of European Culture] (Hamburg 1938), 207.



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head’.88 Arthur Drews — a philosophy professor in Karlsruhe — was outraged ‘that Nietzsche is now elevated to the role of philosopher of National Socialism, considering that he preaches . . . in virtually all things the opposite of National Socialism’. Like von Westernhagen, he argued that Nietzsche’s vision of the ‘good European’ granted the Jews ‘a key role in the fusion of all nations’ and castigated Nietzsche’s individualism as diametrically opposed to ‘the National Socialist principle that puts the common good before personal advantage’. Anticipating postwar Anglo-American criticisms, Drews concluded that pro-Nietzschean nazis were ‘only picking the “raisins” out of the cake of his “philosophy” and . . . [had] no clear idea at all about the context of his thoughts’.89 In time, it was Heidegger who would become Baeumler’s most prominent critic. The relationship between Heidegger and Baeumler had deteriorated through the course of 1933 for both philosophical and personal reasons.90 By the late 1930s, and despite Heidegger’s continued support for National Socialist domestic and foreign foreign policy, the metaphysical metaphysical pathos had evaporated. evaporated. The concrete realities of nazism had not lived up to his philosophical expectations. Heidegger’s changing valuation of the political situation moved in tandem with a comprehensive re-evaluation of Nietzsche. The thinker who had previously come ‘closer to the essence of the Greeks than any metaphysical thinker before him’ was soon to be criticized as seeing ‘the Greek “world” exclusively in a Roman way, i.e., in i n a way at once modern and un-Greek’.91

88 C.von Westernhagen, Nietzsche, Juden, Antijuden [Nietzsche, Jews, Anti-Jews] (Weimar 1936), 73, cited in S. Corngold Co rngold and G.G. Waite, ‘Nietzsche with Hölderlin’, in J. Golomb and R.S. Wistrich (eds), Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? op. cit., 202. Since Wagner’s nationalist and antisemitic credentials were unquestionable, pro-Nietzschean nazis were always obliged to downplay the bitter conflict of ideas between the ‘ seeming antagonists Nietzsche and Wagner’. A. Rosenberg, Gestaltung der Idee [Formation of the Idea] (Munich 1938), 18, my italics. 89 A. Drews, ‘Nietzsche als Philosoph des Nationalsozialismus?’ [Nietzsche as the Philosopher of National Socialism?], Nordische Stimmen 4 (1934), 172–9, cited in Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, ‘Experiences with Nietzsche’, in J. Golomb and R.S. Wistrich (eds), Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism? op. cit., 70. 90 Baeumler wrote the following lines in his copy of Being and Time : ‘the One is omnipresent, but in such a way that when Existence presses for a decision, it has always slunk away [ Das Man

ist überall dabei, doch so, daß es sich auch schon immer davongeschlichen hat, wo das Dasein auf ]’. The words ‘Heidegger’s relationship to me — 1933’, were appended in the Entscheidung Entscheidung drängt ]’. margin. See M. Baeumler, ‘Erinnerung an die Beziehung Alfred Baeumlers zu Martin Heidegger und Wolfgang Schadewaldt’ [Recollection on Alfred Baeumler’s Relationship t o Martin Heidegger and Wolfgang Schadewaldt], 5 April 1983: Institut für Zeitgeschichte, ED–318, Mappe 28. Baeumler’s rather oblique judgment may be read as suggesting that Heidegger, like the inauthentic das Man he critiqued in Being and Time , lacked the capacity for resolute decision — à propos their friendship at least. Using Wolfgang Schadewaldt as a mediator, Heidegger made a renewed attempt to correspond with Baeumler in 1951. Baeumler spurned the advance, claiming he was not in agreement with the development of Heidegger’s philosophy. See M. Baeumler et al., Thomas Mann und Alfred Baeumler , op. cit., 242–3, n. 9. 91 M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, III, 113; M. Heidegger, trans. A. Schuwer and R. Rojcewicz, Parmenides (Bloomington, IN, 1992), 43.


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As the Nietzsche lectures progressed, Heidegger came to view Nietzsche as a thinker who had almost (but only almost) succeeded in overcoming the new age. He now aimed to show that Nietzsche’s philosophy was the final and most extreme form of the tradition of subject-centred and value-positing metaphysics initiated by Plato. Despite all his overturnings and revaluings of metaphysics, Nietzsche remains in the unbroken line of the metaphysical tradition when he calls that which is established and made fast in the will to power for its own preservation purely and simply Being, or what is in being, or truth. Accordingly, truth is a condition posited in the essence of the will to power, namely, the condition of the preservation of power. Truth is, as this condition, a value. 92

Nietzsche’s ‘overturning’ (Umkehrung ) of metaphysics implied for Heidegger an upsetting or turning upside down, but not an overcoming or conquest (Überwindung ). ). Ultimately, indeed, his philosophy represented not the sublimation, but the ‘ultimate entanglement in nihilism’ and therefore ‘the fulfilment of nihilism proper’.93 In 1933, Baeumler and Heidegger had embraced National Socialism as a long-awaited counter-movement to the epoch of nihilism diagnosed by Nietzsche. Yet their understanding of both his philosophy and its relationship to Hitler’s politics quickly diverged. For Baeumler, National Socialism was the political reflex of Nietzsche’s re-evaluation and overcoming of transcendentalism in terms of base urges, ultimately reducible to ‘race’ and ‘blood’. Heidegger demurred from such biologism, seeing it as another manifestation of technoscientific nihilism. Baeumler’s preoccupation with the superficial details of power and race, according to Heidegger, only scratched the surface of Nietzsche’s philosophy. By construing Nietzsche as the philosopher of ‘heroic realism’, Baeumler simply perpetuated the metaphysical tradition that Nietzsche had, at least partially, deconstructed. Baeumler’s interpretation was not even convincing as philosophy: his dogmatic adoption and political adaptation of the will to power forced him to reject the doctrine of eternal recurrence — ‘Nietzsche’s ‘Nietzsche’s most difficult thought, the peak of his meditation’.94 For Heidegger, the essential kernel and the limit of Nietzsche’s thought lay in the conjunction of the will to power and eternal recurrence. Baeumler’s Baeumler’s reflections on the relationship between the two doctrines totally missed this subtlety: ‘the doctrine of eternal recurrence, where [Baeumler] fears “Egyptianism”, militates against his conception of will to power, which in spite of the talk about metaphysics, Baeumler does not grasp metaphysically but interprets politically’.95 It is tempting to draw the wrong conclusions from these multifarious protests. Put differently, acknowledging the existence of a plethora of detracM. Heidegger, trans. W. Lovitt, ‘The Word of Nietzsche: “God is Dead’’’, in The Question Concerning Technology Technology and Other Essays (New York 1977), 84. 93 M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, IV, 203. 94 M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, I, 22–3. 95 Ibid. 92



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tors should not lead us to downplay Nietzsche’s significance for National Socialist ideology. It is unquestionable that Nietzsche was and remained a potent reference point for philosophers in the Third Reich. Indeed, the intense polemics of Nietzsche’s critics are only intelligible vis-à-vis the success of the pro-Nietzschean pro-Nietzschean nazis, and most prominently Baeumler. Heinrich Hoffmann’s photo of Hitler contemplating the bust of Nietzsche in the Weimar Archive seemed to place an official stamp of legitimacy on Nietzsche’s nazi transformation.96 The empty space between the two subjects, the askance stares, the placement of the bust in the shadow and only half in view may imply that Hoffmann’s photography was meant ‘primarily as a picture of Hitler subjecting Nietzsche’s bust to his glance, and not of the bust itself or of Hitler’s intellectual debt to the philosopher’.97 Even if true, however, this detracts only marginally from the fact that Nietzsche was the only great philosopher ‘privileged’ to share a double-portrait with the Führer. Nietzsche remained a conspicuous figure in the Third Reich into the late 1930s and early 1940s. Though Baeumler’s political influence was becoming increasingly circumscribed, he continued to diffuse his Nietzsche interpretation in the National Socialist press and the lecture halls of the University of Berlin.98 As the war escalated, Nietzsche’s philosophy took on a world-historical role that eclipsed its former, and somewhat provincial, völkisch function. The malleable concept of ‘great politics’ was invoked to justify both Hitler’s imperial conquests and the necessity of the united European front against Communism. The all-conquering German armies were portrayed as the new ‘good Europeans’, transforming Nietzsche’s dream of continental rejuvenation into concrete reality. As the French philosopher and politician Marcel Déat wrote: ‘Nietzsche’s idea of the selection of “good Europeans” is now being realized on the battlefield, by the Waffen SS. An aristocracy, a knighthood is being created by the war that will be the hard, pure nucleus of the Europe of the future’.99 With the changing favours of the war, National Socialist Nietzscheanism took on a more sombre, defiant tone. As the ‘Thousand Year Reich’ collapsed around them, a number of ideologues looked one last time to Nietzsche for inspiration. On 15 October 1944, celebrations were held to commemorate the Hoffmann’s photo is reprinted in H. Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 187. 97 Ibid., 186. 98 Baeumler lectured on Nietzsche in the th e first trimester of 1941 and again in the summer semester of 1944. See K.-P. Horn, ‘Konkurrenz und Koexistenz. Das Pädagogische Seminar und das Institut für Politische Pädagogik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus’ [Competition and Coexistence. The Pedagogy Seminar and the Institute for Political Pedagogy in the Time of National Socialism], in K.-P. Horn (ed.), Pädagogik Unter den Linden. Von der Gründung der Berliner Universität im Jahre 1810 bis zum Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts [Pedagogy Unter den Linden . From the Foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810 until the End of the Twentieth Century] (Stuttgart 2002), 244–5. 99 M. Déat, Pensée allemande et pensée française [German Thought and French Thought], 97–8, cited in S.E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany , op. cit., 248. 96


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centenary of Nietzsche’s birthday. Two days before the event, Baeumler had published a front-page article in the Völkischer Beobachter which presented Nietzsche’s struggle against his age as a cipher for the fate of National Socialism. Nietzsche had ‘lived as a fighter’ and died in heroic solitude. He bore the loneliest fate as a critic of his time, ‘a seer [Sehender] among the blind . . . a soldier of knowledge in a lost post’. He had dedicated his life to combating the ‘nihilism of values’ and the levelling of ‘noble and common’ that characterized the ‘age of machines’ (Maschinenzivilisation) and led man down into the ‘mire of abject contentment’.100 National Socialist Germany, Baeumler explained, had taken upon itself the noble, unrelenting struggle against the materialist and egalitarian torpidity of Bolshevism, which now threatened to overrun not only Germany but the entire European continent. Soviet Communism represented ‘the greatest of all dangers that stands before humanity’. In the spirit of Nietzsche, National Socialism was taking its own heroic last stand against this mortal foe.101 The memorial event itself took place in the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar. Acting as an official representative for Hitler, Rosenberg — who under Baeumler’s influence had become a late convert to Nietzscheanism102 — effectively delivered the ‘philosophical epitaph’ for the nazi era.103 Tacitly acknowledging that the military conflict was lost, he hinted at the coming ‘spiritual’ war in the ‘colossal confrontation’ with Bolshevism.104 Nietzsche, he argued, had been preoccupied by a single question: ‘is human greatness still possible today?’ (Ist heute — Größe möglich? )105 The National Socialists had attempted to answer this question in the affirmative, to ‘eclipse the rest of the world’, just as ‘Nietzsche, the individual, eclipsed the powers of his time’. Despite the failure on the battlefield, Germany still held the key to the redemption of Europe. The ideas proclaimed by Nietzsche, and made concrete by National Socialism, would continue to resonate even after the guns fell silent.106 100 A. Baeumler, ‘Friedrich Nietzsche. Zu seinem 100. Geburtstag am 15. Oktober’ [Friedrich Nietzsche: On his Hundredth Birthday on 15 October], Octobe r], Völkischer Beobachter , 13 October 1944, 1–2. 101 Ibid. 102 Nietzsche had barely received a mention in Rosenberg’s writings hitherto. His semi-official ideological tract Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts [The Myth of the Twentieth Century] (Munich 1930), for example, only referred to Nietzsche twice. As recently as 1940, moreover, Rosenberg had blocked a request from Karl Schlechta to Baeumler for financial support for the historisch-kritische Ausgabe of Nietzsche’s work being prepared in Weimar. The Reichsleiter was of the opinion, Baeumler reported to Schlechta, that ‘resources are primarily for newly undertaken research. The Nietzsche-Ausgabe may still be as important — in any case it cannot be considered as new research’. A. Baeumler to K. Schlechta, 31 May 1940: Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv Schiller-Archiv , 72/1583. 103 H. Sluga, Heidegger’s Heidegger’s Crisis, op. cit., 232. 104 A. Rosenberg, Friedrich Nietzsche. Ansprache bei einer Gedenkstunde anläßlich des 100. Geburtstages Friedrich Nietzsches am 15. Oktober 1944 in Weimar [Friedrich Nietzsche: Memorial Speech on the Occasion of the Hundreth Birthday of Friedrich Nietzsche on 15 October 1944 in Weimar] (Munich 1944), 8. 105 Ibid., 3. 106 Ibid.



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Rosenberg’s grandiloquent rhetoric notwithstanding, the centenary commemoration was a rather morose affair. Material shortages were so desperate that the plans for the event had been scribbled on lose scraps of paper in blunt pencil.107 Ostentation was not entirely lacking, however. Some months earlier, Mussolini had sent a vast statue of Dionysus to the Archive from the Republic of Salò.108 Yet the memorial hall in which it was to be housed remained unfinished (despite an earlier donation of 50,000 Reichsmarks from Hitler’s ‘personal funds’) and the statue, which proved too big for its allotted alcove, had to be left propped against the wall during the proceedings — an apposite symbol, perhaps, of Nietzsche’s problematic position in the Third Reich. Nietzsche was always far more than simply the prophet of nazism, and a general consensus on his precise relationship to National Socialist ideology has never been reached. There was no orthodox Nietzscheanism in Hitler’s Germany, just as there was no single National Socialist philosophy. Baeumler’s interpretations never gained ascendancy as an uncontested paradigm. But they did delineate the central themes of the attempted ideological synthesis: the diagnosis of a degenerate Europe and the parallel obsession with a palingenetic idea of national renewal; the notion of Rangordnung ; the stress on the intrinsic relationship between physiology and moral/cultural worth; the fascination with an enhancement of life through war; and the radical rejection of the notion of a universally shared humanity. For many intellectuals in the Third Reich, Nietzsche provided not merely the decorative furnishing of National Socialism, but its core ideology. This influence cannot be explained away as a simple act of misappropriation. Baeumler’s depiction of Nietzsche as the envoy of ‘heroic realism’ was certainly one-sided and myopic, but it was neither incoherent nor absurd. More than 60 years after its demise, we still have not fully grasped the ‘idea’ of National Socialism. That task remains before us. Understanding of the role of Nietzschean philosophy in the Third Reich provides at least part of the answer.

Max Whyte recently completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge on the relationship between philosophy and politics under National Socialism, focusing specifically on the contribution made by Alfred Baeumler to the ideational framework of the Third Reich. Other interests include the intellectual history of the Weimar Republic and 107 See the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv , 72/2594. 108 See C. Diethe, Nietzsche’s Sister and the Will to Power , op. cit., 157, 202, n. 36; D.M. Hoffmann, ‘Zur Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte des Nietzsche-Archives’ [On the Intellectual and Cultural History of the Nietzsche Archive], in A. Emmrich et al., Das Nietzsche-Archiv in Weimar [The Nietzsche Archive in Weimar] (Munich 2000), 21; and M. Zapata Galindo, Triumph des Willens zur Macht. Zur Nietzsche Rezeption im NS-Staat (Hamburg 1995), 202f. A large dossier detailing the statue’s movement across Europe is contained in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv , 72/2611.


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twentieth-century Marxism. He is currently beginning a new research project on the history of the National Bolshevist movement in interwar Germany. This is his first publication.


Whyte 2008

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