Nietzsche the Unlikely Partisan

On July 29, 1943, Adolf Hitler sent a complete edition of Nietzsche, bound in blue pigskin, to Benito Mussolini for his sixtieth birthday. Unbeknownst to Hitler, Mussolini had been deposed a few days earlier, and was now being held captive on the island of Ponza. Nevertheless, the new Italian government forwarded the gift to Mussolini who, in his memoirs, recorded how the Nietzsche edition had helped him during his exile.

At the same time, one hundred miles north of where Mussolini was being held, a twenty-five-year-old philosophy teacher, Giorgio Colli, had begun to gather around him a group of students for whom Nietzsche was a decisive influence.

As Felsch notes, having specialized in the Greeks, Colli’s love of philosophy was more in tune with a Platonic dialogue than with contemporary styles. He was convinced that philosophical knowledge was best produced by the sort of interactions between a thinker and their students recounted by Plato, rather than through written texts. “What is best and essential can only be conveyed from person to person, it can and should never be ‘public,’” he wrote. Where Nietzsche dreamed of a “society of the unfashionable” or a “monastery for freer spirits,” Colli set aside a portion of his professorial salary to found a “new Greek academy” that would set about “beginning life from scratch in the Greek manner.”

Contra Hitler and Mussolini, one of the things that drew Colli to Nietzsche was what he perceived as the German philosopher’s disregard of politics. “Nietzsche is the anti-political man par excellence,” he declared to his pupils. “His doctrine aims for mankind’s total distance from social and political interests.” The sensitive Colli hated the brutal, animalistic nature of fascism. He and his pupils would resist it by love of knowledge.

Love of knowledge was of little help, however, when Colli’s favorite student, sixteen-year-old Mazzino Montinari, was arrested, beaten, and jailed for refusing to sing the fascist anthem “Vincere” at a public event. After that, Colli’s group could no longer style itself as apolitical.

Although this did not result in an immediate change to the group’s activity, it became increasingly clear that to protect intellectual life against the brutality of Italian politics was tantamount to subversion. A secret “is the invention of a terrible weapon against the state,” Colli later wrote — and when read by their underground philosophy group, Nietzsche became a bulwark against fascism, not its cheerleader.

Nietzsche’s Antisemitic Sister

“Amor fati” — the love of fate — is among the ideas Nietzsche famously embraced later in life. Fate, however, does not always reciprocate. For a long time following his death, the fate of Nietzsche’s archive was a precarious one.

Comprising a chaotic five thousand manuscript pages packed in over one hundred wooden crates, the Nietzsche archives were carted around Soviet East Germany from checkpoint to checkpoint after the war. Owing to his reputation and association with Hitler, Nietzsche was banned behind the Iron Curtain. The archive might have been destroyed at any moment, on any whim.

Instead, Nietzsche’s archive eventually came to rest outside a place called Villa Silberblick — where Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche once had lived, and where her brother Friedrich has spent the last few years of his life. It was here that Mazzino Montinari came to work in 1961.

By then, Montinari had come to love East Germany along, it would seem, party lines. Despite his commitment to communist philosophical orthodoxy, however, Montinari sent word to Colli, who was living in Italy, notifying him about the “almost unfathomable abundance of material” available to them. His task, as he put it, was to find the “‘true Nietzsche’ behind the fragments, behind, even, the published work.”

Montinari, however, was not the first to attempt to catalog and publish the archive. As is well known, eleven years before his death, Nietzsche had suffered a complete mental breakdown. It happened in Turin, the city in which Colli was born. After some time in an asylum, Nietzsche was entrusted to the care of his older sister, Elisabeth. So were his writings.

The version of Nietzsche beloved by the Nazis was, in part, a creation of his sister. Indeed, their relationship, once close, had been broken when, in 1885, Elisabeth Nietzsche married Bernhard Förster. Förster was then a leading figure in Germany’s far right and a prominent antisemite, describing Jews as “a parasite on the German body.”

Nietzsche despised antisemitism, publicly and in his writing, instead expressing his admiration for Jews as “the strongest, toughest and purest race . . . [that knows] how to prevail under the worst conditions.” Indeed, in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) he proposed that “we expel the anti-Semitic squallers out of the country.”

Nietzsche’s contempt for antisemitism also extended to his sister, to whom he wrote, “your association with an anti-Semite chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me ever again with ire or melancholy.” The association between Nietzsche’s sister and Förster, however, was a short one. In 1889, Förster committed suicide when an ideal community of Aryans he set up in Paraguay found the going too tough and folded.

Despite this, Elisabeth retained her beliefs, joining the Nazi Party in its earliest days. When she died in 1935, Hitler himself attended her funeral.

Between 1894 and 1926 — Nietzsche died in 1900 — Elisabeth published a twenty-volume edition of her brother’s works, which included her most famous production, The Will to Power. A collection of fragments, some large, some small, The Will to Power had been edited with National Socialist ideas in mind. Elisabeth was then a proto-Nazi, so she made her brother one also. Tragically, that book came to be seen as Nietzsche’s magnum opus, including by thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, who was himself a member of the Nazi Party.

Comrade Nietzsche?

“Not being a Nazi” is, of course, a prerequisite for being of the Left. But “not being a Nazi” isn’t enough to make Nietzsche a leftist, let alone a socialist. Nietzsche, after all, was unequivocal about his hostility to socialism, a leveling ideology, he argued, which denied and suppressed individual genius.

However, having acknowledged the distortion of Nietzsche’s thought by his sister and the Nazis, some theorists of the Left have gone on to find rich material in his work, analyzing capitalism and advocating for change. Indeed, Colli and Montinari were among the first to make this case.

French philosopher Paul Ricoeur suggested a persuasive reason why this makes sense. According to Ricoeur, Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud were the three “masters of suspicion,” each in their own way exposing the lies and illusions upon which the stability of nineteenth- and twentieth-century society depended. Each, Ricoeur argued, called into question the fundamental Enlightenment beliefs that consciousness and rationality are both present and self-evident, and that the social structures we inhabit are either rational or, particularly, the result of progress.

As Nietzsche famously argued, values are not inherent to our nature or derived from logic. Rather, values are cultural. And if this is the case, values can be changed. Nietzsche, of course, wanted to revalue European values in order to privilege a type of “aesthetic greatness,” in contrast with the egalitarian mediocrity he associated with the Enlightenment. This is a change in values socialists are unlikely to find palatable. But as Matt McManus has argued in these pages, we can also conceive of a revaluation of values that privileges justice.

Indeed, such a step might reveal a deeper proximity between Nietzsche’s vision and Marx’s idea of socialism. What Marx and Nietzsche shared was a theory of liberation. Yes, Nietzsche called for the freedom of the individual genius — but might the collective liberation of socialism also create space for the freedom of the genius of every individual? Marxism seems to allow this. As McManus notes,

Marx shares Nietzsche’s wariness of viewing equality as an end in itself, since the immeasurable differences between people means that treating everyone the same means treating some people far better or worse than others.

During the 1960s, this possibility drew many thinkers associated with the French left to Nietzsche, including figures like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida. As poststructuralists — not postmodernists, as many of these thinkers are mislabeled — they carried out their own “decentering” of the human self, challenging the liberal humanist orthodoxy that legitimated capitalism and postwar Western hegemony.

Where capitalism encouraged the idea that the self was a sovereign entity — impermeable and in charge of itself — that directed itself inevitably toward what Western thinking called “progress” (meaning a sort of gradual perfection along capitalist lines), these thinkers deconstructed this idea of the self in the same way Marx had: the self was constructed from the outside and was unstable in ways that could be used to good advantage by the Left. In making this argument, they drew inspiration from Nietzsche’s work.

The Class Struggle in Nietzsche Studies

Felsch’s book in fact opens with an account of a 1964 French-German conference on Nietzsche, held at Royaumont, a former Cistercian abbey north of Paris. Colli and Montinari attended, as did Michel Foucault, who delivered a lecture attacking their assumptions and methods in cataloging the archive.

For Foucault, to impose the sort of traditional editorial criteria Colli and Montinari had placed on the archive — essentially, to curate it — was an act of violence itself. He held that “the true Nietzsche” would not be discovered by smoothing out contradictions, ordering his writing chronologically, or imposing a hierarchy of important and less important writings. These efforts, despite Colli and Montinari’s claims of loyalty to Nietzsche, could only create a version of Nietzsche, just as Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s editorial distortion had, half a century earlier. And moreover, such an effort precisely undermined the very thought they were working on. Nietzsche was vast; he contained multitudes. Only by respecting this can we engage with him adequately.

Although Nietzsche’s case is exemplary, the implications of this controversy go far beyond him. It placed the contradiction between fact and interpretation on the table. Who is to say what a “true version” of any thinker’s work is — who, indeed, is to say what “truth” itself is? Nietzsche, after all, scrupulously criticized the idea that truth exists independent of how it’s interpreted.

For some on the Left, there is a fine line between this sort of critical theory and the sort of right-wing individualism and irrationalism that socialism seeks to overthrow. If there are only interpretations, not facts, then how are we to find firm ground in pointing to injustice?

It’s a danger that Jacques Derrida, for instance, was aware of, and his own “ethical turn” in the 1980s — where he turned from hitherto apolitical writing toward politics, ethics, and the law — was an attempted response. Justice, according to Derrida, is not an existing fact, but is always “to come,” in the same way that for some religions the messiah is always “to come.” Preceding its arrival, the promise structures our ways of being.

This is the theme of Derrida’s Specters of Marx, which analyzes how this waiting for an arrivant — such as socialism or democracy or justice — not only haunts our thinking but structures it. The idea of a more just future may, in fact, also serve as a force that helps us summon that very future.

It seems that the Left today is faced with just such a problem. In his 2009 book Capitalist Realism, Mark Fisher bemoaned a world where capitalism has become so all-pervasive, that an alternative had become impossible to visualize, let alone attain.

But what if the Left’s despair is also an interpretation? And what if this despair transforms into a will to revalue the facts of our time in the name of a different future? As Nietzsche himself wrote,

we are children of the future, how could we be at home in the present? We are unfavourable to all ideals which could make us feel at home in this frail, broken-down transition period; and as regards the “realities” thereof, we do not believe in their endurance. The ice which still carries them is very thin . . .