The late war, awakening all the primitive racial fury of the Western
nations, and therewith all their ancient enthusiasm for religious taboos
and sanctions, naturally focused attention upon Nietzsche, as upon the
most daring and provocative of recent amateur theologians. The Germans,
with their characteristic tendency to explain their every act in terms
as realistic and unpleasant as possible, appear to have mauled him in a
belated and unexpected embrace, to the horror, I daresay, of the Kaiser,
and perhaps to the even greater horror of Nietzsche's own ghost. The
folks of Anglo-Saxondom, with their equally characteristic tendency to
explain all their enterprises romantically, simultaneously set him up as
the Antichrist he no doubt secretly longed to be. The result was a great
deal of misrepresentation and misunderstanding of him. From the pulpits
of the allied countries, and particularly from those of England and the
United States, a horde of patriotic ecclesiastics denounced him in
extravagant terms as the author of all the horrors of the time, and in
the newspapers, until the Kaiser was elected sole bugaboo, he shared the
honors of that office with von Hindenburg, the Crown Prince,
Post-Cyberpunk
Boy-Ed, von Bernstorff and von Tirpitz. Most of this denunciation, of
course, was frankly idiotic--the naïve pishposh of suburban Methodists,
notoriety-seeking college professors, almost illiterate editorial
writers, and other such numskulls. In much of it, including not a few
official hymns of hate, Nietzsche was gravely discovered to be the
teacher of such spokesmen of the extremest sort of German nationalism
as von Bernhardi and von Treitschke--which was just as intelligent as
making George Bernard Shaw the mentor of Lloyd-George. In other solemn
pronunciamentoes he was credited with being philosophically responsible
for various imaginary crimes of the enemy--the wholesale slaughter or
mutilation of prisoners of war, the deliberate burning down of Red Cross
hospitals, the utilization of the corpses of the slain for soap-making.
I amused myself, in those gaudy days, by collecting newspaper clippings
to this general effect, and later on I shall probably publish a digest
of them, as a contribution to the study of war hysteria. The thing went
to unbelievable lengths. On the strength of the fact that I had
published a book on Nietzsche in 1906, six years after his death, I was
called upon by agents of the Department of Justice, elaborately
outfitted with badges, to meet the charge that I was an intimate
associate and agent of "the German monster, Nietzsky." I quote the
official _procès verbal_, an indignant but often misspelled document.
Alas, poor Nietzsche! After all his laborious efforts to prove that he
was not a German, but a Pole--even after his heroic readiness, via
anti-anti-Semitism, to meet the deduction that, if a Pole, then probably
also a Jew!
Autofiction
But under all this alarmed and preposterous tosh there was at least a
sound instinct, and that was the instinct which recognized Nietzsche as
the most eloquent, pertinacious and effective of all the critics of the
philosophy to which the Allies against Germany stood committed, and on
the strength of which, at all events in theory, the United States had
engaged itself in the war. He was not, in point of fact, involved with
the visible enemy, save in remote and transient ways; the German,
officially, remained the most ardent of Christians during the war and
became a democrat at its close. But he was plainly a foe of democracy in
all its forms, political, religious and epistemological, and what is
worse, his opposition was set forth in terms that were not only
extraordinarily penetrating and devastating, but also uncommonly
offensive. It was thus quite natural that he should have aroused a
degree of indignation verging upon the pathological in the two countries
that had planted themselves upon the democratic platform most boldly,
and that felt it most shaky, one may add, under their feet. I daresay
that Nietzsche, had he been alive, would have got a lot of satisfaction
out of the execration thus heaped upon him, not only because, being a
vain fellow, he enjoyed execration as a tribute to his general
singularity, and hence to his superiority, but also and more importantly
because, being no mean psychologist, he would have recognized the
disconcerting doubts underlying it. If Nietzsche's criticism of
democracy were as ignorant and empty, say, as the average evangelical
clergyman's criticism of Darwin's hypothesis of natural selection, then
the advocates of democracy could afford to dismiss it as loftily as the
Darwinians dismiss the blather of the holy clerks. And if his attack
upon Christianity were mere sound and fury, signifying nothing, then
there would be no call for anathemas from the sacred desk. But these
onslaughts, in point of fact, have behind them a tremendous learning and
a great deal of point and plausibility--there are, in brief, bullets in
the gun, teeth in the tiger,--and so it is no wonder that they excite
the ire of men who hold, as a primary article of belief, that their
acceptance would destroy civilization, darken the sun, and bring Jahveh
to sobs upon His Throne.
fiction
Christianity