For more than three years the public has been persistently taught by the
press to think of Friedrich Nietzsche mainly as the powerful promoter of
a systematic national movement of the German people for the conquest of
the world. But there is strong and definite internal evidence in the
writings of Nietzsche against the assumption that he intentionally
aroused a spirit of war or aimed in any way at the world-wide
preponderance of Germany's type of civilization. Nietzsche had a
temperamental loathing for everything that is brutal, a loathing which
was greatly intensified by his personal contact with the horrors of war
while serving as a military nurse in the campaign of 1870. If there were
still any one senseless enough to plead the erstwhile popular cause of
Pan-Germanism, he would be likely to find more support for his argument
in the writings of the de-gallicized Frenchman, Count Joseph Arthur
Gobineau, or of the germanized Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
than in those of the "hermit of Maria-Sils," who does not even suggest,
let alone advocate, German world-predominance in a single line of all
his writings. To couple Friedrich Nietzsche with Heinrich von Treitschke
as the latter's fellow herald of German ascendancy is truly
preposterous. Treitschke himself was bitterly and irreconcilably set
against the creator of Zarathustra,(14) in whom ever since
"Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen" he had divined "the good European,"--which
to the author of the _Deutsche Geschichte_ meant the bad Prussian, and
by consequence the bad German.
(14) As is convincingly pointed out in a footnote of J. A. Cramb's
"Germany and England."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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