Nietzsche verstehen: Eine Gebrauchsanweisung by Christian Niemeyer (review)

In Nietzsche verstehen, Christian Niemeyer aims at “correcting mistaken readings of Nietzsche” (10), by which he means clichéd misunderstandings of Nietzsche as a racist eugenicist, an advocate of a superiority of “German nature,” an anti-Semite, a warmonger, and a nihilistic negator of any ethics. In other words, the book addresses those aspects that portray Nietzsche as a kind of proto-Nazi. In doing so, Niemeyer also exposes the “genealogies” of such misreadings, in good Nietzschean style. He discusses these issues in seven chapters dedicated to seven “commandments,” each of which concerns a particular set of problems in the interpretation of Nietzsche and how to avoid the usual misunderstandings that they invite.

In the first chapter, Niemeyer argues for factoring Nietzsche’s biography thoroughly into the interpretation of his works. While Nietzsche’s works certainly mirror many personal experiences, such that bearing his biography in mind is often illuminating, Niemeyer’s fixation on the biographical aspect does not seem fully justified, and leads him to interpretations that appear rather forced. For instance, he claims that “Das Grablied” (KSA 4, pp. 142–45) and “Der Wahrsager” (KSA 4, pp. 172–76) in Thus Spoke Zarathustra can be understood only with reference to the unhappy ending of Nietzsche’s relationship with Lou Salomé. But Niemeyer’s evidence for this—a combination of Zarathustra passages, letters, notes from the Nachlaß, and anecdotes (15–16, 19–22)—is highly selective and speculative. And more generally, there is the old problem of biographical fallacy: even with the help of an author’s numerous self-assessments, our knowledge of his inner life and how it is reflected in his works can never be as certain as Niemeyer suggests. Still, these broad doubts aside, Niemeyer’s reading of Nietzsche’s statements concerning breeding, heredity, and euthanasia is interesting: in contrast to the cliché of Nietzsche as an eugenicist, he points out that these statements are less related to peoples or ethnicities than to the person of Nietzsche himself and his own difficulties and development. In this regard, Niemeyer refers particularly to Nietzsche’s anamnesis and how he perceived himself as having inherited a pathological constitution (26–34).

In the second chapter, Niemeyer shows how the appropriation of Nietzsche for eugenicist ideology was made possible by the immense falsification and abuse of his life and work undertaken by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Niemeyer points out many passages in Nietzsche’s works and letters in which he expresses his nausea for racism, German nationalism, and especially antiSemitism (37–43, 58–62), and he also demonstrates that, as administrator and editor of Nietzsche’s work after his mental collapse, Förster-Nietzsche eliminated such statements and purposefully and skillfully created the exact counterimage of her brother. She thus very effectively curried favor with anti-Semites, fascists, and the Nazis, out of what Niemeyer calls “greed [and] craving for recog nition” (45). What Niemeyer narrates and explains here is a sort of a criminal case: he provides insight not only into Förster-Nietzsche’s elaborate network of lies and intrigues, but also into her procedures of falsifying and distorting Nietzsche’s works and letters, ranging from various manipulations of published texts to the invention of a supposed magnum opus, Der Wille zur Macht, by cleverly arranging notes from Nietzsche’s Nachlaß. This “Nazification” (63) of Nietzsche has been gradually corrected since the publication of Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari’s critical edition (begun in 1967). But Niemeyer complains that it continues to be spread by some Nietzsche scholars—Bernhard Taureck and Domenico Losurdo are the most frequent targets of his attacks.

However, as Niemeyer concedes in the third chapter, German nationalistic and anti-Semitic statements can nonetheless be found in Nietzsche’s early writings, along with affirmations of an antiegalitarian elite ideal. Niemeyer argues that this can be explained by Wagner’s immense influence on Nietzsche between 1868 and 1876. In particular, he demonstrates that in the writings of...