Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology (review)

Bertram's appreciation of Nietzsche was first published in Germany in 1918 and was translated into French in 1932, and, perhaps surprisingly, this is the first time it has been translated into English.¹ It is one of the most original and striking books ever written on Nietzsche in any language, and the book was admired by some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century such as Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann. Both the translator and the editor of the series in which it appears are to be congratulated on now making this book available in English for the first time.

There seems to be in English-speaking reception a deep-rooted bias against the book, and Walter Kaufmann may have set the tone for its reception. In the prologue to his classic study of 1950, entitled "The Nietzsche Legend," in part a direct reference to Bertram's book, which begins with an introduction entitled "Legend," Kaufmann establishes the mission of his book, which consists in tracing the origin of the Nietzsche "legend" and constructively refuting the assumption that Nietzsche lacks a coherent philosophy. Kaufmann notes that Nietzsche became a myth even before he died in 1900 and is alarmed by the fact that in the reception of his work there is no basic agreement as to what Nietzsche stands for. He traces the origin of the legend of course to Nietzsche's sister. But he also includes in his account of the legend Stefan George and assimilates Bertram's study to the George Circle. It is in Bertram's book, Kaufmann maintains, that the legend first appears fully grown. The work Kaufmann does in his prologue and in the book as a whole was for the most part necessary and constructive. But his reading of Bertram is misguided in at least two key respects: first, it fails to appreciate the extent to which Bertram is his own man and has an independence from George's ideas about art in general and Nietzsche in particular; second, it fails to consider whether or not Bertram has a serious thesis about Nietzsche as a "legend" and might be doing novel intellectual work in approaching him in this way.

Bertram assumed, I think, that Nietzsche was largely well known among European readers and on this basis set himself the task of writing a very different book to the popularizations that abounded at the time. He does not set out to simplify but, rather, to bring out Nietzsche's complexity by focusing on what he sees as the "psychological antinomies" that structure his existence and intellectual project and to write something akin to a work of art. In spite of the differences between Bertram and Kaufmann, they share a similar conception of Nietzsche, namely, that he is best understood when he is placed within the heritage of European (especially Goethean) humanism.

The book is composed of nineteen headings, ranging from "Ancestry," "Knight, Death, and Devil," and "The German Becoming" to "Justice," "Illness," "Judas," "Mask," "Indian Summer," "Claude Lorrain," "Venice," "Socrates," and finally "Eleusis." These are essentially portraits of Nietzsche, each one providing a set of rich and fertile insights into core aspects of Nietzsche's thought as well as topics that are often neglected and treated as marginal. Bertram is especially good in illuminating the art Nietzsche admired, including literature (for example, Adalbert Stifter) and painting (Lorrain); and the book is full of probing insights into Nietzsche's relation to Wagner. There are definite weaknesses and limitations to the book—Bertram is impatient with the thought of eternal recurrence, for example (he calls it at one point an "illusory revelation" [294] and at another, "monomaniacal" [306]), and he has virtually nothing to say on it or on core doctrines such as the will to power and the revaluation of values (and Kaufmann took him to task...