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13 Two Thinking the Nietzsche Legacy Today A Historian’s Perspective To speak of “Nietzsche today” perforce alerts us to the historicity of the topic.1 For, presumably, the Nietzsche of today differs from the Nietzsche or indeed, the Nietzsches, of the past and—if you believe, as I do, that his protean relevance remains strikingly alive—of the future as well. Today’s Nietzsche—at least in this respect so different from the one that reigned in Europe during the 1930s and 1940s—is among other things the “playful ” one. So in that spirit let me playfully suggest that every culture, every generation, and every political movement constructs the Nietzsche it deserves . Or, to put it in less facetious fashion: Nietzscheanism—the nature and extent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s impact upon politics, culture, and our collective and individual sense of self—has always functioned as a historically dynamic phenomenon simultaneously influencing, reflecting, and being reshaped by the fluid political and cultural circumstances of which it was a part.2 The history of the still vibrant Nietzsche legacy must be regarded as the dynamic history of its manifold appropriations and as the product of an ongoing dialogue between the peculiarly accessible, relevant, and multifaceted qualities of Nietzsche’s oeuvre and its various interested mediators (sympathetic or otherwise) acting within diverse institutional frameworks and changing cultural and political contexts. This has always been a relatively open-ended, reciprocal, creative process that entailed selective filtering and constant interpretive reshaping of Nietzschean thematics according to divergent perceived needs. In the spirit of the Stefan George circle, Nietzsche’s most important Völkisch interpreter Ernst Bertram succinctly summed up the process. “Great men,” he wrote in 1918, “are inevitably our creation, just as we are theirs.”3 Yet who, in the climate of today’s Nietzsche, remembers or even wants to remember the Völkisch Nietzsche shaped during World War I—and how militantly triumphant it became in the Weimar Republic? 14 The Crisis of Culture—Then and Now If we are to gain any perspective on today’s Nietzsche we should keep in mind that the challenge and significance of his legacy has throughout resided precisely in its pervasiveness, in its manifold and often contradictory penetration of crucial cultural and political arenas. There have been not one, but many “Nietzschean impulses” influencing and reflecting their changing times. Only a Rezeptionsgeschichte (reception history) sensitive to the fluid and transformational nature of this legacy will be able to appreciate its rich complexity. “Today’s Nietzsche” must be located as part of this ongoing history and made amenable to the kind of historical analysis applicable to all other Nietzsche annexations. Nietzsche today must be considered precisely that—contemporary yet historically situated—without foreclosing on who or what he will be tomorrow. Nietzsche-reception has always possessed scavenger-like, casuistic properties . Only thus has it been possible to construct the remarkable variety of Nietzscheanisms (some more outrageous than others) revealed by the historical record: vegetarian, expressionist, socialist, feminist, Zionist, anarchist, sexual libertarian, nationalist, and so on. If we are to get a proper historical handle on today’s Nietzsche and understand the elasticity and manifold implications of the legacy, we have to remind ourselves of something which twenty years ago was blatantly obvious but which today has been (or stands in danger of being) almost forgotten. If today’s Nietzsche is, above all, the post-structuralist Nietzsche, during the 1930s and 1940s the not entirely implausible Fascist and Nazi Nietzsche virtually (though never completely) eclipsed every other version. If each generation constructs its own most appropriate Nietzsche, during the years of the Third Reich and immediately after, Nietzsche appeared to be paradigmatically Nazi, while National Socialism itself seemed best understood as a kind of Nietzschean project.4 Both National Socialists and many of their opponents tended to agree that Nietzsche was the movement’s most formative and influential thinker, the key visionary of a hierarchical, biologized Lebensphilosophie society fueled by regenerationist, post-democratic, post-Christian impulses in which the weak, decrepit, and useless were to be legislated out of existence. For those interested in making the case, any number of prophetic themes and uncannily appropriate (and always selectively enabling) quotes were available . “From now on,” Nietzsche wrote in The Will to Power, “there will be more favorable preconditions for more comprehensive forms of dominion , whose like has never yet existed. And even this is not the most important thing; the possibility...

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