Laughing at Nothing: Humor as a Response to Nihilism

Chapter Three. WORLD-WAR AND POSTWAR NIHILISM

We are great invalids, overwhelmed by old dreams, forever incapable of utopia, technicians of lassitude, gravediggers of the future, horrified by the avatars of the Old Adam. The Tree of Life will no longer have spring as one of its seasons: so much dry wood; out of it will be made coffins for our bones, our dreams, and our griefs. —E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay World War I was to be only the first of two world wars that would usher in a new “Age of Anxiety”1 for humankind, and Nietzsche’s name is associated with both of these cataclysms. When World War I began in 1914, though Nietzsche had been dead for fourteen years, his Thus Spoke Zarathustra became an international sensation. In Germany, it was suggested reading for the soldier in the trenches, while in the rest of the world it was considered the voice of “German ruthlessness and barbarism.”2 During World War II, thanks largely to his sister ’s and Heidegger’s influence, Nietzsche became an idol for the Nazis, and thus again a symbol of violence and evil for the rest of the world.3 Though debates about the role played by Nietzsche’s philosophy in fomenting these wars go back and forth, what is most interesting about this period of history for our own purposes is not so much speculation about the causal mechanisms involved in Germany’s aggression, but rather the increasing discourse concerning the issue of nihilism and its full-blown emergence into world history. William Barrett writes, “August 1914 shattered the foundations of [the] human world. It revealed that the apparent stability, security, and material 43 Chapter Three World-War and Postwar Nihilism progress of society had rested, like everything human, upon the void. European man came face to face with himself as a stranger.”4 Barrett is not alone in this reading of history. The world war and post–world war years are conventionally thought of as a time when the West’s optimism and faith in development , progress and rationality came into question. With World War I, and especially after the horrors of World War II, the assumption that humankind was on an unblocked path of perpetual and unfrustrated advancement became untenable, and the problem of nihilism became more of an urgent concern. Nietzsche’s formulation of the problem as a complicated spiritual and cultural phenomenon, despite his bad popular reputation, gained increasing recognition for its subtle insights and influenced the writing of some of the most important voices and movements of the twentieth century. As Keiji Nishitani writes, “The First World War exposed the profound crisis of Europe, and at the same time Nietzsche’s nihilism came to attract more attention than the ideas of any other thinker.”5 THE NATIONAL SOCIALISTS Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, Hermann Rauschning, a former National Socialist writing in Paris, published a book condemning the Nazi party titled The Revolution of Nihilism: Warning to the West. In this work he offers an analysis of the Nazi movement as a movement not of nationalist spirit, but of nihilism in the Russian sense. According to Rauschning, Hitler and his elites were quite unconcerned with the development of a positive program of economic and political renewal. Behind their rhetoric, he claims, was hidden the most extreme form of nihilism that sought not the reconstruction of Germany but the total destruction of all order and established institutions. “The first thing to realize is that the purpose of National Socialism is actually the deliberate and systematic destruction of the social classes that have made history, together with the last vestiges of their established order.”6 Rauschning ’s work not only offers an insider’s view of the Nazi party, but also characterizes the nihilism of this movement, in a somewhat Nietzschean manner, as a spiritual and moral problem. Any explanation of this moment in history, he claims, must include an account of the decline and distortion of the German spirit and its lost ability to create positive and lasting social goals. The war years, in other words, represent a historical symptom of the nihilistic forces at work in German culture. Rauschning tells us that Nazi propaganda was largely a smokescreen for a movement that sought not the establishment of a well-ordered state, but the institution of a “permanent revolution.”7 According to this analysis, Nazism held much in common with Russian nihilism and its emphasis on the total destruction...