Civil Mass Murder: Nietzsche’s Political Options and the Shoah^*

* Translated from German by Joel Golb.

ABSTRACT

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, Nietzsche was widely regarded as a thinker who instigated the selective breeding and the eugenic policies of National Socialism, indeed even its genocidal violence. In the subsequent years and decades, however, Nietzsche was largely cleared of such charges. His many defenders claimed that he was a firm protector of Judaism, his writings offering a rich and nuanced anthropological vision. This common, virtuous portrayal of Nietzsche eschews his resonant call to exterminate masses of ‘failed’ people. This jarring, portentous call, found both in his published and unpublished work, cannot be discounted and ought not to be relativized. The present essay underscores the significance of Nietzsche’s transgression of ethical limits and explores the possible consequences of the view that the state has the right to dispose of masses of its own population. It contends that in that transgression was contained, even, the possibility of the Shoah.

KEYWORDS:

• Nietzsche’s different political options
• Origins of the Final Solution
• Transgression or ethical thinking
• Origins of warlike violence in Erasmus

Notes on contributor

Bernhard H. F. Taureck is professor of philosophy (emeritus) at the University of Braunschweig. He taught philosophy as visiting professor at the universities of Naples and Urbino. In addition to his primary interest in the philosophy of Nietzsche and in ancient philosophy, his work includes philosophically oriented studies of Don Quixote and Shakespeare. He is an author of more than thirty books, and numerous articles, a partial list of which includes: Nietzsche und der Faschismus. Ein Politikum. Reclam: Leipzig 2000. Metaphern und Gleichnisse in der Philosophie. Versuch einer kritischen Ikonologie der Philosophie. Suhrkamp: Frankfurt 2004. Hamlet. Widerstand gegen den Überwachungsstaat. Eine Intertextuelle Deutung. Velbrück: Weilerswist 2017. Drei Wurzeln des Krieges, und warum nur eine nicht ins Verderben führt. Philosophische Linien in der Gewaltgeschichte des Abendlandes. Die graue Edition. Zug/Switzerland 2019.

Notes

* Translated from German by Joel Golb.

1 See Bernhard H. F. Taureck, Nietzsches Alternativen zum Nihilismus (Hamburg: Junius, 1991), pp. 132–5.

2 Georg Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (Berlin: Luchterhand, 1962); Domenico Losurdo, “Vor der Kontroverse: Nietzsche als Anhänger Wagners,” in A. Wildermuth, (ed.), Nietzsche und Wagner. Geschichte und Aktualität eines Kulturkonflikts (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 2008); Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico. Biografia intellettuale e bilancio critico: Nuova Edizione Ampliata, 2 Volumi (Torino: Bollati Bollingheri, 2014); Don Dombowsky, Nietzsche’s Machiavellian Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Ishay Landa, The Apprentice’s Sorcerer: The Liberal Tradition and Fascism (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009); Ishay Landa, The Overman in the Marketplace. Nietzschean Heroism in Popular Culture (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009); Ishay Landa, Fascism and the Masses: The Revolt Against the Last Humans 1848–1945 (New York and London: Routledge, 2018); Bernhard H. F. Taureck, Nietzsche und der Faschismus. Ein Politikum (Leipzig: Reclam, 2000); Bernhard H. F. Taureck, “Nietzsche’s Reasoning against Democracy: Why He Uses the Social Herd Metaphor and Why He Fails,” in Herman W. Siemens and Vasti Roodt, (eds.), Nietzsche, Power and Politics: Rethinking Nietzsche’s Legacy for Political Thought (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 191–204.

3 This is in contrast to Machiavelli himself in Italo-fascist appropriation. See Bernhard H. F. Taureck, “Machiavelli bei Nietzsche und den Faschismen. Zwei Erzählungen der Abfolge Machiavelli – Nietzsche – Faschismen,” in Cornel Zwierlein and Annette Meyer, (eds.), Machiavellismus in Deutschland. Hist. Zeitschr. Beiheft 51 (Munich: Olenbourg, 2010), pp. 234–9.

4 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 380–1.

5 Koenraad Elst, “Manu as a Weapon against Egalitarianism: Nietzsche and Hindu Political Philosophy,” in Nietzsche, Power and Politics, pp. 543–82; Taureck, Nietzsche und der Faschismus, pp. 201–7.

6 Taureck, Nietzsche und der Faschismus, pp. 207–23.

7 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Vintage, 1968), pp. 458–9.

8 Heinz Schlaffer moves past the carefully cultivated presuppositions regarding Nietzsche’s style by pointing to the “poetry” mode at work there, marked by the use of syntax meant to “seduce people into agreement before they have understood everything”; see Heinz Schlaffer, Das entfesselte Wort: Nietzsches Stil und seine Folgen (Munich: Hanser, 2007), p. 58. This, rather than a logic of non-formulation, may explain the sentence fragments in Nietzsche’s late style.

9 On the significance of the doctrine of return in Shakespeare, see Bernhard H. F. Taureck, Hamlet: Widerstand gegen den Überwachungsstaat. Eine intertextuelle Deutung (Weilerswist: Velbrück, 2017).

10 Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 506.

11 Bernhard H. F. Taureck, Machiavelli-ABC (Leipzig: Reclam, 2002), pp. 226–8.

12 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Horace B. Samuel (New York: Dover, 2003), p. 51.

13 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 110.

14 Henning Ottmann, Geschichte des politischen Denkens. Die Neuzeit. Die politischen Strömungen im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2008), pp. 244–68 shows that Nietzsche’s research avoids touching on his fourth political realm, with references to criticisms of proto-fascist elements in the philosopher’s writing replacing acknowledgment of his radicalism.

15 Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 232.

16 Friedrich Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 1 (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), p. 767.

17 Losurdo, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico, 2014.

18 For this and the following note, see Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 6.

19 For here and below, see the detailed documentation in Taureck, Nietzsches Alternativen zum Nihilismus, pp. 181–91.

20 Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936 (Stuttgart: DVA, 1998), pp. 303–4.

21 Christopher R. Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy 1939–1942 (London: Arrow, 2005), pp. 352–72.

22 The medieval Reichsacht, understood as “exclusion of a lawbreaker from the community and the imperial Rechtsverband, valid for the entire empire,” with those affected considered without honor or rights and subject to killing when caught [see Luise Schorn-Schütte, Karl. V (Munich: Beck, 2000), p. 95], produced object–persons and person–objects. However, in contrast to the annihilatory premises of both Nietzsche and the Nazis, no legal criteria were at play here and what was involved was punishment of individuals, not masses.

23 For a precise description, see Harald Welzer, Klimakriege (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2008), pp. 220–31, 305–6.

24 Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 354.

25 Jeannette Schmid, “Aggressives Verhalten,” in Gert Sommer and Albert Fuchs, (eds.), Krieg und Frieden. Handbuch der Konflikt- und Friedenspsychologie (Weinheim and Basel: Beltz, 2004), p. 96.

26 Hitler, Mein Kampf (1936), p. 337, cited in Jeffrey L. Sammons, (ed.), Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion. Die Grundlage des modernen Antisemitismus eine Fälschung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1998), p. 24.

27 “War as father / of all things, and king, / names few / to serve as gods, / and of the rest makes / these men slaves, / those free” from Heraclitus, Fragments (New York: Viking, 2001), p. 44.

28 Wilhelm Nestle, Vom Mythos zum Logos. Die des griechischen Denkens Selbstentfaltung Homer bis auf die von und Sokrates Sophistik (Stuttgart: Alfred Kröner, 1940), p. 102.

29 Adolf Hitler, “War der Zweite Weltkrieg für Deutschland vermeidbar?” in Henry Picker, (ed.), Hitlers Tischgespräche im Führerhauptquartier (Munich: Goldmann, 1981), p. 491; on this and Heidegger, see Bernhard H F Taureck, Zwischen den Bildern. Metaphernkritische Essays über Liberalismus und Revolution (Hamburg: Merus, 2006), p. 49.

30 This distinguishes Nietzsche and Hitler from Luther, who wished to have the Jews expropriated and expelled on confessional grounds. That he also fruitlessly wished to see them outlawed in the above-described sense points to his status as anticipating Nietzsche’s annihilatory premises. On Luther as anticipating the idea of annihilation of the Jews, see, among others, Wolfgang Wippermann, Rassenwahn und Teufelsglaube (Berlin: Frank und Timme, 2013), p. 71ff.

31 Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2011).

32 Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction. Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005).

33 Marcus T. Cicero, De re publica/Der Staat, trans. Karl Büchner (Munich: Artemis und Winkler, 1987), p. 197.

34 Michael Howard, Clausewitz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 35–6.

35 Unlike Mussolini, Hitler appears to have hardly registered Nietzsche. Goebbels did read the philosopher, but never refers to his approval of mass annihilation; see diary entries from 23 March 1925 and 19 November 1935 (vol. 1, p. 168, and vol. 3, p. 911, respectively) in Joseph Goebbels, Tagebücher, 5 vols., ed. R. G. Ruth (Munich and Zurich: Piper, 1998).

36 For the most painstaking survey of Nietzsche’s anti-Judaism, see Losurdo, Nietzsche, il ribelle aristocratico.

37 Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, p. 391f.

38 Ibid., p. 404. On 1 April 1933, Hitler’s friend Ernst Hanfstaengl asked James McDonald, chairman of the American Policy Association, whether he was aware “that we have arranged to wipe out the entire Jewish population in the Reich”; see Nicholson Baker, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), p. 35.

39 Erasmus, Adagia, ed. Davide Canfora (Roma: Salerno, 2002), pp. 690–834.