Basic writings of Nietzsche - By Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche & Walter Arnold Kaufmann Page 0,313

roughly thirty miles west of Rôcken (near Lützen), where Nietzsche was born. And Ranke, like Nietzsche, got his secondary school education at Schulpforta.

1Podach (Friedrich Nietzsches Werke, 1961) reproduces a photograph of section 10 (plate XV) and points out that the spiral scribble used to delete the following passage at this point was characteristic of Nietzsche’s sister and never employed by him (p. 408; cf. also pp. 245f.).

“Our present culture is ambiguous in the highest degree.—The German emperor making a pact with the pope, as if the pope were not the representative of deadly hostility to life!—What is being built today will no longer stand in three years.—When I measure myself against my ability, not to speak of what will come after me, a collapse, a construction without equal, then I more than any other mortal have a claim to the epithet of greatness.”

In the first edition of Ecce Homo (1908) this paragraph was printed in a footnote in Raoul Richter’s postscript (pp. 147f.) and introduced with the following comment: “There are only two passages of any length where the peculiarity of the crossing out and Peter Gast’s testimony, based on his recollection, make it merely probable that the deletion was Nietzsche’s own.” The other passage will be found at the end of the discussion of “The Case of Wagner,” below.

2Pathetisch in German is closer in meaning to bombastic than it is to pitiful. The word is readily associated with an actor’s style and with highly idealistic passages in drama—in Schiller’s plays, for example—where big words are used freely and a laugh would puncture the whole effect. The same consideration applies to Pathos in the next sentence.

One may wonder whether this whole paragraph is starkly ironical or, on the contrary, totally lacking in self-awareness. Without denying that both alternatives contain a grain of truth, one may insist that Nietzsche’s central point is important. He never lost the ability to laugh, and his self-image was the very antithesis of his sister’s later image of him which, at her bidding, was translated into pictures and sculptures that she commissioned and for which she posed her brother who was by then a helpless invalid.

Finally, if we take seriously Nietzsche’s words, “not a moment in my life”—as distinguished from “not a line in this book”—he is incontestably right. Consider how Dr. Paneth, one of Freud’s friends, described Nietzsche of whom he saw a great deal in Nizza from December 26, 1883, until March 26, 1884: “There is not a trace of false pathos or the prophet’s pose in him, as I had rather feared after his last work. Instead his manner is completely inoffensive and natural…. He told me, but without the least affectation or conceit, that he always felt himself to have a task …” For further quotations from his letters and some discussion, see Walter Kaufmann, From Shakespeare to Existentialism (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday Anchor Books, 1960).

3Die kein Mensch mir nachmacht—oder vormacht … If Nietzsche meant—and this possibility cannot be ruled out—“or has done before me,” the text ought to read: oder mir vorgemacht hat.

4Love of fate. It should be noted how Ecce Homo exemplifies this attitude. As long as one overlooks this, as well as the fact that Nietzsche’s life for the preceding decade, and more, had been troubled by continued ill health and excruciating physical pain, and that his books were, without exception, totally “unsuccessful,” one does not begin to understand Ecce Homo.

Why I Write Such Good Books

1

I am one thing, my writings are another matter.—Before I discuss them, one by one, let me touch on the question of their being understood or not understood. I’ll do it as casually as decency permits; for the time for this question certainly hasn’t come yet. The time for me hasn’t come yet: some are born posthumously.

Some day institutions will be needed in which men live and teach as I conceive of living and teaching; it might even happen that a few chairs will then be set aside for the interpretation of Zarathustra. But it would contradict my character entirely if I expected ears and hands for my truths today: that today one doesn’t hear me and doesn’t accept my ideas is not only understandable, it even seems right to me. I don’t want to be confounded with others—not even by myself.

To repeat, one cannot find many traces of ill will in my life; and of literary ill will, too, I could scarcely relate a single case. But only too many of pure foolishness!

To