Basic writings of Nietzsche - By Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche & Walter Arnold Kaufmann Page 0,7

Geburt der Tragödie.

2

The first edition of The Birth of Tragedy was published in 1872, when Nietzsche was twenty-seven. It was immediately attacked by a young philologist, Ulrich Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, in an unbridled polemical pamphlet entitled Zukunftsphilologie!1 Wagner’s music was then called “music of the future,” and Wilamowitz tried to expose Nietzsche’s “philology of the future”—a philology devoid of Greek quotations and footnotes.

Actually, there was much more to the attack than this. Nietzsche had been called to a chair at the University of Basel in Switzerland in 1869, and promoted to a full professorship of classical philology the following year—at the age of twenty-five. His doctoral degree had been conferred by the University of Leipzig without his having written a dissertation, on the basis of the call to Basel. That call, in turn, had been based on a superlative recommendation by Professor Ritschl, who had published articles by Nietzsche in the philological journal he edited and who had informed Basel that Nietzsche “is the first from whom I have ever accepted any contribution at all while he was still a student.” The tenor of Ritschl’s estimate of Nietzsche is perhaps best summed up in his sentence: “He will simply be able to do anything he wants to do.”2 Nietzsche’s appointment to a chair at twenty-four was a sensation in professional circles, and it was to be expected that in his first book he would try to show the world of classical philology that his meteoric rise had been justified. Instead—he published The Birth of Tragedy, the kind of volume that could not be expected to appeal to the guild at any time, least of all to German professors in the new Empire, founded the year before.

Wilamowitz (1848–1931) was four years Nietzsche’s junior, had just received his doctorate but not yet the title of professor—and the attack on Nietzsche was his first “book.” He did try to establish the range and solidity of his scholarship by cataloguing Nietzsche’s faults—and he saw nothing good at all in The Birth. His attack culminated in a charge of “ignorance and lack of love of truth” (p. 32).

Nietzsche’s friend Erwin Rohde replied, still in 1872, in a pamphlet he called Afterphilologie3 to signify a perversion of philology. Luther had liked the prefix After, which refers literally to the human posterior; Kant, too, had used it in his book on religion (1793); and Schopenhauer had spoken of Afterphilosophie when he attacked the philosophy of the universities. Rohde tried to show how many of the mistakes Wilamowitz claimed to have found in The Birth involved errors on his part. But Rohde also called Wilamowitz repeatedly “our Dr. phil.” (our Ph.D.)—Rohde himself had just received the title of professor, though he was not yet a full professor—and “the pasquinader”;4 and the level of his polemic was no higher than that of the attack he sought to meet. Two quotations may show this:

“I have emphasized this example because it may serve you as a sample at the outset of the manner in which throughout this pasquinade ignorance, the art of eager slander, and speculative reliance on the blind prejudices of the general reader are woven together into an attractive whole” (p. 10).

“… really no more similar than an ape is to Heracles—indeed, even less; about as similar as our Dr. phil. von Wilamowitz is to the type of the ‘Socratic man’ whom our friend [Nietzsche] designates as the ‘noblest opponent’ of an artistic culture, although our Dr. phil. rather amusingly supposes that the designation fits him and the likes of him” (p. 12).

This last passage is important because it also illustrates Nietzsche’s high esteem of the “Socratic man.” Afterphilologie, to be sure, was written by Rohde, not Nietzsche; but the two men were very close friends at that time, and the point of Rohde’s pamphlet was to expose misinterpretations of The Birth of Tragedy.

In 1873 Wilamowitz replied once more with a sequel to his Zukunftsphilologie.5 The tenor of his reply may be gleaned from a remark near the end: “I should waste my time and energy on the inanities and wretchednesses of a couple of rotted brains?” (p. 23). Later, both Wilamowitz and Rohde made great reputations as classical philologists and never reprinted these early essays—presumably because they felt embarrassed by them.

Rohde, incidentally, had published a review of The Birth of Tragedy in the Norddeutsche allgemeine Zeitung, Sunday, May 26, 1872, before Wilamowitz’s pamphlet appeared. And in 1882 he published a very critical and hostile review of Wilamowitz’s Antigonos von Karystos