Robert asked:

To what extent does Nietzsche's philosophy deserve to be tainted with Nazism?

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You may not realise it, but this is a LOADED question! And although there are several ways of
handling it, I will suggest something to you which is always a good way of defusing it: before asking it
in just these terms, be sure that you have at least a working acquaintance with Nietzsche's
philosophy and ditto with Nazi ideology. For if that's the case, then you might find that any relationship
between Nietzsche and Nazism is a matter of third parties, invariably with vested interests, making
that connection, which does not in any genuine sense exist. I would go even further and assert that
the more you become acquainted with his writings, the less similarity you will find. Mind you, there are
causes why the 'taint' arose; but again this is neither Nietzsche's doing nor indeed that of the Nazis
themselves, whose 'leading lights' (if you wanted to call them that) would hardly ever be caught
reading a philosopher! And on the other side, although he's not around to confirm my opinion, I think
Nietzsche himself would have recoiled in horror at the election of the Nazi Party, let alone their doings
once they held the reins of power.

But I owe you at least a hint of an account, why people keep sniffing around Nietzsche to find if the
odour of proto-Nazism, which once was believed to be clinging to him, is still there. Essentially they
are two. Firstly, there is a certain amount of 'incendiary' writing in his work, and some of it is couched
in language that can easily be bent to suit an ideology if that happens to be your intention. So certain
phrases like "I philosophise with a hammer", "blonde beast", "Uebermensch", "herd mentality",
"master race" and so on got stripped of their philosophical vestments and thrust into a sub-intellectual
political milieu where they could hardly stand up as the concepts they were in their own environment,
but got turned into slogans.But you must surely have heard that Nietzsche felt himself to be an
apostle of the aristocracyof mankind; and now try and match that attitude to beer hall speeches, the
Nuremberg rally, Hitler Youth and so on: the very "canaille" he never tired of raging against. And yet
he was fulminating against Germany when there was 'Kultur' there, with a capital "K". I think Nazism
would have exceeded his capacity to believe in its very possibility. However, there is another reason,
equally important. Nietzsche had the misfortune that a totally unscrupulous sister 'looked after' his
posthumous fame, who outlived him by decades and spent most of that time 'editing' his letters and
manuscripts by painstaking forgery of his handwriting. In particular she was concerned that posterity
would not read those letters of his where he told her 'home truths' of the most unpleasant kind,
including her political affiliations and her antisemitism. With Hitler, by the way, she got on like a house
on fire.

But the worst 'service' she rendered her dead brother was to publish his projected book, The Will to
Power.This book was throughout the early decades of the 20th century regarded as his chef
d'oeuvre.You should be aware that Nietzsche is not responsible for its contents; for although many of
the words and sentences are his, their arrangement is a wilful distortion and the best thing to do (as
editors have done ever since the 1950s) is to ignore its existence and read the aphorisms in the
higgledy-piggledy order in which they were written. In a word, the book is a forgery, a concoction of
paragraphs in a sequence calculated to rouse a certain impression that does not reflect Nietzsche's
intentions (what little we know of them). Who among scholars could have known this during the years
of the fascist hegemony? They didn't and accepted the book as what it purported to be. But we,
today, who know better, should of course draw the consequence and let the 'Nazi case' dies its
natural death. In a way the continued hankering after it is becoming a manner of refusing to look into
his philosophy and find ourselvesdepicted as in a horrid distorting mirror! Nietzsche was a prophet;
and as you know, they're always a prickly lot. My feeling is that it would be much more useful to
pursue the question, why and how did Nietzsche become such an easy prey to bowdlerisation, and
not just by the Nazis? But let me end as I began: there is no case; and to prove this you need do no
more than read his works. If in addition you can spare the time to read into Nazi ideology, you will
only strengthen the case. But I for one doubt it is worth the effort. Nietzsche was a great philosopher,
and in itself this is incompatible with Nazism. Accordingly I think it is high time we stop looking for
things he didn't say and affiliations he didn't foster and start paying attention to the things he did say.

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney