The Case of Wagner
A Musician’s Problem
1
To do justice to this essay, one has to suffer of the fate of music as of an open wound.—Of what do I suffer when I suffer of the fate of music? That music has been done out of its world-transfiguring, Yes-saying character, so that it is music of decadence and no longer the flute of Dionysus.
Assuming, however, that a reader experiences the cause of music in this way as his own cause, as the history of his own sufferings, he will find this essay full of consideration and exceedingly mild. To be cheerful in such cases, genially mocking oneself, too—ridendo dicere severum1 when the verum dicere would justify any amount of hardness—is humanity itself. Does anyone really doubt that I, as the old artillerist I am,2 could easily bring up my heavy guns against Wagner?—Everything decisive in this matter I held back—I have loved Wagner.
Ultimately, an attack on a subtler “unknown one,” whom nobody else is likely to guess, is part of the meaning and way of my task—oh, I can uncover “unknown ones” who are in an altogether different category from a Cagliostro3 of music—even more, to be sure, an attack on the German nation which is becoming ever lazier and more impoverished in its instincts, ever more honest, and which continues with an enviable appetite to feed on opposites, gobbling down without any digestive troubles “faith” as well as scientific manners,4 “Christian love” as well as anti-Semitism, the will to power (to the Reich) as well as the évangile des humbles.5—Such a failure to take sides among opposites! Such neutrality and “selflessness” of the stomach! This sense of justice of the German palate that finds all causes just and accords all equal rights6—that finds everything tasty.—Beyond a doubt, the Germans are idealists.
When I visited Germany last, I found the German taste exerting itself to concede equal rights to Wagner and to the Trumpeter of S?kkingen;7 I myself witnessed how a Liszt Society was founded in Leipzig, for the cultivation and propagation of insidious8 church music, ostensibly in honor of one of the most genuine and German musicians—German in the old sense of that word, no mere Reichsdeutscher—the old master Heinrich Schütz.—Beyond a doubt, the Germans are idealists.9
2
But here nothing shall keep me from becoming blunt and telling the Germans a few hard truths: who else would do it?
I speak of their indecency in historicis. Not only have the German historians utterly lost the great perspective for the course and the values of culture; nor are they merely, without exception, buffoons of politics (or the church)—but they have actually proscribed this great perspective. One must first be “German” and have “race,” then one can decide about all values and disvalues in historicis—one determines them.
“German” has become an argument, Deutschland, Deutschland über alles1 a principle; the Teutons represent the “moral world order” in history—the carriers of freedom versus the imperium Romanum, and the restoration of morality and the “categorical imperative”2 versus the eighteenth century.—There is now a historiography that is reichsdeutsch; there is even, I fear, an anti-Semitic one—there is a court historiography, and Herr von Treitschke is not ashamed—3
Recently an idiotic4 judgment in historicis, a proposition of the fortunately late aesthetic Swabian, Vischer,5 was repeated in one German newspaper after another, as a “truth” to which every German has to say Yes: “The Renaissance and the Reformation—only the two together make a whole: the aesthetic rebirth and the moral rebirth.”
When I read such sentences, my patience is exhausted and I feel the itch, I even consider it a duty, to tell the Germans for once how many things they have on their conscience by now.6 All great crimes against culture for four centuries they have on their conscience.— And the reason is always the same: their innermost cowardice before reality, which is also cowardice before the truth; their untruthfulness which has become instinctive with them; their “idealism.”
The Germans did Europe out of the harvest, the meaning, of the last great age, the age of the Renaissance, at a moment when a higher order of values, the noble ones, those that say Yes to life, those that guarantee the future, had triumphed at the seat of the opposite values, those of decline—even in the very instincts of those who were sitting there. Luther, this calamity of a monk, restored the church and, what is a thousand times worse, Christianity, at the very moment when it was vanquished.—Christianity, this denial of the will to life become religion!—Luther, an impossible monk who, on account of his own “impossibility,” attacked the church and—consequently—restored it.—The Catholics would have good reasons to celebrate Luther festivals, to write Luther plays.—Luther—and the “moral rebirth”! To hell with psychology!7—Beyond a doubt, the Germans are idealists.
Twice, when an honest, unequivocal, perfectly scientific way of thinking had just been attained with tremendous fortitude and self-overcoming, the Germans managed to find devious paths to the old “ideal,” reconciliations of truth and “ideal”—at bottom, formulas for a right to repudiate science, a right to lie. Leibniz and Kant—these two greatest brake shoes of intellectual integrity in Europe!
Finally, when on the bridge between two centuries of decadence, a force majeure8 of genius and will became visible, strong enough to create a unity out of Europe, a political and economic unity for the sake of a world government—the Germans with their “Wars of Liberation” did Europe out of the meaning, the miracle of meaning in the existence of Napoleon; hence they have on their conscience all that followed, that is with us today—this most anti-cultural sickness and unreason there is, nationalism, this névrose nationale9 with which Europe is sick, this perpetuation of European particularism, of petty politics:10 they have deprived Europe itself of its meaning, of its reason—they have driven it into a dead-end street.11—Does anyone besides me know the way out of this dead-end street?—A task that is great enough to unite nations again?
3
And in the end, why should I not voice my suspicion? In my case, too, the Germans will try everything to bring forth from a tremendous destiny—a mouse. So far they have compromised themselves in my case; I doubt that they will do any better in the future.—Ah, how I wish I were a bad prophet in this case!—My natural readers and listeners are even now Russians, Scandinavians, and Frenchmen—will it always be that way?
In the history of the quest for knowledge the Germans are inscribed with nothing but ambiguous names; they have always brought forth only “unconscious” counterfeiters (Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, and Schleiermacher deserve this epithet as well as Kant and Leibniz: they are all mere veil makers):1 they shall never enjoy the honor that the first honest spirit in the history of the spirit, the spirit in whom truth comes to judgment over the counterfeiting of four millennia, should be counted one with the German spirit.
The “German spirit” is for me bad air: I breathe with difficulty near the by now instinctive uncleanliness in psychologicis which every word, every facial expression of a German betrays. They have never gone through a seventeenth century of hard self-examination, like the French—a La Rochefoucauld and a Descartes are a hundred times superior in honesty to the foremost Germans—to this day they have not had a psychologist. But psychology is almost the measure of the cleanliness or uncleanliness of a race.
And if one is not even cleanly, how should one have depth? It is with Germans almost as it is with women: one never fathoms their depths; they don’t have any, that is all. They aren’t even shallow.2—What is called “deep” in Germany is precisely this instinctive uncleanliness in relation to oneself of which I have just spoken: one does not want to gain clarity about oneself. Might I not propose the word “German” as an international coinage for this psychological depravity?—At this very moment, for example, the German Kaiser calls it his “Christian duty” to liberate the slaves in Africa: among us other Europeans this would then simply be called “German.”
Have the Germans produced even one book that has depth? They even lack the idea of depth in a book. I have met scholars who considered Kant deep; at the Prussian court, I fear, Herr von Treitschke is considered deep. And when I occasionally praise Stendhal as a deep psychologist, I have encountered professors at German universities who asked me to spell his name.
4
And why should I not go all the way? I like to make a clean sweep of things. It is part of my ambition to be considered a despiser of the Germans par excellence. My mistrust of the German character I expressed even when I was twenty-six (in the third Untimely One, section 6)1—the Germans seem impossible to me. When I imagine a type of man that antagonizes all my instincts, it always turns into a German.2
The first point on which I “try the reins” is to see whether a man has a feeling for distance in his system, whether he sees rank, degree,3 order between man and man everywhere, whether he makes distinctions: with that one is a gentilhomme; otherwise one belongs hopelessly in the broad-minded—ah, so good-natured—concept of canaille. But the Germans are canaille—ah, they are so good-natured.—One lowers oneself when one associates with Germans: the German puts others on a par.—Except for my association with a few artists, above all with Richard Wagner, I have not spent one good hour with a German.4—
If the most profound spirit of all millennia appeared among Germans, some savioress of the capitol5 would suppose that her very unbeautiful soul deserved at least equal consideration.—I cannot endure this race among whom one is always in bad company, that has no fingers for nuances—alas, I am a nuance—that has no esprit in its feet and does not even know how to walk.—The Germans ultimately have no feet at all, they have only legs.—The Germans have no idea how vulgar they are; but that is the superlative of vulgarity—they are not even ashamed of being merely Germans.—They join in every discussion; they consider themselves decisive; I fear they have reached a decision even about me.
My whole life is the demonstration de rigueur6 of these propositions. In vain do I seek among them for some sign of tact, of délicatesse in relation to me. From Jews, yes; never yet from Germans.
It is part of my nature to be gentle and benevolent toward everybody—I have the right not to make distinctions—but that does not prevent me from keeping my eyes open. I except no one, least of all my friends; in the end I hope that this has not diminished my humanity in relation to them. There are five or six things that have always been a point of honor with me.—Nevertheless it is true that almost every letter that has reached me for years now strikes me as a piece of cynicism: there is more cynicism in being kind to me than in any hatred.
I tell every one of my friends to his face that he has never considered it worth while to study any of my writings: I infer from the smallest signs that they do not even know what is in them. As for my Zarathustra: who among my friends saw more in it than an impermissible but fortunately utterly inconsequential presumption?
Ten years—and nobody in Germany has felt bound in conscience to defend my name against the absurd silence under which it lies buried: it was a foreigner, a Dane, who first possessed sufficient refinement of instinct and courage for this, who felt outraged by my alleged friends.—At what German university would it be possible today to have lectures on my philosophy, such as were given last spring in Copenhagen by Dr. Georg Brandes who thus proved himself once again as a psychologist?
I myself have never suffered from all this; what is necessary does not hurt me; amor fati7 is my inmost nature. But this does not preclude my love of irony, even world-historical irony. And thus I have sent into the world, about two years before the shattering lightning bolt of the Revaluation that will make the earth convulse—The Case of Wagner: let the Germans commit one more immortal blunder in relation to me that will stand in all eternity. There is barely enough time left for that.—Has it been accomplished?—Most delightfully, my dear Teutons! My compliments!8
1The motto of the book: “Through what is laughable say what is somber”—a variation of Horace’s ridentem dicere verum, quid vetat (what forbids us to tell the truth, laughing?), Satires 1.24.
2Nietzsche had done his compulsory military service with an artillery regiment, beginning in October 1867; but his actual service was cut short by an accident in which he was hurt, and he was bedridden and then convalescing until his discharge in October 1868. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, he was a Swiss subject, being a Swiss professor, but volunteered and served briefly as a medical orderly—for less than a month. Sick with dysentery and diphtheria, he was discharged.
3An impostor or charlatan, after Count Alessandro di Cagliostro (1743–1795; really Giuseppe Balsamo).
4Wissenschaftlichkeit.
5Gospel of the humble.
6… Gaumens, der allem gleiche Rechte gibt …
7An immensely popular epic poem by Josef Viktor Scheffel (1826–1886) that had gone through about 140 editions by 1886. In an earlier draft for this passage Nietzsche had considered pairing “Goethe and Scheffel” the way the will to power and the gospel of the humble are paired above (see Podach, Friedrich Nietzsches Werke).
Richard M. Meyer says of Scheffel in Die deutsche Literatur des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (German literature of the nineteenth century, Berlin, Bondi, 1900): “No poet of our time has been glorified with so many monuments, memorial stones, and memorial tablets;” also, “The Trumpeter of S?kkingen (1854) belongs among those books which have made popularity unpopular among us”.
8Listiger. Franz Liszt (1811–1886), the composer and pianist—and father of Cosima, then Wagner’s widow—was born in Raiding, Hungary; retired to Rome in 1861 and joined the Franciscan order in 1865; he died in Bayreuth in 1886.
9In the sense made popular by Schelling and Hegel: men who seek syntheses of opposites.
1“Germany, Germany above everything”: the beginning of the German national anthem.
2The unconditional and universal imperative that Kant considered the core of morality.
3For Nietzsche’s thoughts on Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896) and the German historians of that time see also Beyond Good and Evil, section 251, along with my long footnote (22). None of this kept Ernest Barker, an eminent British scholar, from publishing a tract on Nietzsche and Treitschke: The Worship of Power in Modern Germany, Oxford Pamphlets, Number 20, London, Oxford University Press, 1914; 4th impression, 1914!
4The words “idiot” and “idiotic” figure prominently in Nietzsche’s writings, beginning in 1887: see Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, Chapter 12, note 2.
5Friedrich Theodor Vischer (1807–1887) wrote Aesthetik, 6 volumes (1846–57); also a parody of Goethe’s Faust II, entitled Faust: Der Trag?die dritter Teil (i.e., Faust III; 1862, under the pseudonym Mystifizinski), and a very popular novel, Auch Einer (another one; 1879).
6The remainder of this section is quite similar to The Antichrist, section 61 (Portable Nietzsche.).
7Zum Teufel mit aller Psychologie: presumably, Nietzsche means that those who associate Luther with a “moral rebirth” have no regard whatever for psychology. Cf. The Antichrist, section 39 (Portable Nietzsche), The Will to Power, section 192, and Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, Chapter 12, section II.
8Superior force.
9National neurosis.
10Der Kleinstaaterei Europas, der kleinen Politik.
11Sie haben Europa selbst um seinen Sinn, um seine Vernunft—sie haben es in eine Sackgasse gebracht.
1The name of Schleiermacher (1768–1834), the leading Protestant theologian of the German romantic movement, means literally veil maker.
2Nietzsche here uses one of the “Maxims and Arrows” (number 27) from Twilight and applies it to the Germans. The last sentence is crossed out in the MS—presumably not by Nietzsche, and therefore printed in the German editions.
1Just before the middle of the section: “… Certainly, one who has to live among Germans suffers badly from the notorious grayness of their life and senses, their crudity, their dullness and doltishness, their clumsiness in delicate relationships, and even more their envy and a certain slyness and un-cleanliness in their character; one is pained and offended by their deeply rooted pleasure in the false and inauthentic …” Schopenhauer as Educator was written and published in 1874, the year Nietzsche turned thirty. And he was twenty-seven when his first book appeared. Thus “twenty-six” in the text is an error; but it is noteworthy how early he attributed “uncleanliness” to the Germans.
2There is no period in the MS, which continued: “—or an anti-Semite.” These words were struck out, presumably not by Nietzsche.
3Cf. Ulysses’ great speech in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, Act I, scene 3, about “degree.”
4See Appendix, section 3.
5That is, some goose.
6According to strict form.
7Cf. the conclusion of Chapter 2, above.
8According to Podach (p. 410) the following passage (ibid., p. 315) is crossed out in the MS with a colored pencil, meaning that it was deleted by the printer: “Just now, lest my friends be left out, an old friend writes me that she is now laughing at me.— And that at a moment when an indescribable responsibility weighs on me—when no word can be delicate and no eye respectful enough towards me. For I bear the destiny of humanity on my shoulders.”
Raoul Richter included this passage in a footnote to his postscript to the first edition of Ecce Homo (1908) but said he considered it “probable that the deletion was Nietzsche’s own” (p. 147). Cf. note 1 to Chapter 2, section 10, above.
The reference to the Revaluation, in the text, should be compared with section 3 of “Twilight of the Idols,” above: Nietzsche is speaking of his forthcoming book. He is not implying that the earth will be convulsed by his revelation of new values; as he explains in the first section of “Beyond Good and Evil,” above, the revaluation is a “No-saying”—a critique of faith and morals. This point is developed further on the following pages.