The last of Nietzsche

 During this year he was periodically overtaken by periods of euphoria. His initial meeting with Turin triggered just such an excessive rush of enthusiasm. His letters repeatedly describe Turin as possessing everything of the best: from the gelat: to the quality of the air. The cafés were the most beautiful he had ever seen, the ice creams the most delicious he had ever eaten. The food was wonderfully digestible. Without exception, Turin’s little trattorie provided the cheapest and best nourishment in the world! His intestines could cope with anything in this place. 

He found lodgings in the center of town, perched high on the third floor of number 6, Piazza Via Carlo Alberto. The splendid view from his window looked out over the magnificent piazza to the rippling pink-and-white Baroque facade of Palazzo Carignano, where King Victor Emmanuel II had been born. Nietzsche enjoyed informing his many correspondents of this fact. 

Adjacent to Nietzsche’s apartment was the Galleria Subalpina, a glass-and-wrought-iron behemoth built some ten years previously in the heyday of the international passion for erecting Crystal Palaces. The Subalpina’s long gallery was on the scale of a railway station without all the tiresome bother of trains. Fifty meters long and 

and

HE HAD No companions during his time in Turin. Not even any visitors. The days were spent working furiously, tempo fortissimo, on the book he had begun in Sils-Maria. 

The Antichrist, subtitled A Curse on Christianity, is a short, vitriolic work that hurls abuse at Christianity. The word Antichrist in German may mean “Antichrist” or “anti-Christian.” Nietzsche preserves his respect for the person of Jesus Christ throughout, while damning the religion that subsequently grew up in His name. 

A great deal of the book revisits what he has already said in Tw1light of the Idols and On the Genealogy of Morality. 

He reiterates his thoughts concerning Christianity’s dishonesty in devaluing life on earth against the hypothetical life to come. This erroneous favoring of cotton-wool-cloud eternity over trash-heap ev, eryday reality powered ressentiment, the vengeful, jealous, morally superior mindset used by priests to subdue whole populations whom they managed to reduce to slave mentality. 

The whole fictitious world of religion was rooted in hatred of Nature and profound unease concerning reality. And so the entire realm of subsequent morality throughout the Christian world was invalidated, because everything fell under this concept of imaginary cause and effect. Christianity’s hostility to reality was unsurpassed, Once the concept of “nature” had been branded as counter to the idea of God, the whole natural world had been branded reprehensible, including man’s nature, which, unimproved, was condemned as damnable. 

Nietzsche makes it clear that his condemnations are reserved for the Church and priests rather than for Jesus Christ, the founder of the religion, whom he admires and reveres. 

In an unspoken reference to Dostoyevsky, he suggests that Christ, the holy anarchist who roused up the lowly, the outcast and the sinners to oppose the ruling order, would be banished to Siberia today. Christ had died for political rather than religious reasons. The proof for this was the inscription on the Cross. The words “King of the Jews” were dynamite. It would always be a threatening title so long as the Jews had no physical territory to call their own. 

Christ, “the bringer of glad tidings,” died as He lived and as He taught-not to redeem mankind but to demonstrate how one ought to live. What He bequeathed to mankind was His practice. It was demonstrated in His bearing before the judges, before the guards, before every kind of mockery and calumny and finally in His bearing on the Cross. Not to resist the evil man, the unjust situation, even to love it; this was supreme absence of ressentiment. This was amor fati, eternal affirmation. 

The subsequent Christian Church had been molded by the second-rate interpreter St. Paul. It was he who turned Christ’s exemplary life into a legend of guilt sacrifice in its most repulsive and barbaric form. The blood sacrifice of the innocent man for the sins of che guilty--what atrocious paganism! It was Paul who focused ha cred against the world and hatred against flesh. It was he who gathered up every opportunity to spread ressentiment. Paul had guessed how you can use a small, sectarian movement to kindle a worldwide fire, how you can use the symbol of God on the Cross to take everything lying below, everything filled with secret rebellion, the whole inheritance of hidden anarchistic activities in the Roman Empire, and unite them into the mighty power that became the Christian Church. 

It is a translation of Christianity into politics that would hold up better without the last section in the book, where Nietzsche takes on the role of God by delivering a final judgment. As with much of his writing at this time, it is impossible to judge whether he is exercising extreme Swiftian satire or extreme seriousness, or if it simply represents a temporary spike in a graph tracking a mind that is growing unstable. 

It is headed: 

Given on the Day of Salvation, on the first day of the year one (September 30, 1888, according to the false calculation of time) 

°War to the death against vice: the vice 1s Christianity. 

All priests should be locked up. 

Participation in church services is an attack on public morality. 

The execrable location where Christianity brooded over its basilisk eggs [Israel? Jerusalem?] should be razed to the ground. Being the most depraved spot on earth, it should be the horror of all posterity. 

Poisonous snakes should be bred on top of it. 

The preacher of chastity is the real sinner. 

And

On the strength of his relationship with Georg Brandes, Nietzsche wrote to the Swedish playwright August Strindberg, asking him to undertake the translation of Ecce Homo into French. Nietzsche introduced himself to Strindberg through the by-now-customary letter telling of his Polish ancestry, his impeccable physical health, his world fame and the perfection to which he had brought the German language; “I speak the language of the rulers of the world.” He further tempted Strindberg with the promise that Prince Bismarck and the young Kaiser were to receive advance copies of the book “together with a written declaration of war-military men will then be unable to retaliate by taking police measures.” Strindberg himself was not at the greatest moment of mental stability in his life. He had no money, his first marriage to the wife he worshipped was crashing to disaster and they were living in a wing of a dilapidated castle overrun with peacocks and feral dogs and ruled over by a self-styled countess and her companion, a blackmailer, alchemist, magician and thief. It was an overheated concatenation of circumstances that gave rise to Strindberg’s greatest play, Miss Julie, but even in this chaotic context, Strindberg realized that something was very wrong with Nietzsche. Was Nietzsche mad? he asked Brandes. 

 It is not clear what exactly happened ON THE MORNING OF January 3, 1889. The story is they saw him as usual leaving Davide Fino’s corner house on the Piazza Carlo Alberto. They were used to the sad and solitary figure wrapped in thought, often on his way to the bookshop, where he was known to sit for hours with the book pressed very close to his face, reading but never making a purchase. The piazza was full of tired old horses drooping between the traces of carts and cabs waiting for fares: miserable jut-ribbed nags being tormented into some semblance of work by their masters. On seeing a cabbie mercilessly beating his horse, Nietzsche broke down. Overwhelmed by compassion, sobbing at the sight of it, he threw his arms protectively around the horse's neck, and collapsed. Or so they said. Crises are so quickly come and gone. Eyewitnesses see so many different truths. 

Somebody must have known which house he lived in, for Davide Fino was summoned. The police, too. Had it not been for Fino, Nietzsche would have been taken off straightaway and quite possibly lost forever in the dark labyrinth of Italian institutions for the insane, but Davide Fino brought him home. 

&

In 1888, KatseR WILHELM I had died at last, at the age of ninety. Seventeen years previously, he had accepted the German crown in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles, to Nietzsche’s great distress and fear for the imbalance of Europe. In the intervening years, the Kaiser and his Iron Chancellor Bismarck had famously forged the archconservative and repressive Second Reich on industrialization, capitalism, unscrupulous expansionism, the Protestant Church, artistic conservatism and censorship. All this had coagulated into one massive, congested, sclerotic, nationalist, repressive and authoritarian world power-as Nietzsche had feared would happen. Even while the edges of Nietzsche’s mind were fraying, he had not let go of his horror of the Second Reich. His final megalomaniac ravings in Turin had dwelled on his imagined power to have the Kaiser, Bismarck and all antiSemites shot. 

The last decade of the century ought to have been a time of optimism, an era of artistic innovation, as it was in France. But the dawn of the new emperor, Wilhelm II, failed to illumine the German horizon. Even his own army officers, who in 1914 would follow him into the First World War, were confidentially describing the new Kaiser in 1891 as “too changeable, too capricious, particularly in small things, too many incautious remarks... Does not seem to know himself what he wants. Rumours about psychological disturbance.”® 

Political uncertainty was coinciding with the jumpy spirituality that always goes with the looming close of a century. Where was the revolutionary iconoclast, asked Count Harry Kessler, a student at the University of Leipzig at the time: “A secret Messianism developed in us. The desert which every Messian needs was in our hearts, and suddenly there appeared above it, like a meteor, Nietzsche.”? It was 

Harry Kessler moved in the highest social, political and military circles throughout Europe. His family was rich, his mother stupendously beautiful: he was widely supposed to have been fathered by Kaiser Wilhelm I, an untrue supposition (the timing doesn’t work) that did him no harm. Both Bismarck and the Kaiser treated him as a favorite young hope of the side. Harry Kessler would become a secret agent and an officer in the First World War, Germany’s ambassador to Warsaw in 1918, an art activist, art patron and museum curator. He would ride in a cab with Nijinsky on the first night of The Rite of Spring and he would close Nietzsche’s eyes when they had opened again in his coffin. He was the complete cosmopolitan. Had Nietzsche been capable of comprehending, he would have approved of Harry Kessler becoming a founding trustee of the Nietzsche archive. 

Slim and elegant as a greyhound, multilingual, erudite, supremely well connected but never the grand seigneur, in 1891 the twenty-three-year-old student Kessler sniffed the air and found the future Nietzschean. Throughout the next forty years he promoted the new vision through the theaters, publishing houses, artists’ studios and duchesses’ drawing rooms of Europe until 1933, when he fled Germany on the Nazi assumption of power, and another story took over the pages of the history books. 

As a university student in the late 1880s and early ‘90s, Harry Kessler was part of “the Raskolnikov generation”: those on whom Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment had a profound effect. Kessler served as witness at the trial of a highborn fellow student who shot and killed his working-class girlfriend, after which the murderer failed to kill himself because his shot into his own chest was not well aimed.”° It was a nihilist act inspired by Dostoyevsky’s book, which made an unquantifiable impression on the first postChristian despairing generation. A rash of such murders among students overcome by “the great disgust,” the will to nothingness, became known as “the Raskolnikov effect” after the anti-hero in Dostoyevsky’s book.” 

Into this end-of-the-century mood of nihilism, of Schopenhauerian pessimism, moral despair and wondering what, if anything, was worth striving for, Kessler describes Nietzsche as making an impact as profound and as widespread as Byron had made upon a previous generation. 

Shipwrecked souls desperately seeking resolution between skepticism and a longing for peace, the generation clung to Nietzsche's removal of meaning from its illusory position outside of life, replacing it back into life itself. They venerated Nietzsche as a truly free spirit, a solitary voice extolling individualism, offering an alternative both to the decline of faith and to the steady assault of science upon the anthropomorphic assumption of the human ego. Nietzsche had created for them the possibility of meaning as something completely personal rather than, as Johann Fichte put it, “a lifeless household item one can put aside or pick up as one wishes.” If faith was dead, philosophy remained worthwhile in its ability to justify the very soul of the person who adopted, and adapted, it. 

The book that most affected Kessler was Beyond Good and Evil, with its Argonaut of the spirit who sailed uncharted seas in search of a new way to interpret the world, and new moral values to suit modern circumstances. Kill God, yes, but put the Ubermensch in His place. The Ubermensch as the outcome of a personal metaphysical struggle through the will to power existing in everyone and everything-though the struggle it depicts is not necessarily against others but against the petty emotions in oneself, such as envy and resentment. 

The Ubermensch, rather than the will to power, was the concept that made Zarathustra such a cult text at the end of the century. A pathbreaking book for the avant-garde, it provided a way out of impasse and decadence. It sanctified the earth without the need for justification through Heaven and Hell. Nietzsche set the joyful dance of the Hellenic gods against the Church-dependency that had  Accounted for the degeneration and diminution of Christian European man into the perfect herd animal. Amor fati flung the rope over the new nihilistic abyss over the centuries of envy and resentiment which had dragged the individual down to the level of the untermensch

&

The form of Nietzsche’s work was having a great and immediate impact on the arts of the 1890s also. What in fact had been imposed on Nietzsche by his illness-his short, aphoristic, often non-sequential bursts that at first sight appeared disorganized and unfinished-was seized upon as a direct and arrestingly modern way of communication. Strindberg’s plays are notorious for jettisoning the classical theatrical unities of time, space and action and for being incomprehensible on the page because they do not follow a logical progression, while being electrifying on stage for the same reason. Munch didn’t clear up dribbles and splashes of paint; he left whole areas of canvas naked and unpainted. It was the painterly equivalent of the powerful effect of the half-glimpsed, the suggestive quality of the aphorism that Nietzsche had first seized upon in Sorrento, and upon which he built the powerful and extraordinarily modern strategy of “the philosopher of perhaps,” a position which gave him the power to end an aphorism, a train of thought or even an entire book with an ellipsis,  Bring the reader in charge of the conclusion while at the same time acknowledging that objective truth is not even conceivable for humans striving for it mere illusion. 

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