Introduction

For readers who grew up, like me, during a high tide of secularism in the West, it has been a surprise and a shock to witness that tide turn. The secularist and consumerist wave probably peaked in the 1980s: this was a world captivated by the newest consumer gadget in the shops, the latest football star to move clubs for a world record transfer fee, and the advertising that told you sex with the sexiest was yours for the taking – if you could only rise high enough, Michael Jordan-like, to pass society’s cruel tests on who gets to have what.¹ Religion and theology gathered dust somewhere in the psyche’s hinterlands. Born into a church-going and clerical family, I was of the minority still garnering religious experience, on Church of Scotland pews. But this was quaint tradition and ritual; middle-class, do-gooding whimsy; and it hardly felt like it really mattered.

Organized religion’s reclamation of a strong-arm role in British civic society flares up, highly visible, on certain city streets, but is also the result of a hundred big money deals conducted over restaurant tables or in closed rooms, which most of us only hear about years after they’ve been struck. One such spiritually minded dealer is Sir Paul Marshall. He started going to services at Holy Trinity Brompton, now commonly called HTB, in West London when in his late thirties, in 1997 – the same year he and accomplice Ian Wace got family, friends, and George Soros to chip in spare cash so that they could float their hedge fund with $50 million in seed capital. Knowing that this same fund, Marshall Wace, held $69 billion in assets as of 2025, helping the world’s richest get that tick richer, should remind us of one of the New Testament’s most conscience-nagging lines: ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.’² But fairness demands we also report Marshall’s consistent attempts to give away large chunks of his fortune. With assets and personal wealth estimated at around £900 million, this is easier for Jesus to encourage than for heavily moneyed Christians to do, despite the ‘hundreds of millions’ Marshall has poured into ‘schools, universities, and churches’, and into programs training Church of England priests.³

Are these phenomena necessarily suspect? And how can Nietzsche, with his infamous and still-reverberating polemics against Christianity, give us a novel perspective on it? These questions rattled around my head as my train drew into King’s Cross station early last August, fresh from my Islamic Studies jaunt around Glasgow (see my two-part article from November 2025 in this magazine⁴), rucksack strapped to my back and walking boots to my feet, my heart set on digging out answers from the ground up. In part one of this essay I set the scene regarding Marshall and charismatic or evangelical Christianity in London (shifting terms for the same entity), and how my urban pilgrimage walks there revealed a community that should be seen as an unexpected inversion of the ‘Slave Revolt’: Nietzsche’s catchy coinage for how an obscure, first-century Jewish sect became a world religion. In part two I turn the tables on Nietzsche’s meta-narrative on Christianity’s historical role, drawing on recent historical and religious studies research on the early Christians. As several leaders of this group did indeed grow up as slaves, or as children of slaves, shouldn’t their rebellion against a religious and social orthodoxy that was built on slavery be seen as an ethical act, and a justice-based movement, against the fatalistic and tyrannical Greco-Roman world that they were merging out of?

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Marshall and Charismatic-Evangelical Christianity: Who Gets to Call who Names?

Marshall seeing religion and politics as two manifestations of a single endeavour comes into focus when you learn of which media he has bought into and pushed in the last five years. Following the launch of GB News in 2021, Marshall pledged to fund the platform to the tune of £70 million over its first two years. It’s a catchall cauldron of ‘breaking’ non-news, a politics of hate boiled and re-boiled to death, hounding its obsessions with all the grace of a terrier that’s carrying half-dead prey in its mouth. A terrier that would rather die than drop it. ‘Small boat arrivals [in the UK] on track to hit 200,000 TODAY with less than 8,000 deported in eight years’,⁵ the platform screams in a story that’s tweaked then recycled daily. This platform has no truck with the philosophical caveat declaring that the collective ethical agency of these 200,000 immigrants is no better or worse than the collective agency of any other randomly selected 200,000 UK residents. But another current affairs outlet that Marshall has spent millions on is incomparably more nuanced, even philosophical at times. This is a long-journalism outfit, to which non-conformist writers from both Right and Left contribute, and which goes by the distinctly Nietzschean name of UnHerd. Its financing opaque (though we estimate Marshall has forked out £17 million for the endeavour, in the nine years since it was founded)⁶, it manages, unlike GB News, to host genuinely great writing, through pairing unlikely voices. Terry Eagleton, for example, celebrated cultural theorist, Marxist, and paid-up anti-Nietzschean in political terms,⁷ has contributed dozens of articles, including the pertinent ‘Was Jesus a Revolutionary?’.

Eagleton’s colleagues representing the Right on the paper don’t hold back when it comes to opinionizing on Brexit, and what they see as its emancipatory consequences. Sohrab Ahmari, the US editor of UnHerd and a convert to Catholicism, published a fawning interview with US trade representative Jamieson Greer, parroting enthusiastically Greer’s words on the 2025 Transatlantic Trade Deal: ‘Brexit made it possible for the UK to do this’, i.e., to seal the agreement.⁸ Joining up the dots, the £100,000 donated by UnHerd’s owner to the Vote Leave campaign in 2016 seems like a flinging of loose change into the hat; Marshall’s bankrolling of Nigel Farage to the tune of £80,000 monthly, for the latter to present a show on GB News, reads, by contrast, like a strategic intervention to buy a neo-Conservative future for a particular walled-off island state.⁹

If none of this sounds faintly Christian in the colloquial sense of pity for and engagement with the poor and the meek, then it would be politic to step back a decade, or century, or two, to understand more about the evangelical or charismatic wing of the religion that Marshall is part of. We know of the etymological roots in the ancient Greek εὐαγγέλιον (euangélion), meaning good news or glad tidings, and of John (c. 6–100 CE), and the other gospel writers, as the Evangelists: the proclaimers of things ‘written, that ye might believe … and that believing ye might have life’: as John puts it.¹⁰ And from the time when other New Testament books took shape, between c. 60-90 CE, ‘evangelist’ was being used more broadly to name any wandering preacher of this same good news.¹¹ Like the preachers whose training was paid by Marshall, these itinerants spoke with the will to convert, and with the self-empowerment belief can give you. Andrew Graystone, author of a recent book on the child abuse scandal implicating evangelical leaders that forced the resignation of Justin Welby as Archbishop of Canterbury (and thus as head of the Anglican Church) last year, sums up the anti-intellectual certainty that the HTB approach expounds: ‘You believe that your brand of Christianity is the only way to get to heaven. You believe that you were selected by God to govern.’¹² The same author’s assertion that ‘Marshall’s money set the agenda of the Church [of England; hereafter C-of-E] under Welby’,¹³ seems justified, when we reconsider what ‘to govern’ means in the vendible system of UK democracy today. Marshall’s ‘generous’ funding of the HTB venture St Mellitus Theological College means it now educates one in four C-of-E clerics;¹⁴ the £10 million (a conservative count) that he’s funnelled into the Church Revitalisation Trust has enabled that organ ‘to plant’ 185 Marshallian ‘City Centre Resource churches in key cities across England and Wales’, a conquest that includes the recruitment of ‘worship leaders ... children’s workers ... and social action workers’.¹⁵ From out of the shadows, this figure seems to be at least co-governing what has historically been the world’s most influential Protestant church.

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Everyday Londoners and Other Evangelicals

Knowing something of Marshall’s form, the HTB church is the natural place for me to start my investigative hike. Two minutes from Knightsbridge’s bling-bling denizens and shops, and encountered on a weekday with no services underway, the church feels all English pastoral, its tower topped with form rather than escape: a square, battlemented parapet. (It’s lovely irony to learn later that choosing this rather than a spire was a money-saving move by the church’s commissioners in the 1820s.) The polygonal vestry annex to the tower’s left is Gothic Revivalism in force, and the place where still today the clergy shed and don their vestments, to represent symbolically what Nietzsche calls ‘the priestly caste’.¹⁶ When I’m appalled again by the behaviour of flesh and blood Christians, it’s church architecture and indeed all the heights of sacred art that win me back, that leave me feeling that something here is worth preserving. Or even worth embodying. The boards up on the outside of the church advertising Alpha, the globally successful evangelising course launched from HTB in the 2000s, confirm that I’m in the right place for my investigations.¹⁷ Wanting to give everyday Christians another chance, I descend to the Bloom Cafe in the undercroft. Where I’m reminded that the UK now runs, any ethically responsible governing class that once served long since departed, mostly on a blend of hot beverages and kindness between ordinary inhabitants of the place.

Returning for a second Earl Grey, I get talking to Lisa, a South African, who’s preparing the drinks and serving the cakes behind the counter. I mention Alpha as a gambit, so Lisa asks me if I’m a Christian. I hedge: ‘good question’. ‘Well, then Alpha might be the very thing for you’, she responds, before pressing a slim paperback, A Life Worth Living, by Alpha-designer and former HTB vicar Nicky Gumbel, into my hands. Embarrassed by the God-talk, I return to peruse the notice on my table, informing me that revenue from my visit is going towards their ‘Social Transformation Ministry’, which prioritises those on society’s fringes ‘including women, displaced persons, prison leavers and those experiencing homelessness.’ Not doubting that those employed in this ministry work wholeheartedly to accompany these individuals, I’m fascinated how a project fuelled by Big Capital¹⁸ can talk authentically this socialist-sounding talk. The highlighting of ‘women’ as among the most marginalized is both reality – London women have substantially lower average incomes than London men, and are at higher risk of being victims of violent and sexual crimes – and a thinly-veiled political stand. Commentators in the HTB camp are fierce opponents of what they call the ‘ideology’ of ‘transgenderism’, going so far as to argue that it has ‘captured’ the BBC.¹⁹

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The Christian Poets’ Streets of London

Covering miles on foot begins in godly earnest the next morning. I’ve chosen the London Martyrs’ Way, a leisurely and faithfully-curated route that meanders from Tower Hill in the city’s east, to Tyburn Tree in Hyde Park, in the city’s west.²⁰ Follow it, and it will lead you to and past the sites of dozens of religiously-motivated executions, churchyards, and churches closed and open, pools of quiet yards away from briskly-walked streets, yards from the techno-like thrum that is London, and which never really gets switched off. The literature and history obsessed, including this author, could spend days on this trail: who wouldn’t nip round that next corner, and try that next church’s great metal door handle, to get a glimpse of the places Samuel Pepys or William Blake worshipped?²¹ Almost every step incarnates my bookishness. I’m led to ‘where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours’, arrived at after, as T. S. Eliot reports in his epoch-making poem The Waste Land, ‘... each man fixed his eyes before his feet. / Flowed up the hill and down King William Street’.²² Aware of the tidings of The Waste Land as the mostly London terrain Eliot crosses between his infinitely talented and clever agnosticism, and his conversion to Anglo-Catholicism,²³ makes seeing this church matter. But it’s not just white Anglo-American male seekers that the walk calls to mind. Soon after Tower Hill, where Catholic leaders John Fisher and Thomas More were beheaded in the summer of 1535 for resisting Henry VIII’s worldly overreach, you enter a square, ringed by skyscrapers, in which a cluster of inscribed columns meets you. These are the Gilt of Cain,²⁴ a sculpture commemorating the bicentenary of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. One column demands: ‘WHO WILL KICK OVER THE STALL AND TURN THE TABLE?’, a line by poet Lemn Sissay invoking Christ throwing over the tables of financial operators in the Temple,²⁵ and thus rearticulating the unanswered question: who will finally put the brakes on the financial class and on the havoc they wreak? The class who built wealth through investing savvily the profits of slavery, and who still inhabit, representatively, the district in which this sculpture stands, the officiously named ‘City of London’?²⁶  

As unable to answer these questions as the next philosophically-inclined human, I stride on, past the entrance portico of the National Provincial Bank of England, whose deep barrel vault wants to induce the awe we can feel on the threshold to a Romanesque cathedral – or leaves us scrambling for our architectural guides, if we’ve forgotten such features’ names. I pass St Edmund, King and Martyr, its ancient plaque claiming ‘206 feet superficial’ of ‘the ground on each side of the doorway’ as its ‘freehold property’. Its modern, less pedantic sign calls it an ‘imprint church’. This is corporate but also God-given language, or so asserts Wole Agbaje, a Nigeria-born, South-London-raised evangelical, who refounded the congregation here in an HTB-backed manoeuvre, aged just 24. Agbaje retells the story of an earlier dream he had, seven nights running, of ‘forming a Gospel Showcase to tell the story of Jesus through creative media’, and of feeling ‘God say that it was going to be a movement called IMPRINT and it would bring his prodigals home’. With this divine green light leaving no room for doubt, Agbaje is seen as achieving the rejuvenation desired: just under ‘200 young people’ crowded into St Edmund for its September 2019 relaunch.²⁷

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Shining Faith With the Dullest and Greatest Music

Agbaje’s partly realised dream is to synthesise the stage arts of ‘drama, poetry, dance, video visuals and music’ to tell the ‘story of Jesus’ to Londoners.²⁸ I won’t judge his musical aesthetics until I’ve attended one the Christian jamborees he curates. But regarding the rest of the HTB crowd, as you’d hear for yourselves if you were to enter their services, it’s Christian guitar rock ad infinitum, upbeat, generic, and incredibly dull. Unquestionably, the singers and guitarists are competent, or even talented; yet you’d have to be a hardened believer not to soon desperately sicken of it. As the songs’ protagonists already realise their sinners’ status and need for Jesus’s redemption when the music begins, the utter absence of drama, or of an individualised voice, leaves sceptical listeners wondering how they’ll survive the next six minutes.²⁹ Back in the US, the home of such holy guitar riffs, Johnny Cash manifested more compelling anguish in one single phoneme, or chord change, of his dozens of songs about being a Christian: just listen to ‘The Man Comes Around’.³⁰ Only one person in creation’s history gets to be Cash, but with such a soul and mind expanding heritage of sacred vocal music in English to draw from, both popular and pre-electric, the HTB leadership decision to reproduce boilerplate Neo-Gospel-Rock down the line feels smugly philistine. Walking tall away from such mere repetition, as a Cash protagonist would teach us to do, I am led to a different aesthetic world. Quite unplanned, my boots to have taken me to the approaches to St Paul’s Cathedral, the midpoint of the London Martyrs’ Way, just as the bells are calling the curious to the 5 pm Sung Eucharist.³¹ This is held in the drum or tall cylinder that supports the building’s central dome, the unusually large windows for a church of this time (completed under Christopher Wren’s direction in 1708) allowing sunlight from this late summer day to pour in. Sitting waiting for the service to start, your eyes are drawn up the great masonry piers, clad in the typical fluting of these times, to the Whispering Gallery thirty metres above. The whole thing is certainly grand, but free of the too-much pinky-goldness that affects many Baroque churches. Both believers and committed secularists can find beauty here, the latter left pondering which agency this movement has wielded, a non-existent deity as its focus, enabling disciples to expend such energy and resources creating this.    

The unaccompanied liturgical chants that form the service, the congregation responding in turn, are nothing new, yet aren’t even slightly repetitive.³² The Sursum Corda or ‘Lift up your hearts’ dialogue, sung just before communion is taken, is one of the church’s oldest, its text dating to the Canons of Hippolytus (written early 200s, CE)³³. Its melody’s basic shape emerged around the same time, and is sung today in G Mixolydian – piano and guitar players: think G Major, with a flattened 7^th (F sharp to F natural).

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From London Slave Ship Captain to Participant in the Slave Revolt

A talented pianist, and occasional composer, Nietzsche wrote much about music,³⁴ and occasionally about its churchy forms. While young, he was far from being the Christian-baiting devil he posed as in his later years. A twenty-five year old professor in Basel, Nietzsche writes to his friend Erwin Rohde to recommend the ‘godly Bach’, whose St Matthew’s Passion he’s heard ‘three times’ in the past week: anyone who has ‘completely lost their knowledge’ of Christianity will hear it again in this music, which is ‘genuinely like a Gospel [Evangelium]’.³⁵ Such passion fits with his early theory of Christianity as affirmational rather than nihilistic, and as carrying cultural gifts forward from a Grecian and particularly Dionysian world view. His note 7[13] on this from late 1870 / early 1871 can’t be read in isolation, yet nonetheless pictures early Christianity as a juxtaposition or even friction between Johannine-Grecian attitudes on the one hand, and Judaic attitudes on the other:

The Gospel according to St John born out of Greek atmosphere, out of the soil of the Dionysian: its influence on Christianity in contrast to Judaism.³⁶

However already at this stage of his career, Nietzsche is propagating original and dehistoricizing standpoints on early Christianity, in texts including the disturbing 1872 essay on ‘The Greek State’, which he distributed to a coterie audience but chose not to publish during his active lifetime.³⁷ In a text that argues for slavery, no abstract topic after the American Congress had passed the Abolition Amendment in January 1865, thus liberating four million African Americans, Nietzsche has brass neck enough to claim that

The enormous social emergencies of the present are born out of the emasculation of the newer type of human, not out of genuine and deep compassion with that misery; and if it is true that the Greeks’ [system of] slavery was their ruin, then the counterpart of that is far more certain, that the lack of slavery will be our ruin: a quantity that neither ancient Christianity, nor the ancient Germanic nation [Germanenthum] regarded as the least objectionable, still less condemnable.³⁸

The progress from this philo-Christian position, hardly tenable when newer historical research on Christianity and slavery is brought to bear on it, and Nietzsche’s later, and better-known genealogy of Christianity as an ultimately successful ‘Slave Rising’ [Sklavenaufstand], whereby a former slave class became, over the course of almost two millennia, the ruling, ‘priestly’ class in the West, subjugating almost everyone to its life-denying worldview, is convoluted. But it’s also the subject of a small army of excellent articles and books, both popular and scholarly in emphasis.³⁹

I cannot summarize this discourse here, but do repudiate Nietzsche’s 1872 argument: early Christian clergy and laity, many of them slaves themselves, or their descendants,⁴⁰  were so opposed to granting one group of humans the legal rights to physically use the bodies of other humans at will,⁴¹ that this opposition became their signature idea, the motor behind their paradigm shift in ethics and in ideas. How this shift played out, and in some senses collapsed from the late fifteenth century, when thinkers of European colonialism reread canonical Christian texts to justify the enslavement of non-European peoples as labour power for the new colonies will be returned to in part II. Here I’ll also illuminate new angles on Nietzsche’s writing on both Christianity and slavery. But we part for now by returning to the City of London. Wole Agbaje, who refounded St Edmund, King and Martyr in 2019, is also responsible for the parish church that ‘chapel of ease’ is attached to – St Mary Woolnoth – and speaks out about its history.⁴² John Newton, former slave ship captain turned abolitionist, and lyrics-writer for ‘Amazing Grace’, preached here as Rector in the late 1700s: and for abolition. Newton mentored William Wilberforce, evangelical Christian and leader of the parliamentary wing of abolitionism in Britain until parliament passed the Slave Trade Act in 1807, prohibiting the Atlantic Slave Trade within British Empire territory.⁴³ Why Nietzsche sought to resuscitate this most brutal of practices, which Black abolitionists in his lifetime, including Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), Harriet Tubman (c. 1822–1913), and Sojourner Truth (1797–1883),⁴⁴ were dedicating their lives to fighting – and what that partisanship means regarding Christianity as a ‘slave rising’ – will be addressed in this essay’s concluding part.

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To be continued.

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All photographs have been taken by Henry Holland. The article imagine shows the ‘Gilt of Cain’ sculpture, in Fen Court in the City of London. On it, one finds inscribed a verse by poet Lemn Sissay: ‘WHO WILL KICK OVER THE STALL AND TURN THE TABLE?’.

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Bibliography

Ahmari, S. (2025, May 9). US trade chief: Brexit liberated the UK. UnHerd. https://unherd.com/2025/05/us-trade-chief-brexit-liberated-the-uk/

Bradshaw, P. F., Johnson, M. E., & Phillips, L. E. (2002). The Apostolic tradition: A commentary (H. Attridge, Ed.). Fortress Press.

Brown, C. L. (2006). Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. University of North Carolina Press.

Burley, R. (2026, May 18). Inside the capture of the BBC: How transgenderism killed impartiality. UnHerd. https://unherd.com/2026/05/inside-the-capture-of-the-bbc/

CCX. (2019, October). Plant stories: IMPRINT Church London. The Gregory Centre for Church Multiplication. https://ccx.org.uk/stories/imprint-church-london/

Deleuze, G. (1994). Difference and repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1968)

Douglass, F. (1855). My bondage and my freedom. Miller, Orton & Mulligan.

Eagleton, T. (2026). The Ideology of the Aesthetic — Friedrich Nietzsche. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism (M. Lazzari, Ed.). Gale Cengage. (Article originally published 1990.)  

Eagleton, T. (2022, April 15). Was Jesus a revolutionary? UnHerd. https://unherd.com/2022/04/was-jesus-a-revolutionary/

Eagleton, T. (2024, February 22). Seeds of What Ought to Be? London Review of Books. https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n04/terry-eagleton/seeds-of-what-ought-to-be

Eliot, T. S. (2025). The waste land. Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47311/the-waste-land (originally published 1922)

Elgat, G. (2015). Slave revolt, deflated self-deception. British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 23(3), 524–544. https://doi.org/10.1080/09608788.2015.1013915

Foner, P. S. (1950). Frederick Douglass. Citadel Press.

Forster, M. N. (2022). Nietzsche: Three genealogies of Christianity. Genealogy, 6(2), 38. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6020038

GB News. (2026, May 5). Migrant crisis: Small boat arrivals hit 200,000 with only 8,000 deported in eight years. https://www.gbnews.com/news/migrant-crisis-small-boat-arrivals-hit-200000-8000-deported-eight-years

Geoghegan, P. (2025, March 6). Making media great again: Peter Geoghegan on Paul Marshall. London Review of Books, 47(4). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n04/peter-geoghegan/making-media-great-again

Geoghegan, P. (2025, March 8). We need to talk about Paul (Marshall). Democracy for Sale. https://democracyforsale.substack.com/p/we-need-to-talk-about-paul-marshall-unherd-spectator-gb-news

Graystone, A. (2021). Bleeding for Jesus: John Smyth and the cult of the Iwerne camps. Bloomsbury Continuum.

Graystone, A. (2024, March 27). The Marshall Plan: Hedge fund manager Paul Marshall is on a God-driven mission to transform the religious fabric of the nation. Prospect Magazine. https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/65415/the-marshall-plan-paul-marshall-gb-news

Holland, T. (2019). Dominion: How the Christian revolution remade the world. Little, Brown.

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Nietzsche, F. (1887/2006). On the genealogy of morality (C. Diethe, Trans.; K. Ansell-Pearson, Ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Nietzsche, F. (2009). Notebook 7, end of 1870–April 1871. In R. Geuss & A. Nehamas (Eds.), Writings from the early notebooks (L. Löb, Trans., p. 33). Cambridge University Press.

Olshanetsky, H., Silverman, A., & Cosijns, L. (2026). Turning the tables: Re-evaluating the incident between Jesus and the money-changers. Cogent Arts & Humanities, 13(1), 2587102. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2025.2587102.

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Pollock, J. (1977). Wilberforce. St Martin’s Press.

Rayman, J. (2022). Nietzsche’s genealogy in its relation to history and philosophy. Genealogy, 6(2), 54. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy6020054

Seal, D. M. (2025). The intersectionality of gender and slavery: Paul’s social creativity within an unchangeable system. Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 48(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/0142064X241313487

Sernett, M. C. (2007). Harriet Tubman: Myth, memory, and history. Duke University Press.

Snelson, A. (2017). The history, origin, and meaning of Nietzsche’s slave revolt in morality. Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 60(1–2), 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2016.1251167

Stauffer, J. (2008). Giants: The parallel lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. Twelve Books.

Stewart-Kroeker, P. (2024). Nietzsche on Socrates, Jesus, and the slave revolt in morality. International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 85(3–4), 142–164. https://doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2024.2423000

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Footnotes

1: I don’t suggest that secularism and consumerism are in anyway identical. But they have often manifested themselves side by side in recent history. What secularism means in the light of Nietzsche’s writings would make a good standalone essay.

2: Matthew 19:24; these and all other bible quotes in this essay are cited from the King James Version, unless otherwise stated; for an informative and myth-busting essay on Marshall’s money and his politics, including the statistics given here, see: Peter Geoghegan, ‘Making Media Great Again’.

3: Ibid., unpaginated.

4: Part I, part II.

5: GB News, ‘Migrant Crisis’.

6: For more on the platform‘s financing, and Marshall’s economic-political role in it, see: Graystone, ‘The Marshall Plan’, and Geoghegan, ‘We need to talk about Paul (Marshall)’.

7: In ‘The Ideology of the Aesthetic — Friedrich Nietzsche’ Eagleton (1990) calls Nietzsche ‘a belligerent opponent of almost every enlightened liberal or democratic value who speaks up for “everything haughty, manly, conquering, domineering”’ (cf. Beyond Good and Evil, § 62). Thirty-four years later, Eagleton (2024) published again on Nietzsche’s ‘rancid politics’ (‘Seeds of What Ought to Be?’).

8: Greer cited in Sohrab Ahmari, ‘US Trade Chief: Brexit liberated the UK’.

9: Greer cited in Sohrab Ahmari, ‘US Trade Chief: Brexit liberated the UK’.

10: John 20: 31, King James Version.

11: Cf. Ephesians 4:11, and Acts 21:8.

12: Graystone cited in Geoghegan, ‘Making Media Great Again’, unpaginated.

13: Graystone cited in Geoghegan, ‘Making Media Great Again’, unpaginated.

14: Graystone, ‘The Marshall Plan‘, unpaginated.

15: Cf. Geoghegan, ‘Making Media Great’, and Graystone, ‘The Marshall Plan’, both unpaginated.

16: First developed in ‘On the Use and Abuse of History for Life’, Part II of Unfashionable Observations (1874) (see §8), Nietzsche only fully develops the notion of ‘the priestly caste’, who presides influentially, and in life-denying, ascetic manner over contemporary society, in The Genealogy of Morality, § I — 6 (1887), and in notes from this time that were published posthumously: NF-1887,11[280] — Posthumously Published Notes, dated to November 1887 —March 1888.

17: Cf. Graystone, Bleeding for Jesus, pp. 158-159. Here Graystone explains how Alpha was developed by former HTB vicar Nicky Gumbel, together with Charles Marnham and John Irvine, all of whom Graystone characterises as shaped by participation as children and teenagers in ‘the Irwerne camps’: evangelical holiday institutions, run primarily for the children of the British elite, and thus focussed on those attending Britain’s top public schools. The scandal surrounding the camps broke in 2017, when it emerged that John Symth (1941–2018), one-time Iwerne Trust chairman, had serially abused children in the camps in the 1970s and 1980s. Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury from 2013–2025, also attended the camps while growing up, and maintained personal relations with Symth for decades, as described in this article from December 19, 2024: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2024/december/technically-leading.

18: Rosa Luxemburg (1861–1919) and other Marxist thinkers of her generation routinely talked of Big Capital (Großkapital), by which they meant those capitalists that owned the means of production with the highest monetizable value: and those capitalists’ economic interests. With later Marxist thinkers agreeing that the means of production also (re)produce culture, the term remains relevant.

19: Rob Burley, ‘Inside the capture of the BBC: How transgenderism killed impartiality’.

20: For a route and thoughtfully made digital guide, see: www.britishpilgrimage.org/portfolio/london-martyrs-way.

21: Samuel Pepys (1633–1703): English naval administrator and diarist, best known for his detailed diary documenting daily life in Restoration England, including the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London. William Blake (1757–1827): English poet, artist, and printmaker whose visionary works, including Songs of Innocence and of Experience, combined Romantic poetry with distinctive visual art.

22: T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Section I.

23: This current within the Anglican Church, attractive particularly for artists and intellectuals in the twentieth century’s first decades, keeps faith with the Anglican Communion, while striving aesthetically and theologically to see itself as part of ‘the one church‘ that has its earthly headquarters in Rome.

24: A collaboration between sculptor Michael Visocchi (b. 1977), poet Lemn Sissay (b. 1967), and graphic designer Gareth Howat, the City of London Corporation commissioned the piece, which was unveiled in 2008.

25: Mark 11:15: ‘[A]nd Jesus went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers’, King James Version. The Greek word here for ‘moneychangers’, kollybistēs (plural kollybistai), means literally a currency exchanger who charged commission for their service. This job was necessary because the half-shekel Temple tax had to be paid with a Tyrian tetradrachma, a currency that many visitors to the Temple did not have. For historicizing research on this verse from Mark, see: H. Olshanetsky, A. Silverman, & L. Cosijns, Turning the tables.

26: Also known as the Square Mile, this is both a local government district in the middle of London, and a global centre for finance capitalism.

27: Statistics and quotes from: CCX (2019), ‘Plant stories’, unpaginated. This does not try to be a neutral source; impartial sources on HTB-backed ‘church plants’ are hardly to be found.

28: Ibid.

29: Listen in, for example, to the video of the HTB service from 10 August, 2025, from c. 6:20: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm7vP_sOI60.

30: 4.5-minute YouTube version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9IfHDi-2EA&list=RDk9IfHDi-2EA&start_radio=1.

31: In this communion service, a regular C-of-E fixture, the celebrant sings rather than speaks most of the liturgy.

32: The question of repetition versus difference deserves philosophical attention, but cannot be answered here on the fly. I advise readers wanting to explore here further to revisit this thorough, and Nietzsche-inflected treatment: Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.

33: Cf. Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson, and L. Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition, p. 39.

34: For a first glance into Nietzsche’s deep biographical and philosophical connection to this form of art see two articles dedicated to the topic of ‘Nietzsche and music’ on this blog by Christian Saehrendt and Paul Stephan.

35: Nietzsche to Erwin Rohde on April 30, 1870. This and all other translations from original German-language texts are the author’s own, unless otherwise stated.

36: The posthumously published ‘Notebook 7, end of 1870 - April 1871’ in Nietzsche, Writings From the Early Notebooks, p. 33. German-original at: http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/NF-1870,7[13].

37: Presented as a private print to Cosima Wagner, the essay is the third in the collection of Five Prefaces to Five Unwritten Books.  

38: The Greek State. Emphasis in the original.

39: The best place to begin with this reading is Nietzsche’s own Genealogy of Morality (1887), section I – 7, and section I – 10. Section I – 7 characterises Christianity as a takeover led by a ‘caste of priests’, aimed ascetically against everything that lends ‘a blossoming, rich, foaming-over health’ and ‘bodilyness’ to life. Moreover, Nietzsche blames ‘the Jews’ for introducing this strain into the history of morality, and regards Christianity as a continuance of this intervention, and as no rupture from it: ‘Regarding the initiative, both monstrous and fateful beyond all measure, which the Jews have advanced with this most fundamental of all declarations of war, I remind us of the principle, which I touched upon at another juncture […] namely that it is with the Jews that the slave rising in morality begins: that rising, which has now put a two-thousand-year history behind itself, and which has only slipped out of our vision today because it – has been victorious…’ (emphasis in original). – Tom Holland’s history of early Christianity, outlined in his book Dominion, is also not neutral – Holland makes no secret of his own philo-Christian position – but is a hugely informative and fast-paced account. The best English translation of Nietzsche’s Genealogy was published in 2006 at Cambridge University Press. See also M. N. Forster, Nietzsche: Three genealogies of Christianity; P. Stewart-Kroeker, Nietzsche on Socrates, Jesus, and the slave revolt in morality; J. Rayman, Nietzsche’s genealogy in its relation to history and philosophy; A. Snelson, The history, origin, and meaning of Nietzsche’s slave revolt in morality; and G. Elgat, Slave revolt, deflated self-deception.

40: T. Holland, Dominion, chapter ‘Mission: AD 19: Galatia’ (unpaginated as cited from ebook edition), emphasises the role of the Galatians (who lived in what is modern-day Turkey) as a stateless nation formerly ‘enslaved’ by Roman Empire authorities, who were not only empowered by Christianity to escape slavery themselves, but who then also went on to reject the principle of slavery outright. In this regard, Holland cites the letter by Paul the Apostle (c. 5–64/65 CE) to the Galatians, 3.28–9: ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.’  

41: T. Holland, Dominion, chapter ‘Mission: AD 19: Galatia’ (unpaginated as cited from ebook edition), cites Musonius Rufus and other 1^st century CE sources, to argue that those males categorised as ‘free-born Roman’ in this period ‘no more hesitated to use slaves and prostitutes to relieve themselves of their sexual needs than they did to use the side of a road as a toilet.’ By contrast, Holland sees Paul and other participants in the Hagioi – the collective noun for the early Christian community of believers – of Rome as campaigners against this sexual subjugation of those who were not ‘free-born Roman’ males. He reconstructs these early Christian assemblies as anti-authoritarian spaces where Christians ‘would meet to commemorate the arrest and suffering of Christ with a communal meal, men rubbed shoulders with women, citizens with slaves.’ On this same history, see also: D. M. Seal, ‘The intersectionality of gender and slavery.’

42: For Agbaje’s attitudes to this history, see the interview from May 29, 2025 at Premier Christianity. On the structuring of Agbaje’s parish, note that St Edmund, King and Martyr is run as a ‘chapel of ease‘, attached organisationally to St Mary Woolnoth. Cf. https://register-of-charities.charitycommission.gov.uk/en/.

43: On Newton’s influence on Wilberforce, see J. Pollock, Wilberforce, p. 38 and C. L. Brown, Moral Capital, p. 383. The Slave Trade Act was an improvement, but did not emancipate those already enslaved, nor make keeping slaves illegal in British Overseas Territory. Slavery only became illegal there after the Slavery Abolition Act passed in 1833.

44: For more on these Black abolitionists, including their own writings, see: F. Douglass, My bondage and my freedom; P. S. Foner, Frederick Douglass; N. I. Painter, Sojourner Truth; M. C. Sernett, Harriet Tubman; J. Stauffer, Giants; S. Truth, The narrative of Sojourner Truth; and H. Tubman, H., Scenes in the life of Harriet Tubman.

“Revolt, Slaves, Revolt!”

Hiking with Nietzsche Through Evangelical Christian London: Part I

From the hedge-fund billions that bankroll Nigel Farage, and tie that funding to evangelical expansionism, to Nietzsche’s fulminating assault on Christianity as a “slave revolt”: this essay tracks the troubling way religion has reappeared at the heart of British public life. Arriving in London with walking boots, a rucksack, and a philosopher’s skepticism, the author follows the money, theology, and street culture surrounding charismatic Christianity and its seemingly unappeasable growth. At the centre stands Sir Paul Marshall: billionaire financier, Christian media mogul, and embodiment of a faith that feels entitled to reach for elite power.

But this is more than merely an unveiling of the knot that binds together wealth and religion. It is also a confrontation with Nietzsche’s deepest historical claim: that Christianity triumphed because the so-called weak learned to moralize against the strong. Wandering through churches, cafés, and city streets, the essay asks whether contemporary evangelical London represents a new form of that revolt—or its complete inversion.

Part I explores the rise of influential evangelical networks in modern Britain and their uneasy alliance with finance capitalism. Part II, which will appear shortly, returns to the first Christians themselves.

This article is a follow-up to Henry Holland’s account of hiking through Glasgow’s Muslim Southside (part I, part II).

I. The Forest as a “Notched Space”

Long merely a backdrop on the horizon, the forest has now once again become a destination for the working population from cities, eager to explore it from within. Wilderness schools are springing up like mushrooms; in the online directory alone wildnisschulen.de 121 wilderness schools can be found in German-speaking countries. There, a blend of survival skills, mindfulness in nature, species knowledge, and "feeling" nature is being introduced to an ever-wider audience.¹ Speaking of mushrooms: "Going mushroom hunting" is also experiencing an unexpected renaissance, as can be seen on YouTube or in bookstore displays. In the visual arts, at music festivals, and on (digital) album covers, nature and wilderness motifs are very much "en vogue" – especially since the COVID-19 lockdowns pushed broad new segments of the population into the few remaining natural areas of our industrialized continent, primarily into the forests.

That this reflects a yearning for freedom is stringently argued by philosopher and publicist Alexander Grau in his 2023 book On the Forest. A Philosophy of Freedom very stringently. His thesis, which recurs in various forms throughout the book, is:  

The forest serves so well as a symbol of freedom against human striving for control and obsession with order because it is, in fact, a space of diverse contingent experiences and permanent change. In this respect, the forest is a veto against “the absolutization of man and its modern culmination.”²

Sartre is quoted in the last half-sentence. What is remarkable about Grau's treatise is his detailed description of works related to forests across various political-theoretical camps: starting with the Brothers Grimm, Ludwig Tieck, and Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, moving on to Heinrich Heine, then to Ralph Waldo Emerson and, of course, Henry David Thoreau (Walden), he touches upon Marx and Adorno, delves into Adalbert Stifter and Wilhelm Raabe in detail, but also the Wandervogel movement and, in doing so, Nietzsche, especially the Zarathustra, finally going into great detail once again with Ernst Wiechert, as well as with Ernst Jünger, and lastly with Jean-Paul Sartre³.  

Some details of Grau's work – which tends to be placed in a conservative milieu – and his treatise are certainly debatable; for instance, the justification for why tree-hugging and forest bathing are "intellectual kitsch of the highest order" (p. 171) remains somewhat meager, yet it is precisely in these activities that Grau's intuitive approach to the forest, without "interpretation of meaning" (ibid.), which he champions in the same paragraph, is actually expressed. Nevertheless, the text as a whole impresses with a radicalism in the best sense of "going to the root" and questioning, without immediately offering new concepts, which always act as corsets for nature, which is, by contrast, uncontainably complex:

Whoever, in a fit of megalomania and oblivion to the world, breaks away from the harmony of the natural whole, will perish. True freedom is found not in the pursuit of private or political castles in the air, but by immersing oneself in the flow of nature. Today, we would speak of flow.⁴

Here, the postmodern "end of grand narratives" resonates, as does Nietzsche's critique of "hubris" as our entire "attitude towards nature, our rape of nature with the help of machines and the so thoughtless ingenuity of technicians and engineers"⁵, as Nietzsche already proclaimed in 1887 in On the Genealogy of Morality .  

Nietzsche also anticipates the experience of contingency and permanent change in forests and nature in several places, as here in Twilight of the Idols: "Nature, artistically appraised, is no model. It exaggerates, it distorts, it leaves gaps. Nature is chance."⁶ Nature as contingency and also as self-giving extravagance – as during tree blossom.

Grau's description of the forest as a prime example of contingency (Heidegger's "thrownness"?) in nature becomes particularly interesting when he draws comparisons to other natural environments:

History is also experienced by the sea or in the steppe […]. Yet these habitats themselves seem timeless, the sea as eternal and immutable as mountains or deserts. In the forest, however, humans are confronted not only with events and the cyclical course of the seasons, but with time itself. Transience is directly experienced here; the forest exposes the eternity suggested by seas or mountains as a perceptual error.⁷

Everything flows, panta rhei – Heraclitus is once again vindicated.  

As justification, Grau states that agricultural fields established just a few years ago are already overgrown today, and paths that were recently passable are now barely recognizable⁸ and also that the flora and fauna of the forest have for millennia been products of “countless generations of humanity, their way of hunting, [clearing land,] settling, and farming.”⁹  

From this, three landscape patterns can be derived: First, the “smooth”¹⁰ space of naturally “eternal” landscapes: desert, mountains, sea. Then, secondly, the “notched” space of the eternally changing forest landscape – in which naturalness and anthropogenicity are inextricably intertwined. And thirdly, finally, the entirely man-made smooth space of “cultura,” described by Grau as “cleared farmland,”¹¹ in which humans strive to create landscape and social order and to decouple themselves from biological evolution, in other words: creating eternity through rationality and mathematics in time (harvest cycles, planning) and space (geodesy, geometry). These endeavors are perfected with each development cycle of human culture and culminate in modernity, where almost every wild animal and health risk is controlled by civilized humans, where chance dies more with every process optimization, and freedom perishes with security in the panopticon of the digitized “Qualityland”¹².

Without providing examples, Grau draws a connection to the history of philosophy:

Accordingly, philosophers of all ages saw in the vastness of the oceans and the majesty of the mountains veritable allegories of thought, which also aesthetically enhanced philosophizing and lent it pathos and majesty. Connected with this was philosophy’s claim to proclaim truths and insights that are as eternal, immutable, and boundless as seas or mountains. However, this asserted claim to absolute truth undeniably has totalitarian features. […] The forest, however, is different. Here, nothing is eternal. Here, nothing is timeless. And nothing here is static at all. Forest means change, temporality, and relativity.¹³

It's a good thing that criticism of totalitarianism and claims to absolute truth has prevailed not only in Alexander Grau's work but across all relevant fields of philosophy and politics. This demonstrates, on the one hand, a certain capacity for learning within the human species in the face of the "totalitarian" catastrophe of the Second World War, but also, on the other hand (somewhat later), a broadening of perspective to include previously "subaltern" viewpoints, whether through feminism, postcolonialism, Indigenous Rights Movements, or, more generally, the underlying currents of post-structuralism and social constructivism.

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II. What is "Postmodernity"?

The experience of the Second World War revealed the dangers and abysses of totalitarianism, yet it took almost another generation for the realization to spread that it is not crucial which modern political system emerges victorious from war, but rather that the hubris of modernity, with its subtle claim to absolute truth, itself is built on shaky ground (or, with Grau and Sartre: on a receding forest, lurking and waiting for the ordering hand to disappear). For in that era, which from today's perspective can partly be considered historically concluded and designated with a "post-prefix"—an era in which Foucault, Deleuze & Derrida experienced their heyday, James Stirling alongside Charles Willard Moore shaped architecture, and fashion designer Vivienne Westwood or Grace Jones, singer and much more, influenced culture—the transience and contingency of human reason itself was articulated as culture for the first time in a grand conceptual framework: We are, of course, talking about Postmodernism!  

In a narrower sense, this era can be understood as a central cultural movement spanning the 1970s to the 1990s. The oil crises, the collapse of the dollar-gold peg in 1971, the Club of Rome reports on the "Limits to Growth" from 1972 onwards, and other events indicated that the claim to absolute truth of the techno-economic feasibility ideology, believed in both the West and the East, seemed to be developing its first cracks.¹⁴  

Michel Foucault philosophically clarifies that the Enlightenment's ambition to foster a more humane society—for example, through more rational systems of psychiatry and penal enforcement—demands a very high, perhaps disproportionate, price.  

Deleuze and Guattari explore in their A Thousand Plateaus in 1980, that the rationality underlying capitalist modernity represents only one of several possibilities, even mathematically; they describe lines of flight to minority currents in mathematics, science, and history (precisely not that of the victors), extending to shamanism and other approaches to body and mind not originating from colonial powers. Rarely has the illusory nature of eternal truths been described in a more multifaceted—or, in their own term: manifold—way than by Deleuze & Guattari in their collaborative works, whose style, fitting for postmodernism, appears eclectic.¹⁵

For postmodernism, as art historian Klaus Kowalski describes, defines itself through a "democratization of cultural life oriented towards independence, which manifests in a poly-stylism"¹⁶ and as "cross-domain thematic mixtures"¹⁷ in contrast to the previous "general, world-interpreting claim"¹⁸. Collage gains popularity as a defining graphic form; in architecture, the mixing of technical modernity with features of earlier eras, such as classical columns or even Gothic or primitivist elements, becomes style-defining. Jean-François Lyotard's famous statement about postmodernism as the "end of grand narratives" underlies all these developments.¹⁹

Antonio Negri & Michael Hardt also add a change in the world of work as an argument to these perspectives, because

from the 1970s onwards, the techniques and organizational form of industrial production shifted [...] towards smaller and more mobile work units and more flexible production structures – a change often referred to as the transition from Fordist to post-Fordist production.²⁰

They therefore define postmodernism as "today's capitalist production," which is characterized "by a series of transitions that name different facets of the same change: from the hegemony of industrial labor to that of immaterial labor, from Fordism to post-Fordism, and from modernity to postmodernity."²¹.  

Emerging from this, they describe as a new networked global superpower, the "Empire," a complex and entangled global power relationship that cannot be attacked by storming a single center. In contrast, they posit the "Multitude" as a progressive, emancipatory actor:

A multitude is an irreducible multiplicity; the singular social differences that compose the multitude must always be expressed and must never be leveled into equality, unity, identity, or indifference.²²

As such, they appear sporadically, rhizomatically,²³ come together for a goal, quickly dissolve, and then reconnect – again, the network form:

The Multitude is the true productive force of our social world, whereas the Empire is merely an apparatus of appropriation that lives solely off the vitality of the Multitude – or, as Marx would put it: a vampire regime of accumulated dead labor that only survives by sucking the blood of the living.²⁴

The "apparatus of appropriation" that Deleuze & Guattari describe on a psychological level, here in its political-economic dimension. Guy Debord's concept of "recuperation," the appropriation of subversive impulses by the "Society of the Spectacle," is also evident here… The omnipresence of an all-encompassing market has rather grown in recent decades, coupled with the equally typical postmodern loss of "grand narratives of salvation" (communism, religion, …).

Many of these dimensions of postmodernity are certainly experiencing renewed urgency in the 2020s: consider "deep fake" and "post-truth," our fragile global human culture with its public sphere and commodity flows, which were severely threatened by Covid-19, the lockdowns, the incident in the Suez Canal, and the blockade of the "Strait of Hormuz," as well as the fact that even nature itself is no longer imperishable in the face of climate change: mountains are crumbling away with the permafrost, and the sea is no longer the same both underwater (coral reefs) and at the water's surface.  

Thus, the 'panta rhei' principle embodied in the forest fits very well into a 21st century that is slowly gaining momentum, and which Foucault rightly prophesied as the 'Deleuzian century'.²⁵

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III. „We are a forest that grows quietly.“

With its overgrown paths, its intertwining of standing-living and dying-lying trees, its leaf decomposition, and its diverse underground soil network, the forest is in any case a Multitude – just as the Multitude itself can be seen as 'a forest that grows quietly'²⁶.

Forests are a network on both the micro and macro levels – which is not so dissimilar to the internet.

On the micro level, the forest floor is an extremely complex, intricate network; trees communicate with each other via root rhizomes, as one can read in Peter Wohlleben's bestselling books, exchanging substances in symbiosis with fungal mycelium, even nourishing their young or warning of predators through messenger substances in rhizomatic connections.²⁷ Generally, the forest floor is interwoven with a network of diverse, extremely thin threads and strands.

On the macro level, forests are migration corridors for the movement of fauna and flora. For the 'specter of migration'²⁸ This is not only about (post-)modern human society, but also about animals and plants, which on the one hand need to mix their populations to counteract inbreeding, and on the other hand, in the course of climate change, should be able to advance through migration corridors into regions where the climate (still) suits them. While in the course of industrialized modernity, humans have increasingly built and interconnected infrastructure using rational techniques of urban, road, and landscape construction, with the landscape crisscrossed by highways, power lines, and telecommunication channels, environmental organizations like BUND have been working for about 20 years to counteract this by connecting largely isolated forests into a forest biotope network through targeted, scientifically supported corridor plantings. This network is used by wildcats, lynxes, and other animals, but also generally aims to restore the original character of the forest as a network. At the German Nature Conservation Day in mid-March this year, Federal Environment Minister Carsten Schneider announced a draft law on the "Securing of Natural Infrastructure" – a significant step in times of a rather defensive environmental policy.²⁹, with 2% wilderness as a target by 2030 – at least, that's what the National Strategy Paper states³⁰.  

The ambivalence, of course, runs deep in this endeavor, as it does in many methodologies of contemporary nature conservation: correcting previous interventions through new ones in an environment already heavily shaped by humans³¹; the ultimate encroachment of "cultura" on the forest – or a belated recognition of its valuable, transcendent complexity? After all, here, with rational techniques and human planning reason, an infrastructure of "wilderness" is being initiated (also in the literal sense), which is then intended to continue to exist and develop independently of "us".

If one follows Grau, and Sartre as well, the forest would likely seize every opportunity to develop independently, to overgrow "cultura" again: "The forest permanently tries to reclaim what was painstakingly wrested from it before."³². However, it is not in all natural regions of the Earth that the encroaching forest spreads as wild, permanently changing nature against culture – in other parts of the world, for example, it is the deserts that reclaim what was wrested from them. Or the steppes. In rare cases, water also does, for example, on dike marshland or in the area of dams.  

Following this, the question arises whether, in times of climate change, it is always the forest that first spreads on abandoned areas; the "Lieberose Desert" in Brandenburg shows that things can also turn out differently.³³ And there are calculations that many forests are permanently threatened by climate change, because here too, eternal change and entropy certainly do not stop: persistent drought leads to pest infestation, dieback, and often also to the burning down of forest areas.³⁴ The smooth space could be on the advance, in this case the desert. Thus, "cultura" would have managed to reproduce itself and permanently prevent the "relapse" of the forest. It would be the victory of the "metropolitan desert," which is spoken of in post-situationist writings.³⁵ Or a victory of market, noise, and "poisonous flies," which Nietzsche in his Zarathustra contrasts with forest nature:

Forest and rock know how to be silent with you, with dignity. Be like the tree you love again, the broad-branched one: silent and listening, it hangs over the sea. Where solitude ends, there begins the market; and where the market begins, there also begins the noise of the great actors and the buzzing of poisonous flies.³⁶  

A victory that might not only be external but even threatens our inner life. Thus Zarathustra warns elsewhere: "The desert grows: woe to him who harbors deserts!"³⁷

In contrast, a central characteristic of nature and forests is their adaptability and thus resilience. Even man-made deserts like Lieberose or Bledow in Poland can recede,³⁸ in the wildfire areas of the Harz or Saxon Switzerland, new, more resilient tree species are spreading. However, this does not absolve us of responsible action, because precisely because we humans are part of nature's network, it is ultimately our decisions that tip the scales between devastation and reforestation.

A foundation here is certainly respect for nature's complexity, which surpasses us, something Nietzsche describes in a pantheistic-sounding way when he demands: "[W]hen walking a path cut through a spruce forest, remember the cathedrals: the forest had an overwhelming influence on the builder."³⁹

Whether in the construction of "domes" and cathedrals or in countless other examples: forest nature influences large parts of human cultural creation – but more clearly than in Nietzsche's time, we see today how human culture also influences growing parts of forest nature. – Humans and forests are indeed multidimensionally connected.

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Mandus Craiss (born 1983) grew up in Ludwigsburg and studied political science, cultural studies, philosophy, modern history, and geography in Tübingen and Leipzig. He was socialized within the ecological and alter-globalization movement and traveled extensively in this context, largely by hitchhiking. As a key editor of the former BUNDjugend magazine Critical Mass he also published articles and interviews on political philosophy from Fromm to Foucault. His master's thesis deals with the works of Deleuze & Guattari in relation to unconditional basic income. He lives with his son in a shared house on the outskirts of Leipzig. For the Halcyonic Association for Radical Philosophy, he gave on YouTube an introductory lecture on Deleuze & Guattari. 

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The article image was peinted by the Australian artist Mitchell Nolte (link), whom we commissioned to illustrate our entire forest series. The photos were taken by Mandus Craiss.

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References

Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus.  

Foucault, Michel: Writings in Four Volumes II. Frankfurt a. M. 2017.

Franke, Nils: Nature Conservation – Landscape – Homeland. Romanticism as a Foundation of Nature Conservation in Germany. Wiesbaden 2016.

Grau, Alexander: About the Forest. A Philosophy of Freedom. München 2023.

Hardt, Michael & Antonio Negri: Empire. The New World Order. Frankfurt a. M. 2003.

Ibid.: Multitude. War and Democracy in the Empire. Frankfurt/ Maina. M. 2004.

Kling, Marc-Uwe: QualityLand. Berlin 2017.

Ibid.: QualityLand 2.0. Kiki's Secret. Berlin 2022.

Kowalski, Klaus: Postmodernism. Style, Era, or Flimflam? Hanau 2013.

Lyotard, Jean-François: The Postmodern Condition. Paris & Vienna 1979.

Invisible Committee: The Coming Insurrection. Hamburg 2010.

Wohlleben, Peter: The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate. The Discovery of a Hidden World. Munich 2015.

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Footnotes

1: Cf. https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/wildnisschulen-natur-selbsterfahrung-umweltschutz-li.3213587?reduced=true.

2: p. 169.

3: It is remarkable that Sartre plays such a significant role in Grau's argumentation, as he is considered a thinker rather detached from nature (cf. the conversation with Jens Bonnemann about Sartre and Nietzsche on our blog).

4: Ibid., p. 116.

5: On the Genealogy of Morality, Sec. III, 9.

6: Twilight of the Idols, Skirmishes of an Untimely Man, Aphorism 7. Unfortunately, Nietzsche's quotes on the topic of "nature" are all too often permeated by a contempt for the weak (ibid.: "The study 'according to nature' seems to me a bad sign: it betrays submission, weakness, fatalism"); nature is pitted against Christianity because the latter protects the weak; there is polemic against Rousseau's demand "Back to nature" (the "canaille"; cf. Twilight of the Idols, Skirmishes of an Untimely Man, Aphorism 48) and against the socialist Paris Commune (cf. On the Genealogy of Morality, Sec. I, 5). Nature is admired when the predator snatches its prey; at the same time, human destruction of nature ("breaking of branches, dislodging of stones, fighting with wild animals" [Human, All Too Human I, Aph. 103]) is upheld when it manifests the superiority of the superior. This reveals a deep belief in inequality and an ideological foundation of sadism as a "natural act," as if this were a basic need – and not a sublimation of an unsatisfied one, which is more likely.

7: Grau, Of the Forest, p. 38.

8: Cf. ibid., pp. 10 ff.

9: Cf. ibid., pp. 37 ff.

10: The concept of "smooth" and "striated" space originates from Deleuze & Guattari and is described in their work A Thousand Plateaus (1980).

11: Cf. Grau, Of the Forest, pp. 9 ff. This, incidentally, does not correspond to the actual Latin etymology, which rather stems from the concept of "care" (of body and mind, internally and externally). Cf. https://www.dwds.de/wb/etymwb/Kultur.

12: "Qualityland" is the name of the globalized state in Marc-Uwe Kling's two eponymous dystopian novels from 2017 and 2022; however, Orwell and Huxley could also have served as inspiration.

13: Grau, Of the Forest, p. 12 f.

14: Compared to a boat, one would no longer speak of cracks in the hull today, but of a pile of debris in the sea of chaos, with drifting planks on which isolated individuals drift, in permanent danger and unable to steer.

15: Nietzsche already anticipates this criticism of universal truths, even if he tends to proclaim many of his own universal truths against the existing ones.

16: Postmodernism. Style, Era, or Frippery?, p. 156.

17: Ibid., p. 90.

18: Ibid., p. 88.

19: Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. 23 ff.

20: Multitude. War and Democracy in the Empire, p. 82.

21: Ibid., p. 146.

22: Ibid., p. 105.

23: The concept of the "rhizome" as a counterpart to the classical logic of the root is also a key concept of Deleuze & Guattari (cf. A Thousand Plateaus).

24: Empire. The New World Order, p. 62.

25: Cf. Michel Foucault, Writings in four volumes II, p. 94.

26: There is an ecological-spiritual protest song with this name: “We are a forest that grows quietly.” Cf.: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=v7F1zlT3I7k.

27: Most well-known, among several other publications by the author: The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate (2015).

28: Hardt & Negri, Empire, p. 213.

29: Cf. https://www.bundesumweltministerium.de/rede/rede-von-carsten-schneider-anlaesslich-des-deutschen-naturschutztages.

30: Cf. BUND Magazine 2 / 26, p. 10; with the current 0.62%, it appears that the implementation of these goals is being pursued as neglectfully as those of the international climate targets – albeit with admittedly lower urgency.

31: Cf. Nils Franke, Nature Conservation – Landscape – Homeland. Romanticism as a Foundation of Nature Conservation in Germany.

32: Grau, Of the Forest, p. 13 f.

33: Cf. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieberoser_Wüste.

34: Among others, available at: https://www.bundesumweltministerium.de/faqs/waelder-im-klimawandel.

35: Cf. Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, p. 70.

36: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of the Flies of the Market.

37: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Among Daughters of the Desert, 2.

38: See also https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C5%82%C4%99d%C3%B3w-W%C3%BCste.

39: Posthumous Fragments 1882 17[12].

The Postmodern Forest

How the Forest Subverts Modernity's Totalizing Claim

Forests are trending. And this is by no means contradictory to another, even larger trend of our time: digitalization. In this article, Mandus Craiss demonstrates that the forest is a network. Digitalization also occurs in a network-like manner; both phenomena are therefore characteristic of postmodernism.  

In the first part of the article, the forest is characterized as a non-centralized and thus typically postmodern natural phenomenon. The second part defines "postmodernity" and discusses the extent to which this epochal concept is still, or once again, relevant – a discourse whose very early roots can be traced back to Nietzsche. Finally, the third part explains how the network aspect of postmodernity manifests itself and how the human-forest relationship has evolved recently.

This article is part of our special series this year "the forest as a lifelihood".

I. Utopia, Nationalism, and Germanness

Paul Stephan: Dear Michael, thank you very much for agreeing to our conversation on "Nietzsche and Nationalism." Some of our readers probably know you less by your real name and more as "PhrasenDrescher." Under this name, you run a very popular channel on YouTube, where you have recorded some of Nietzsche's most important works as audiobooks – highly recommended! – as well as works by other significant philosophers and writers, but also frequently speak out on philosophical topics yourself. One of your main themes is nationalism, and you are currently pursuing your doctorate on this topic. So, this is the dual role in which I have invited you: as a Nietzsche expert and as a nationalism researcher.

Perhaps it should be emphasized right away that you do not approach either topic with complete neutrality. You clearly have great sympathy for Nietzsche, but also for the idea of the nation. In 2024, you also published a non-fiction book on this, Germanness for the Advanced, in which you advocate for a kind of "rehabilitation" of German nationalism.

Perhaps we should start our conversation with a clarification of terms, because your use of the term "nationalism" is probably already causing some irritation among some readers – and it also struck me when reading the book. But that's precisely what our conversation is about: to put aside one's immediate "knee-jerk reactions" and engage in a factual discourse on important fundamental questions of our time, even if we probably won't reach an agreement in the end. Listening to what the other person really has to say, instead of immediately pigeonholing them. Perhaps this can be seen as an exercise in the art of "perspektivische[n] Sehen[s]"², which Nietzsche speaks of.

Normally, a distinction is made between patriotism and nationalism. Patriotism is said to be an unproblematic identification with one's own nation, while nationalism is its unhealthy exaggeration. In your book, you clearly distance yourself from the term "Völkisch," from racism, imperialism, chauvinism, antisemitism, and also very unequivocally from National Socialism, but you want to hold on to the term "nationalism," and, if I understand you correctly, you also describe yourself as a "nationalist." Why is this term still important to you, despite the negative connotations it has in current usage? What does it mean for you to be a "nationalist"?

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Michael Drescher: Dear Paul, thank you very much for your kind words and your introduction. I am truly touched by how honestly you ask me about these matters! Such openness is something I've only been accustomed to from my university days, and even there, after some back and forth, sparks would fly. Both are practically notorious and seem all too dangerous, as the thinking associated with both is directly, at least partially, blamed for the atrocities of National Socialism and the World Wars. As a Nietzschean, you know that Nietzsche undeservedly holds this reputation, which is why he has largely been rehabilitated today. With nationalism, the whole matter is a bit more complicated.  

There is the nation, there is nationalism, there is patriotism, and there is Germanness. I have tried to playfully explore the latter in my book, although all these terms, as you have already indicated, are not entirely separable from one another. I must confess that they evoke a feeling in me that is difficult to describe, yet positive. Does that jeopardize my objectivity? I don't think so, as long as I reflect on this feeling, which I share with many people. In nationalism research, it is often the other way around (whether reflected upon or not); most researchers openly reject nationalism or secretly wish that the age of nations were finally over.  

German nationalism, in particular, plays a special role in nationalism research due to the intellectually explanatory writings on nationalism by Johann Gottfried Herder, Leopold von Ranke, or Johann Gottlieb Fichte. However, they are largely ignored today by mostly English-speaking research; instead, with the standardization of research operations, there is not only linguistic uniformity, because language shapes our understanding of the world. Nevertheless, I would like to leave aside the philosophers of German Romanticism, among whom Nietzsche is occasionally counted, for now, and jump directly to the end of the 20th century.  

While I sharply distinguish National Socialism from nationalism, both definitionally and substantively, in my book, there is nevertheless little to object to in the idea that early National Socialism at least used nationalism as a vehicle, but ultimately abandoned it for its ideological chauvinism. The world we live in today is shaped by two epochal breaks: 1945 and 1990. After 1945, National Socialism, which was now equated with nationalism, was ideologically exposed as bankrupt and militarily defeated. Liberalism and communism (even if these terms are poorly applicable to realpolitik) had prevailed and shaped the entire world for the next few years. Konrad Adenauer simply called nationalism the "cancer of Europe." While nationalism was openly combated in the West and partly replaced by a cosmopolitan Americanism, the self-conception of nations remained stronger in the Soviet Union, which is still evident today. However, as soon as the Soviet Union disintegrated, nationalism returned in one of its worst forms in the Yugoslav Wars. After his election, German Federal President Johannes Rau summarized how most people now thought about nationalism: "[A] patriot is someone who loves his homeland, a nationalist is someone who despises the homelands of others."³ This definition solidified, even though patriotism continued to draw upon the achievements, colors, songs, and figures of nationalism (such as black, red, and gold or the national anthem). According to the Duden, "nationalism" is today "mostly used pejoratively" and means, in a thoroughly chauvinistic manner, an "exaggerated national consciousness."  

But: "Rarely," the term also refers to the "awakening self-awareness of a nation with the aspiration to form its own state"⁴. This is where the crux of the matter finally lies. The view that collectives or peoples should be allowed to govern themselves in their own state. The pursuit of such a state and the desire to maintain it can only be described as nationalistic. This has nothing to do with chauvinism, as the first definition in the Duden dictionary suggests. Nor is the concept of nation static or biologically determined in any way. While "nation" originally comes from the Latin "nasci," meaning "to be born," nationalism research has long agreed that a felt kinship is more important in nationalism than an actual one.  

After 1990, it quickly became clear that after the "end of history,"⁵ only the supposedly defunct nation-state would be able to guarantee democratic and liberal institutions. To this day, only nation-states are capable of safeguarding the diversity of cultural and political systems in a world oriented towards functionalism, where everything pushes towards uniformity (such as the language of science; even the contributions on Nietzsche POParts are now, as I've read, intended to target an English-speaking audience or at least be translated⁶). Thus, only the nation-state, or its demand by peoples suppressed by nationalistic aspirations, can guarantee the enforcement of their right to self-determination (consider Kurdistan or Ukraine). While a nation is not the same as a nation-state (often confused in English), I think it's fair to say that a nation can realize itself through nationalism within a nation-state. By this alone, nationalism is immensely emancipatory and anti-imperialistic. I would even go so far as to say that nationalism offers the greatest opportunity to counteract a global homogenization of culture, language, and other aspects of communal life. In my humble opinion, in the future world, only languages, cultures, and customs with strong institutional representation will be able to survive in the long run. This, too, is only possible through the nation-state, whereby even regionalisms or separatist movements are nationalistic (consider Catalonia). Unlike other political systems, nationalism primarily depends on how a particular group sees itself. Because, quite apart from intellectual justifications: most people want the nation, they want to be equals among equals, and they want to base their solidarity precisely on that. As the last few years have shown, the nation and national sentiment cannot be abolished by simply not addressing or ignoring them. At the latest, when the right to exist of nations, as in the case of Ukraine, Israel, or Palestine, is threatened, even the staunchest critic of nationalism can become a flag-waving nationalist.  

I've taken a long detour and presented you with some historical explanations and a Duden definition. I'll also give you my most valued definition of nationalism by the religious scholar Steven Grosby, who treats nationalism as "territorial kinship." Yet, definitions, to paraphrase Nietzsche, are nothing but a "mobile army of metaphors,"⁷ and to this day, no researcher, let alone a politician or anyone else, has succeeded in providing a uniform and accepted definition of nation and nationalism. The terms simply refer to too many heterogeneous phenomena. But the world is indeed profound, and from a Nietzschean perspective, truths only exist through agreement. This—despite the value relativism that accompanies nationalism—is both possible and desirable in a world of nations and nation-states. It enables cooperation and only leads to conflict under adverse conditions: it is not difficult to imagine nation-states instead of states in Kant's treatise on perpetual peace, and in my opinion, the principle of subsidiarity in Catholic social teaching (tasks should be solved by institutions as small as possible and as large as necessary) is also a guarantor of peaceful coexistence, with which supranational, global problems such as climate change can also be addressed.  

The alternatives to a world divided into nation-states are not convincing to me. If utopia is literally the "non-place," then the nation-state is the non-utopia and the spatially bound. Nationalism, accordingly, stands for the culturally multipolar. It is a particular spirit: it conceives of the world, as Heinrich Heine wrote about Herder, as a harp played by God, with the peoples as its strings.  

If that's how a nationalist thinks, then I am one! However, for the positive aspects of nationalism to be realized and the negative ones prevented, nationalism undoubtedly needs to be better understood. This is also why I engage in research on nationalism, specifically its relationship to the nation and which came first.  

Whether a peaceful and future-oriented life is possible in a Europe and a world divided into nations is, of course, uncertain. But isn't that also the case with other political systems?

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II. Nietzsche, Homeland, and Modernity

PS: Thank you for your detailed response. Yes, nationalism is indeed a remarkable historical phenomenon. It emerged in the 18th century alongside progressive ideas such as popular sovereignty, human rights, and social justice – today, there's an attempt to uphold these ideas while simultaneously detaching from nationalism. The question is whether this is easily possible, whether there isn't even a close connection – and whether nationalism, even if no longer called such, persists so stubbornly for this very reason.

Thinkers important to you, like Schopenhauer and especially Nietzsche, struggled with all these "modern ideas."⁸. You open your book on German identity with a Schopenhauer quote – but this one probably wouldn't have fit as well:

The cheapest kind of pride [...] is national pride. For it reveals in those who possess it a lack of individual qualities he could be proud of, as otherwise he would not resort to something he shares with so many millions. Whoever possesses significant personal merits will, rather, most clearly recognize the flaws of their own nation, as they constantly have them before their eyes. But every pathetic fellow who has nothing in the world to be proud of seizes upon the last resort: to be proud of the nation to which he happens to belong. In this he finds solace and is now gratefully ready to defend, tooth and nail, all the faults and follies that are peculiar to it.⁹

Goethe, whom you also count among the greatest Germans, expressed similar disdain for nationalism – and it was also a thorn in Nietzsche's side, especially in its German variant. This also seems to me to be something that truly runs through all of Nietzsche's writings, from the Birth of Tragedy up to Ecce homo : his rejection of nationalism, and especially of the German nation, in the name of his ideal of the "good European." In Ecce homo he takes his hatred of Germany so far as to define himself as a "Polish nobleman pur sang"¹⁰ – he was never a German citizen anyway, but had been stateless since 1869, when he moved to Switzerland.

He considers nationalism in times of globalization to be an artificial ideology that can only be enforced by force.¹¹ When he himself becomes political, he distances himself from the demand for "closed, original folk cultures"¹² His views clearly diverge and he distinctly pursues a 'globalist' goal, occasionally even sounding almost a little Marxist when he writes, for example:

Humans can consciously decide to evolve towards a new culture, whereas previously they developed unconsciously and by chance: they can now create better conditions for the emergence of humans, their nourishment, upbringing, instruction, manage the Earth as a whole economically, weigh and deploy the forces of humanity against each other. This new conscious culture kills the old one, which, viewed as a whole, led an unconscious animal and plant life; it also kills the distrust of progress.¹³

He criticizes the backwardness of German culture and even advocates for a united Europe:

Thanks to the pathological alienation that the madness of nationality has placed and continues to place between the peoples of Europe, thanks also to the short-sighted and quick-handed politicians who are currently on top with its help and have no idea how much the divisive politics they pursue can necessarily only be an interim policy – thanks to all this and much that is quite unspeakable today, the most unambiguous signs are now overlooked or arbitrarily and falsely reinterpreted, in which it is expressed that Europe wants to become one.¹⁴

Nietzsche dreams in Zarathustra of "One Goal" under which humanity must be united¹⁵ and values in Germans precisely "their old, proven quality, interpreters and mediators of peoples to be"¹⁶ and that they actually had no fixed nature, but were "the deceptive people"¹⁷ were.

When you write about the nation as a "non-utopia," that seems to me to be precisely the crucial problem with nationalism and the real reason Nietzsche rejects it. There may be 'realistic' arguments in its favor, but its fundamental impulse is: Why strive for something higher? We are already home. And this 'homeland' must then, of course, be defended against all possible dangers – which, naturally, always come 'from outside,' not from within – if necessary, with violence. It seems to me that the Marxist Ernst Bloch, of all people, is much more Nietzschean when, at the very end of The Principle of Hope writes:

Man still lives everywhere in prehistory; indeed, everything and everyone is still before the creation of the world as it should be. The real genesis is not at the beginning, but at the end, and it only begins to begin when society and existence become radical, meaning they grasp themselves at their root. The root of history, however, is the working, creating human being, transforming and surpassing given conditions. If he has grasped himself and established his own without alienation and estrangement in a real democracy, then something arises in the world that shines into everyone's childhood and in which no one has yet been: homeland.¹⁸

"Homeland" here is not at the beginning, but actually only at the end of history. Homeland is not; it becomes. – And Bloch does not even connect this radical stance with any particular anti-conservatism; instead, he repeatedly acknowledges the hope-bearing, forward-looking aspects of inherited traditions.

Philosophically speaking, this seems to me to be the only adequate concept of homeland. It sends humanity on an infinite journey to nowhere: "Odysseus did not die in Ithaca"¹⁹. From this perspective, common nationalism precisely blocks the further development of humanity by merely simulating homeland and the possibility of true homeland conceals; it is a temptation like the Sirens, Circe, or perhaps, at best, Calypso.

How would you respond to this critique of nationalism? And how do you reconcile being a Nietzschean and To be a nationalist?

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MD: You are, of course, right: as a political movement capable of mobilizing the masses, nationalism was also a strange phenomenon for people who often paid for their existence as a genius with loneliness. However, I consider it a problematic undertaking to consult long-deceased philosophers, who lived under the specific conditions of their time, on current political issues; especially because political and social conditions have changed so drastically throughout the 20th century. The keyword here is Zeitgeist: some context is also important for the Schopenhauer quote. Politically, Schopenhauer sided with the Prussian monarchy. By "wretched wretch," he meant those liberal democrats who took to the barricades in 1848 and 1849 for a united, democratic Germany. Your quote, for example, continues:

The Germans are free from national pride and thereby furnish proof of the honesty attributed to them; the opposite, however, applies to those among them who feign such pride and ridiculously affect it; as is mostly done by the "German brothers" and democrats who flatter the people to seduce them.²⁰

Regarding Schopenhauer's rather famous statements, it must also be mentioned that while Schopenhauer thought highly of Germans, his critique of nationalism simultaneously argued against democracy and the republic. He even donated money to soldiers who died in battles with democrats, not to mention his misogyny. Now, I don't believe this disqualifies Schopenhauer from discussing nationalism, nor does it mean that Schopenhauer wasn't right about some things: blunt and superficial forms of national pride also deter me. However, it highlights the importance of historical context; few who quote Schopenhauer for his anti-nationalism are aware of the historical circumstances of that time or wish to side with the reactionaries and the German Confederation, which was re-established by the time the work was published (1851).  

Goethe and Nietzsche also held views that modern people might find objectionable. For instance, they were very dismissive of democracy. Their classical education led them to dream of a Europe like ancient Greece, and as the geniuses they were, their thinking was partly clearly linked to their great role models of a perhaps supranational Western culture. Unlike Heinrich von Kleist, for example, they did not see the Germanic tribes as the forefathers of German culture, but rather, if at all, as late descendants of Greece and Rome. Therefore, Goethe and Nietzsche can undoubtedly be called good Europeans.

Especially the solitary free spirit Nietzsche, who politically would have preferred to live in pre-Socratic Greece, was, you are right, entirely hostile to Germany. At the latest after his break with Richard Wagner, Nietzsche wanted to expose the Germans as responsible for numerous phenomena of decadence and energetically turned his back on them. He was particularly hostile towards Luther, but also towards the Prussian and Swabian philosophers whom Nietzsche perceived as consequential phenomena of the Reformation. However, Nietzsche rejected not only Germany and its thinkers, but, as you correctly wrote, also nationalism. In Nietzsche's time, nationalism was still accompanied by the demand for equality among citizens. Such demands, especially when they came from the masses, were for Nietzsche lived nihilism.  

Today, we live in a different world: two world wars have completely transformed nationalism, like almost every other political and intellectual current. In a globalized and increasingly digitized world, complete with artificial intelligence and global interconnectedness, Europe is not becoming an ancient Greece in Nietzsche's sense (which is not at all averse to self-confident nations without a nation-state), but rather an Eastern America. If nationalism was once accompanied by the demand for more equality, today it is the demand for more diversity. Even on a smaller scale: demanding the preservation of German dialects through state measures would probably be interpreted as a nationalist demand. As this example illustrates, nationalism today is considered rather reactionary and conservative, whereas it was formerly perceived as more revolutionary and liberal. What would Schopenhauer and Nietzsche think of nationalism today? A difficult question!

To this day, nationalism also has many faces. Besides those who would simply prefer – figuratively speaking – to live the life of hobbits in the Shire, there are others who cast an eye towards a German colony on Mars. Even if the latter sounds utopian, a certain German self-confidence, also regarding its leading role in Europe, would certainly not be a bad thing.

I found your explanations on "Heimat" (homeland/home) very interesting, even if I would rather disagree: in my eyes, "Heimat" is what is familiar. At the same time, in my opinion, it can never be identical with the nation, as the latter is too large to be fully known. Especially since modernity, the world is changing at an enormous pace. This means both the loss of national characteristics and often the loss of "Heimat." Modernity cannot be reversed; but it can be guided in ways that respect both the existence of "Heimat" and that of the nation in favor of a vibrant diversity in the world.

In my opinion, one can therefore be a Nietzschean and a nationalist if one does not cling to rigid concepts and formally adapts to the ever-changing conditions in a world of becoming. Like nationalism today, Nietzsche's thinking is particular. For both, a modern world state that could formulate and implement universal truths would probably be the greatest possible dystopia. Although such a state is unrealistic, various processes are working towards the unification of all culture, even without a corresponding political will. Only the particular spirit can defend itself against this great simplicity or, in Nietzsche's words, nihilism.

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III. World State, Patriotism, and Conservative Revolution

PS: Although what Nietzsche there in Human, All Too Human describes, indeed remarkably moves towards a world state... But I agree with you that Nietzsche usually expresses himself differently; one only has to think of his famous critique of the state in Zarathustra, where he, on the one hand, describes the state as "the coldest of all cold monsters"²¹ calls it, yet at the same time distinguishes between the state and "peoples," contrasting the natural evolution of "peoples" with their particular values against the abstract universality of the state. However, his positive counter-proposal here is not a return to the particularism of peoples, but a vision of individual liberation and the "Übermensch" (Overman/Superman) as perhaps a new universal that could replace the state.

I would object regarding the concept of "genius." Early Nietzsche adopted it quite uncritically from Schopenhauer, and even in Schopenhauer's work, it already had a clear anti-democratic meaning in the sense of the "great man" who is not understood and is suppressed by the 'stupid masses.' Interestingly, from Human, All Too Human there are repeatedly aphorisms in which Nietzsche very clearly criticizes this concept and the mystifications associated with it²² – yet at the same time, he could never quite detach himself from it.

The question here, too, is what can still be done with all these 19th-century concepts today. History has tainted them, yet at the same time, they continue to exert a great fascination and are almost indispensable to our cultural self-understanding. Who would seriously want to understand art without any reference to the concept of genius, as a mere craft like any other?

In my view, a similar problem arises with the concepts of "Heimat" (homeland) and "Nation" (nation). I also believe that they were once very progressive, with a clear edge against the cosmopolitan aristocracies of the 18th century. Even into the 20th century, it wasn't necessarily a contradiction to be left-wing and a patriot – which, of course, also led to the fateful decision of the major workers' parties not to prevent the First World War. Here, the elites of the time – that is, the "mud on the throne"²³  – nationalism was used as the 'cocaine of the people,' if you will,²⁴ to burn through people on an unprecedented scale on the battlefields of Verdun etc. Hasn't nationalism rightly fallen into disrepute simply because of this experience, and shouldn't one, especially as a Nietzschean, say: "Get out of the way of the bad smell! Get away from the steam of these human sacrifices!"²⁵ And indeed, there were some ardent Nietzschean pacifists at that time, such as the "Red Count" Harry Kessler, Emma Goldman, who agitated against the US entry into the war, or Hermann Hesse, to name just a few.²⁶

I mean, during this period, the Nietzschean movement definitively split into a cosmopolitan, pacifist, left-wing faction and a right-wing one, led by his sister – who beat the drums for war, using outrageous lies about her brother's views.²⁷ –, with representatives such as the young Thomas Mann, Ernst Jünger, or Oswald Spengler. This is often referred to as the "Conservative Revolution."

In your book, you seem to refer to this concept positively and emphasize that even the conspirators of July 20th or the White Rose were close to this intellectual current and were nationalists. On your YouTube channel, you've also read aloud several of Spengler's writings – which I don't necessarily interpret as agreement, but certainly as a certain expression of sympathy.

But isn't the actual "Conservative Revolution," as the name suggests, a very avant-garde movement that explicitly turns away from 19th-century nationalism and strives for the more radical vision of re-establishing hierarchical order in the 20th century – with Italian Fascism often serving as a model and relations with National Socialism being quite ambiguous; Spengler, for example, already spoke in 1920 in his essay Prussianism and Socialism, which you also read aloud, of a 'Caesarian Socialism,' even if he later distanced himself from Nazism.²⁸ Or consider Ernst Jünger's The Worker from 1932, where he expresses only contempt for the 'junk room' of the 19th century, and seems to directly anticipate Nazism – his clear and honorable distancing from the Nazi atrocities seems to me, not least, also a distancing from the pre-war Jünger.

What I'm getting at is this: If, for me, after the infernal period from 1914 to 1945 – and it must be emphasized here that European imperialism had previously spread similar horror on other continents – there can still be a meaningful reference to nationalism as a 19th-century idea, then one would have to strongly refer precisely to this liberal and democratic legacy of nationalism, such as the Revolution of 1848. The anthem of such a 'nationalism,' if one wishes to call it that, was perhaps penned by Bertolt Brecht, whom you count among the "great Germans" in your book, in 1950 with the Children's Anthem written, which in my view should actually be declared the national anthem. – But such a 'nationalism' would, to me, strongly contradict the anti-democratic and anti-liberal ideas of the Conservative Revolution.

Starting from such a patriotism, as I would prefer to call it, one could combine the preservation of cultural diversity with collective work towards universal "superhuman" ideals. Bloch also speaks in this sense of a "multiverse" of cultural heritages, all pointing to similar contents of hope.

I am, however, not sure if such patriotism is still conceivable in Germany today. Black, Red, and Gold is associated by very few with the flag of the democratic revolution of 1848 – one of the few truly heroic moments in the history of the German people, I would argue (and it doesn't say much good about German culture that arguably the greatest German philosopher of that era positioned himself so ' brilliantly' here) – but rather with the World Wars and Nazi barbarism, even though all of this occurred under different flags; at best, with a shallow 'hurrah-patriotism' or a rather unpromising German copy of Trumpism. Perhaps German patriotism – despite all the appealing aspects one might find in German tradition, such as pub culture, German food, the rich treasury of folk songs, fairy tales, and legends (you write about this in great detail) – was irretrievably lost in the trenches and then later in the concentration camps, and our hopes must rather lie, as Nietzsche already hinted, in the European – and in the local? Whereby Europe would then have to be conceived more as a 'world Switzerland' or 'world Sweden,' as a purified continent without any imperial ambition, as a haven of democracy, liberalism, and social market economy, under whose wing the different national cultures could express their diversity in a non-repressive way. By the latter, I mean: 'diversity' would also have to imply the recognition of non-traditional lifestyles and the lifestyles of migrants from non-European cultures, otherwise it almost sounds as if, in the name of 'diversity,' one would want to force homosexuals to enter heterosexual marriages and Muslims to eat Weißwurst and drink beer; Orwell would have had a field day with that.

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MD: In my opinion, a modern world state cannot be justified by Nietzsche. A world citizen, or cosmopolitan, is, according to section 16 of The Antichrist anyway, merely the god of a declining people. At the end of Aphorism 475 from Human, All Too Human that you quoted, Nietzsche writes that Judaism, in contrast to Christianity, did not want to orientalize the Occident, but rather helped "to make Europe's task and history a continuation of the Greek."²⁹ This underscores my argument that Nietzsche wanted a European ancient Greece. However, as you know, it's always tricky with Nietzsche quotes, because "[i]n the mine of this thinker, every metal can be found"³⁰. Thus, in the same aphorism from Human, All Too Human he writes about progress in the sense of the victory of conscious over unconscious culture, while in Twilight of the Idols he defines progress in his sense as follows:

I too speak of "return to nature," although it is not really a going back, but an ascending – ascending into the high, free, even terrible nature and naturalness, one that plays with great tasks, is allowed to play . …³¹

In the same paragraph, Nietzsche emphasizes – as so often – his contempt for the idea of equality.

I find it necessary to clarify something here. I consider myself a Nietzschean based on five points of agreement in my worldview. I consider:

• the will to power as a general driving force of the world,
• the pursuit of excellence, along with a critique of the idea of equality, as important,
  
• so-called universal truths critically and emphasize the importance of art,
• a certain pessimism regarding future visions as appropriate, especially concerning the Last Man,
• morality as a materialistic concept in its development, often linked to weakness.

This does not mean that I approve of all of Nietzsche's statements.³² Nonetheless, I take note of them: In my view, therefore, despite some pacifist comments, Nietzsche cannot be construed as a pacifist. Zarathustra loves his "brothers in war".³³ However, I also believe, and this will likely be part of our discussion, that Nietzsche cannot be made into a left-wing cosmopolitan ("No shepherd and one herd!").³⁴). The five aspects of Nietzsche's thought I mentioned alone contradict this desire too strongly.

I, too, find the enthusiasm for war, both today and before and after the First World War, alien. At the same time, I do not condemn it morally, but rather view it historically. Accordingly, I perceive Ernst Jünger's life and work as thoroughly Nietzschean. Spengler, too, is an enthusiastic Nietzschean who frequently refers to him – and who resigned from the Nietzsche Archive when it became too National Socialist for him there. I studied him extensively in my younger years because I could not share the optimism of progress held by many fellow students, especially regarding historical materialism. I primarily recorded the audiobooks because I consider him criminally underrepresented in German intellectual history. For some time now, however, I have moved away from his philosophy of history in favor of a Nietzschean vitalism.

I believe you'll agree with me when I insist that a Nietzschean worldview cannot align with National Socialist ideology. This is proven not only by Spengler or the later Jünger, but also by the Hitler assassin Stauffenberg, who had his comrades swear:

We want a New Order, which makes all Germans upholders of the state and guarantees them law and justice, but despise the lie of equality and demand recognition of natural ranks.³⁵

In my view, this passage is both Nietzschean and nationalistic.  

So, to get to the heart of the matter: there is a continuity of non-National Socialist, German-nationalist ways of thinking from the Wars of Liberation to the present day, although history has profoundly influenced them and makes us think differently today than 50, 100, or 150 years ago. This strong moralizing mostly concerns only national thought, not to the same extent anti-democratic or anti-liberal ideas, which are advocated by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, as well as by adherents of the Conservative Revolution. Well, I acknowledge that, but I insist that National Socialism must not be reduced to a mix of these or to one alone, with the intention of dragging everything connected to it into the abyss. In my book, I therefore point out in detail the ideological foundation of National Socialism in antisemitism and racial chauvinism. Instead of relying on emancipatory and non-chauvinistic nationalisms (to which the German state refers with its national symbols), all nationalism has been condemned and equated with National Socialism since 1945. As a leftist, you surely know all too well when leftist thought is associated with the atrocities of the Soviet Union or the GDR. Superficially, I consider both to be disingenuous. Likewise, I do not believe that German patriotism (socialism could be accused of similar things) has been "irretrievably lost" due to the atrocities of the 20th century. Rather, I believe anti-national ways of thinking would like to assume this, but they are disproven by recent election forecasts, in which non-patriotic parties and individuals tend to be penalized.

I am firmly convinced that national sentiment (for example, as territorial kinship) is natural and is what enables solidarity and coexistence in the first place. At the same time, the division of Europe into nation-states is the status quo, and any demands for a reordering require strong arguments. Nietzscheans, meanwhile, know that moral arguments for this often stem from a drive of one's own weakness, such as the desire not to be a nation. Nevertheless, we will remain a nation. Almost in contrast to every other people, this grates on many Germans, which, ironically, seems to have long since developed into a typically German peculiarity for a part of the nation.  

In my view, the local and the European do not inherently contradict the national. But regardless of whether it's a Europe of fatherlands or a "world Switzerland": the conservative element of these systems must aim at preserving culture, which, given the demographic situation in Western Europe, the abandonment of traditional cultural assets, and especially anti-nationalist currents from the circles of the so-called "Paypal Mafia" – which are often anti-democratic or can even be described as neo-fascist – is by no means a given.

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PS: I would immediately object to some points here again, but I think we at least agree on rejecting the "Paypal Mafia," which makes me optimistic. We will certainly discuss further details in the verbal follow-up to this written exchange, which I am very much looking forward to. Thank you for your willingness to have this conversation, Michael.

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MD: Thank you very much too, dear Paul! I am also looking forward to our joint conversation, hoping to identify further parallels and common ground, as well as to discuss differences.

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Michael Drescher (born 1995 in Southern Germany), also known as PhrasenDrescher, is a YouTuber, author, and is currently pursuing a doctorate on the question of the age of nations. He lives in Vienna and, during and after his philosophy studies, focuses primarily on Friedrich Nietzsche. On his YouTube channel "PhrasenDrescher" he has recorded numerous works by the philosopher and explained individual concepts, but also conducts interviews, reviews films and books, or publishes other philosophical content. 

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The Article image shows the only stamp dedicated to Nietzsche in a German state so far. It was issued in 2000 on the occasion of the centenary of his death (Source). It is based on a drawing by Edvard Munch.

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Bibliography

Bloch, Ernst: The Principle of Hope. Frankfurt a. M. 1976.

Colli, Giorgio: After Nietzsche. Frankfurt a. M. 1980.

Förster-Nietzsche: Elisabeth: Nietzsche and the War. In: Hamburg Correspondent of Sep. 15, 1914 (No. 468, Vol. 184), p. 2.

PhrasenDrescher: Being German for Advanced Learners. Krefeld 2024.

Schopenhauer, Arthur: Parerga und Paralipomena. Minor Philosophical Writings I. Complete Works Vol. IV. Leipzig 1979.

Stephan, Paul: Left-Nietzscheanism. An Introduction. 2 Vols. Stuttgart 2020.

Zeller, Eberhard: Spirit of Freedom. The 20th of July. Berlin 2004.

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Footnotes

1: The Case of Wagner, Turin Letter, Para. 11.

2: On the Genealogy of Morality, Para. III, 2.

3: https://www.bundespraesident.de/SharedDocs/Reden/DE/Johannes-Rau/Reden/1999/05/19990523_Rede.html (last accessed: 23.04.2026).

4: duden.de/rechtschreibung/Nationalismus (last accessed: 23.04.2026).

5: Editor's note: This was notably proclaimed by the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama. See, for example, this article by Michael Meyer-Albert on our blog.

6: Here's a little anecdote: Not too long ago, I met a young woman who, as a native German speaker, speaks and reads a lot of English because of her job. When the conversation turned to Nietzsche, she told me – and I can still barely believe it – that she had read the Zarathustra in English.

7: On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Sec. 1.

8: The Gay Science, Aph. 358.

9: Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, Chap. 4; p. 430 f.

10: Ecce Homo, Why I Am So Wise, 3. For more on Nietzsche's "Polishness", see my article "Poland Has Not Yet Perished" on this blog.

11: Cf. Human, All Too Human I, Aph. 475 and similarly the 23rd aphorism of the book.

12: Human, All Too Human I, Aph. 24.

13: Ibid.

14: Beyond Good and Evil, Aph. 256.

15: Cf. Of the Thousand and One Goals.

16: Human, All Too Human I, Aph. 475.

17: Beyond Good and Evil, Aph. 244.

18: The Principle of Hope, p. 1628.

19: Ibid., p. 1201.

20: Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena I, p. 430.

21: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On the New Idol.

22: In the 126th Aphorism of the first volume of MA it states, for example: "Among the greatest effects of those whom we call geniuses and saints is that they compel interpreters who, for the salvation of humanity, misunderstand." – Perhaps this observation could also be applied to Nietzsche himself.

23: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of the New Idol.

24: Cf. Nietzsche's very apt remarks on this in On the Genealogy of Morality, 3rd Essay, Sec. 26.

25: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of the New Idol.

26: As you know, I discuss all of this in great detail in my book on Left-Nietzscheanism see.

27: One can read this in her article published directly in 1914 Nietzsche and the War.

28: For a critique of Spengler's Nietzscheanism, see also Christian Saehrendt's corresponding article on our blog.

29: Human, All Too Human I, Aph. 475.

30: Giorgio Colli, After Nietzsche, p. 209.

31: Twilight of the Idols, Expeditions, Aph. 48.

32: "[O]nly when you have all denied me, will I return to you" (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of the Bestowing Virtue, 3). Nietzsche intended to convey that his readers should not cling to a supposedly "true" doctrine, but rather should continually reinvent both it and themselves.

33: Cf. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Of War and Warriors.

34: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, 5.

35: Quoted from Eberhard Zeller, Spirit of Freedom, p. 324.

Nietzsche and Nationalism?

A Disputation between Michael Drescher and Paul Stephan

Throughout his life, Nietzsche was a great critic of nationalism. The burgeoning German national sentiment, in particular, was anathema to him, and he wrote scathing remarks about his home country, such as "definition of the Germanic: obedience and long legs..."¹. At the same time, nationalists and patriots of all stripes count among his fans. How can one be a Nietzschean and a (German) nationalist? What exactly is "nationalism," and is it possible to give this term a positive meaning?

Paul Stephan discussed these delicate topics, which are gaining increasing relevance given the successes of nationalist parties worldwide, in written form with YouTuber, Nietzsche expert, and nationalism researcher Michael Drescher, also known as PhrasenDrescher.

Additionally, they continued this dialogue verbally on YouTube – feel free to check out the result here (or as an audio-only version on SoundCloud).

So what is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms"¹, Nietzsche wrote in 1873, laying the groundwork for a debate that would only escalate 100 years later, when postmodern philosophy began to argue that there is no scientific truth that adequately represents its objects, but rather that sciences construct their knowledge.

But don't modern natural sciences finally grasp nature correctly? Radical constructivism, however, has been disputing this since the 1960s. For one of its main proponents, the Chilean biologist Francisco J. Varela, "reality is not simply given: it depends on the perceiver, and that is [...] because what counts as a relevant world counts, is inextricably linked to the structure of the perceiver."²

Nietzsche paved the way for this when he argued against the positivism dominant in the 19th century, "which stops at the phenomenon 'there are only facts'": "[N]o, there are no facts, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact 'in itself'"³.

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1. The Will to Power as Interpretation

The background to this is Nietzsche's doctrine of the Will to Power. At first glance, it appears merely as a kind of driving force of biological beings, when in Zarathustra means: „Only where there is life, there is also will: but not will to live, but – as I teach you – will to power!“⁴ This is further confirmed by Henning Ottmann, who, commenting on Nietzsche's writings of the 1880s, observes: "'Will to Power' was everything that 'acted' and was in motion, on its way to more strength"⁵.

Yet in Nietzsche's Nachlass it says: „The Will to Power interprets: in the formation of an organ, it is an interpretation; it delineates, determines degrees, power differences. […] In truth, interpretation itself is a means, to become master over something.“⁶ Thus, Will to Power means taking possession of the world by interpreting it accordingly. For, according to Nietzsche, philosophy "always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise; philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the spiritual Will to Power, for the 'creation of the world,' for the causa prima."⁷

Marx refuses to be satisfied with mere interpretation, reads the famous eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; interpreted, the point is to change it."⁸ Martin Heidegger, who plays an important role in the postmodern debate, objects to this: "In following this statement, one overlooks that a change in the world presupposes a change in the conception of the world and that a conception of the world can only be gained by adequately interpreting it"⁹, which, for Heidegger, Marx only inadequately achieves.

However, Marx initially grounds his thesis in the philosophy of history, as history was a leading discipline at the time. And after that, he would spend a long time on economic analyses. With both, he would interpret the world in such a way that it could be changed.

And if one objects to this with: "It's all just interpretation!", then Marx could refer to Nietzsche, who concedes as much: "Suppose that this too is only interpretation – and you will be eager enough to object to this? – well, so much the better."¹⁰ Facts are always already the result of an interpretation. This is also supported by the postmodern philosopher Gianni Vattimo: The doctrine of understanding and thus of world-understanding, "hermeneutics is itself 'only interpretation'. It does not base its claims to validity on an alleged access to things themselves."¹¹

Radical constructivism views this similarly. As Chilean neurobiologist Humberto Maturana states: "One only sees what one believes."¹² A biological being always perceives the world only according to its perceptions, which it must interpret. Sensory data must be understood.

Thus, Nietzsche, in Daybreak paves the way for radical constructivism: "The habits of our senses have woven us into the deception and illusion of sensation: these, in turn, are the foundations of all our judgments and 'knowledge', – there is absolutely no escape, no secret paths or detours into the real world!"¹³

This corresponds to what radical constructivist Ernst von Glasersfeld writes: "Our sense organs always 'report' to us only a more or less hard impact against an obstacle, but never convey to us features or properties of that which they encounter."¹⁴ If pain suddenly appears, one must first clarify its origin and where it spreads. This is where the 'errors', distortions, differences, and above all, varying interpretations begin. But only interpreted perception says something about the world and the pain. Perception alone says almost nothing.

Therefore, one cannot rely on an original perception, which does not provide an object in itself. As von Glasersfeld remarks: "[N]o one will ever be able to compare the perception of an object with the postulated object itself, which is supposed to have caused the perception."¹⁵ The object in itself is neither an object of perception nor of experience.

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2. Mathematics and Causality as Idealizations

But haven't modern natural sciences solved these problems? For Galileo Galilei, the book of nature is written in mathematical script. Everything in the world can be accurately grasped quantitatively with mathematics, because nature consists of bodies whose proportions can be measured. For Galileo, this provides an adequate explanation.

But do "triangles, circles, and other geometric figures" truly exist in nature,¹⁶, as Galileo claims? Nietzsche precisely contradicts this: "We operate with things that do not exist at all, with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, divisible spaces"¹⁷. These are ideal constructs of geometry that do not occur in nature. In 1936, Edmund Husserl would confirm this: "In the Galilean mathematization of nature, nature itself is now idealized under the guidance of the new mathematics"¹⁸.

Nietzsche, however, had already recognized this: "[W]hen we first turn everything into an image , our own image! It is enough to consider science as the most faithful humanization of things possible; we learn to describe ourselves ever more precisely by describing things and their succession.”¹⁹ It is precisely this that the founder of quantum mechanics, Werner Heisenberg, would remind physics of in 1955: "Even in natural science, therefore, the object of research is no longer nature in itself, but nature exposed to human questioning, and to that extent, man also encounters himself here again."²⁰

For Nietzsche, this calls into question the fundamental epistemological principle of Western thought, namely, the principle of causality, of cause and effect, with which one seeks to explain the world. In contrast, Nietzsche asks: "[H]ow is explanation even possible, [...] Cause and effect: such a duality probably never exists – in truth, a continuum lies before us, from which we isolate a few pieces."²¹. With the principle of causality, an effect is explained by a cause, meaning one thing by another. But what are the precise connections?

And for that, one must know the matter precisely. Therefore, Michel Foucault, whose post-structuralism, even before postmodernism, questioned truth as a correspondence between word and object, asks: "Why does the genealogist Nietzsche at least occasionally reject the search for origins? Primarily because it implies the search for the precisely defined essence of the matter."²².

Is it not an arbitrary division or a determination of events dictated by scientific methods? As Nietzsche remarks: "People have always believed they knew what a cause is: but where did we get our knowledge, or more precisely, our belief that we know here?"²³ For many religious believers, God is considered the creator of the world and thus the first cause. Those who trust in the natural sciences accept their Big Bang theory. Similar to Nietzsche, Maturana notes: "Explanations are thus statements about generative mechanisms accepted by a listener."²⁴

Is the principle of causality not merely due to the urge to make the world comprehensible, i.e., scientifically today? From this, von Glasersfeld concludes, "that we expect the world we live in to be a world with certain regularities, a world that functions according to certain rules."²⁵

For if one cannot attribute a headache to the weather, it is unsettling: a brain tumor? If, however, one knows the causes, one hopes to be able to do something about it. This then leads to, as Nietzsche says: "To trace something unknown back to something known is alleviating, reassuring, satisfying, and moreover, gives a feeling of power."²⁶

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3. The End of the 'True World'

Furthermore, there is never just one interpretation to explain an event, but always several. This is actually the self-critical principle of modern sciences, which should distinguish them from religions and ideologies. Of course, scientists quickly forget this when they claim their doctrines are the only correct ones, for example, when it comes to funding.

This is simply misapplied science. Nietzsche already pointed this out to the sciences when he distinguished various forms of nihilism: "The radical nihilism is the conviction of the absolute untenability of existence, when it concerns the highest values one recognizes, plus the insight, that we have not the slightest right to posit a beyond or a thing-in-self, which is 'divine', which is morality incarnate."²⁷ If one can no longer adequately explain the world, then no morality can be derived from it either.

From this, Nietzsche distinguishes the most extreme form of nihilism: "That there is no truth ; that there is no absolute nature of things, no 'thing-in-itself' – this is itself a nihilism, and indeed the most extreme.²⁸ Christianity, like the modern natural sciences, thereby loses not only the foundations of its ethics but, above all, its understanding.

Then one must interpret the world differently. This also opens up perspectives for various ways of life, so that one can declare no particular way of life as the correct one, neither scientifically nor religiously; "for one recognizes," according to Maturana, "that statements cannot be justified by 'the real,' that the idea of objective reality should primarily serve as a strategic argument for the validity of explanations, and that one can, in fact, delineate many operationally coherent domains that are just as livable and sustainable as the 'sole real one' once was."²⁹

Nietzsche had encapsulated this in a central aphorism: "We have abolished the true world: what world remained? the apparent one, perhaps? . . . But no! with the true world, we have also abolished the apparent one!"³⁰ If there is no truth as a correspondence between statement and fact, neither a true nor an apparent world exists, but many worlds that owe their existence to different interpretations. Thus, Maturana demands recognition "that the distinction between reality and appearance is a questionable construct, from which, in turn, other, in principle explainable consequences must arise."³¹ With this, radical constructivism completes Nietzsche's most extreme nihilism.

All insights are due to different understandings of the world. One should account for such things from the outset. Thus Nietzsche writes programmatically: "There is only a perspectival seeing, only a perspectival 'knowing'; And [...] the more eyes, different eyes we manage to apply to the same matter, the more complete will our 'concept' of this thing, our 'objectivity' be."³² Therefore, one should not be content with a single perspective on the world.

This leads to many different paths to knowledge for radical constructivism, as it does for Nietzsche. Von Glasersfeld writes:

Since for the constructivist, knowledge is never an image or reflection of ontological reality, but always only a possible way to navigate among the "objects," finding a satisfactory way never excludes the possibility that other satisfactory ways can be found.³³

Then the situation after the end of the true world – regardless of whether it is religiously or scientifically assumed – presents itself as follows: "What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? And backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down?"³⁴ To this day, most people, especially many scientists, really dislike reading this, because then the latter can no longer dictate to the former how they should live.

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For the article image (Source) is the painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1767/8) by the English painter Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797). It depicts a famous experiment in which the Irish natural philosopher Robert Boyle (1627–1692) sought to prove that animals require air to live by extracting it from a bird trapped in a glass sphere using a specially commissioned pump, then considered high-tech. The animal died in agony – quod erat demonstrandum.

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Literature

Martin Heidegger in Conversation with Richard Wisser (ZDF 24.9.1969). In: Emil Kettering & Günther Neske (eds.): Answer. Martin Heidegger in Conversation, Pfullingen 1988.

Foucault, Michel: Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (1971). In: Idem: Of the Subversion of Knowledge, Frankfurt a. M. 1987.

Galilei, Galileo: Il Saggiatore (1623). In: Le opere di G. Galilei, Florence 1932.

von Glasersfeld, Ernst: The Logic of Scientific Fallibility (1987). In: Idem: Ways of Knowing. Constructivist Explorations through Our Thinking, 2nd ed. Heidelberg 2013.

Idem: Construction of the Reality of the Concept of Objectivity (1992). In: Heinz Gumin & Heinrich Meier (Eds.): Introduction to Constructivism, 10th ed. Munich 2010.

Heisenberg, Werner: The Image of Nature in Contemporary Physics. Hamburg 1955.

Husserl, Edmund: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936). Husserliana Vol. VI. The Hague 1954.

Marx, Karl: Theses on Feuerbach (1845). In: MEW Vol. 3, Berlin 1969.

Maturana, Umberto: What is Cognition? (1992). Munich & Zurich 1994.

Ottmann, Henning: Philosophy and Politics in Nietzsche (1987), 2nd ed. Berlin & New York 1999.

Varela, Francisco J.: Ethical Competence (1992). Frankfurt a. M. & New York 1994.

Vattimo, Gianni: Beyond Interpretation. The Significance of Hermeneutics for Philosophy (1994). Frankfurt a. M. & New York 1997.

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Footnotes

1: On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense, Sec. 1.

2: Ethical Competence, p. 20.

3: Posthumous Fragments No. 1886 7[60].

4: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On Self-Overcoming.

5: Philosophy and Politics in Nietzsche, p. 354.

6: Posthumous Fragments No. 1885 2[148].

7: Beyond Good and Evil, Aph. 9.

8: Theses on Feuerbach (1845), p. 7.

9: Martin Heidegger in conversation with Richard Wisser, p. 22.

10: Beyond Good and Evil, Aph. 22.

11: Beyond Interpretation, p. 155.

12: What is Knowing?, p. 31.

13: Daybreak , Aph. 117.

14: Construction of the Reality of the Concept of Objectivity, p. 21.

15: Ibid., p. 12.

16: Il Saggiatore, p. 232.

17: The Gay Science, Aph. 112.

18: The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, p. 20.

19: The Gay Science, Aph. 112.

20: The Concept of Nature in Contemporary Physics, p. 18.

21: The Gay Science, Aph. 112.

22: Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, p. 71.

23: Twilight of the Idols, The Four Great Errors, Sec. 3.

24: What is Knowledge?, p. 43.

25: The Logic of Scientific Fallibility, p. 73.

26: Twilight of the Idols, The Four Great Errors, Sec. 5.

27: Nachlass No. 1887 10[192].

28: Nachlass No. 1887 9[35].

29: What is Knowledge?, p. 47.

30: Twilight of the Idols, How the "True World" Finally Became a Fable.

31: What is Knowledge? p. 53.

32: On the Genealogy of Morality, 3rd Essay, Sec. 12.

33: Construction of the Reality of the Concept of Objectivity, p. 32.

34: The Gay Science, Aph. 125.

"There are no facts, only interpretations."

From Nietzsche's Critique of Knowledge to Radical Constructivism

Nietzsche questions truth as an adequate understanding of the world. This implies there is no longer a true world, as modern sciences assume. Radical constructivism, emerging in biology, which posits that living beings perceive their environment only as their internal structures allow, confirms Nietzsche's analyses and, consequently, postmodern philosophy, where truth is also considered merely a construction and not an objective grasp of something. From this, it follows not only that the world can be interpreted in various ways, but also that there is no single, uniquely correct truth and, therefore, no single correct way of life.

If you prefer to watch or listen to this article, read by the author himself in German, you can also find it on YouTube and Soundcloud.

“I had the impression that he could possibly kill or strangle his mother in this condition. ”² Köselitz wrote these lines to Overbeck in 1893 after a visit to Nietzsche, after he had already fallen victim to spiritual absenteeism, was cared for with sacrifice by his mother. Perhaps the aggressive behavior observed by Köselitz can only be interpreted as a symptom of insanity and Nietzsche's already decaying personality. More evil tongues could claim that the same aggressiveness reveals the suppressed feeling that Nietzsche would in reality have shown towards his mother: contempt that ignites into hatred beneath the surface.

Well, so we could ask, what does that actually concern us? Whether Nietzsche loved or despised his mother, whether her care was self-sacrificing, or whether she only wanted to meet social expectations of a “loving mother” regardless of her actual feelings? Whether she wanted to protect Nietzsche from the eyes of neighbors or herself from their talk as she increasingly locked him in the house? Whether she was spiritually limited and bigoted her Christian ideals, whether the “laundry of virtues” and the numerous “may God judge it.”³ stemmed from a brave, fateful soul or one of resentment who did not want to allow anyone and certainly not her children a life beyond the normative corset, which she would rather have seen unhappy, but married and leave the son sick in a regular job rather than permanently taking sick leave and vagabond in climatic cures that he himself considered good?⁴

Yes, that could of course not matter to us or just satisfy our personal curiosity if these considerations could not help us to like Nietzsche's philosophy a little more by readjusting, balancing and understanding better: When he becomes so abusive again in his misogyny, when he so rages against Christian charity, when he lets himself go in the fury of his contempt.

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I. Between mom and llama

Well, we could say that he also knew Malwida von Meysenbug, Lou von Salomé, Meta von Salis and Ida Overbeck — all clever women — but he was influenced by two others. Because the family never completely lets you go, or at least not Nietzsche.

The fact that they are not good for him can be found again and again in his letters: “I don't like my mother, and hearing my sister's voice displeases me; I am invariably I got sick when I was with them. ”⁵ The fact that he gives his mother very limited insight into his inner life — or we could even say: none at all — that he advises her not to read his books, does not prevent him from having her send him food packages over and over again. This tradition begins in his school years, a box wanders back and forth, Nietzsche writes to his mother what his son's heart desires, and then the box filled with food and washed clothes comes back. Why stop doing that? Even a lonely philosopher can eat well for once:

When the sausage arrives at the end of next week, it would be the best time! Then I ask for 1) 1 pair of woolen stockings, 2) a glove (knitted) to wash (as the good llama used to do for me) (I mean to bathe in the morning) and 3) finally a pair of black knitted fairly long gloves with one thumb. Please please! ”⁶

And the much-maligned sister is also allowed to help make Nietzsche's life easier. In Basel, she manages the household for Nietzsche, who is suffering from time to time in terms of health, so that she “shares with him about a third of Nietzsche's time in Basel.”⁷ spends. And when she is called, she comes to Tautenburg, herself as a chaperone, where Salomé and her brother discussed and wandered together for about three weeks in August 1882. A Nietzscher mistake with ultimately fatal consequences for the friendship between Nietzsche and Lou von Salomé, at least from his later point of view. Because it remains questionable whether Salomé's sharp tongue would have grown without Sister Friedrich Nietzsche.

At least the two blood-related women Elisabeth and Franziska Nietzsche can hardly refuse anything to their hearts and you won't be surprised if something is expected in return for such service of love: a decent bourgeois life, that wouldn't be too much to ask, no abuses against authorities and a little more adjustment to the spirit of the times. You have such wonderful writing talent — your sister could have thought — and then he writes something like that of all things. The mother doesn't even read the books and that's probably better that way.

The big disagreement with mother and sister happened in 1882 as part of the “Lou Affair.” Elisabeth Nietzsche intrigues against Lou von Salomé, who, as you have to admit, probably treated her more than disparagingly. Jealousy certainly plays a part. How inappropriate the friendship between the two is, what Lou von Salomé claims about Nietzsche behind Nietzsche's back, these tips of Elisabeth Nietzsche reach both mother and Frederick. A visit to Naumburg ends in disaster. Nietzsche leaves and writes to Overbeck:

For example, I haven't forgotten for an hour that my mother called me a disgrace for my father's grave. I won't mention other examples — but a pistol barrel is now a source of relatively pleasant thoughts for me.⁸

As a thank you for all the attention and disappointed expectations — imposed by many Nietzsche researchers — mother and sister are now heavily blamed. All the unspeakable things Nietzsche wrote about women were attributable to them. And maybe even the bossy grandmother Erdmuthe and the aunt: the weak Auguste and the nervous Rosalie. What springs from such a household of women is misogyny, which is also a good part of self-loathing, because if we cannot live out our hate and do not free ourselves from it freely and cheekily, then it goes into the interior, then we just hate ourselves and those who have shaped us.

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II. Nietzsche's Misogyny

Franz Overbeck writes about Nietzsche in his memoirs:

[S] I myself was by no means easy for him everywhere, and he may have developed the “will to power” into an ideal with such eloquence as was only possible for one who had this ideal in mind so much as such and had not actually become flesh of himself.⁹

How to deal with women who are constantly dancing on your nose? Some aphorisms from Human, all-too-human sound like reflections on this question. In his opinion, women with their “sudden decisions about the pros and cons” of a matter that is better considered thoroughly were romanticized far too often by men as “Sibylline Oracles,” although the diversity of things simply suggests that “the nature of things [...] is set up in such a way that women are always right.”¹⁰.

Is there a man who cannot defend himself against feminine, pragmatic reason speaking? “The intellect of women shows itself as complete mastery, presence of mind, use of all advantages. ”¹¹ Once they are inflamed with hatred, the women after Nietzsche have no reluctance. No moral corset imposes them and so they practice “finding sore spots [...] and stabbing them: for which purpose their dagger sharpening intellect serves them excellently.”¹².

After extensive squabbling, one sex remorses that it has hurt, while it bothers the other “that he has not done enough woe to the other because he is trying to make his heart heavy afterwards through tears, sobs and disturbed faces.”¹³. With these words, which reader would not like to imagine a family dispute in the house of Nietzsche? And imagine a Nietzsche who, instead of being beautifully independent, is free from “compulsion, disturbance, noise, business, duties, worries.”¹⁴ Moves in philosophical expanses, grumbles about domestic matters — and that too with a bad conscience. Nasty women's rooms!

It was precisely because they were able to poison the men's entire domestic lives (so, according to Nietzsche, Xanthippe first drove her husband Socrates out into the alleys and into philosophy¹⁵). The women rule, but on a small and covert basis¹⁶ — and that is also the only way women can do it — according to Friedrich Nietzsche. Therefore, for their own sake, they should not desire what they want to compete with the man recently: for emancipation.¹⁷ It's hard to imagine what that would mean for science if women got involved with their overly sharp, quick, contradictory thinking.¹⁸ And the further emancipation goes, the more women lose their original power over men. They masculinize themselves, which is why an age with a higher degree of emancipation paradoxically means less power for women.

Nietzsche also writes this in Beyond good and evil, where he does a lot more. Interestingly enough, he includes the aphorisms 231 to 239 from the Seventh Main Piece, our virtues (we already know — not women), with an introductory thought:

But at the bottom of us, completely “down there,” there is certainly something irteachable, a granite of spiritual fate, of predetermined decision and answer to predetermined questions. With every cardinal problem, an immutable “that's me” says; about man and woman, for example, a thinker cannot relearn, but can only learn out.¹⁹

These “decisions” will later be interpreted differently at different times and put on the thinker who said such things himself as

A guide to the problems that we are, - more correctly, to the great foolishness that we are, to our spiritual fate, to Unteachable completely “down there.” — Based on this abundant manner, as I have just committed against myself, I will perhaps be allowed to testify a few truths about the “woman herself”: provided that you now know from the outset how much it is — my Truths are.²⁰

You can use this line to claim that Nietzsche makes fun of the prevailing prejudices against women in the following aphorisms by sharpening them and satirizing them as “foolishness.” However, we can also take him at his word that it was indeed his truth and that he knew how much it was part of his “unteachable right down there.” Perhaps every person will find in themselves a few ugly, low convictions that they would usually be afraid to express publicly, not because they do not believe in them, but because they are afraid of how people will then think of them.

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III. An apology?

It may be difficult to distance yourself from the experiences you have, and at a time when women were patronized and kept small, they were largely the way they were formed. Let's think of Franziska Nietzsche, who met her spouse at the age of 17 (it's all right, “[d] he only mistake is that I'm so young mother”²¹), or because Ludwig Nietzsche presented her with a draft as a sample letter for how she should write as a pastor.²² Elisabeth Nietzsche, a graduate of a girls' school, used idiosyncratic punctuation throughout her life, which was mainly characterized by cut-outs. Her youthful writing style is aptly described by Kerstin Decker:

She usually sounded what a young girl should sound like according to general agreement, enthusiastic, uplooking, sentimental, not clinically stupid, but something, and shivering in front of male size: “Beloved Fritz! How long have I been longing to write to you, but the longing has been particularly vivid since the last eight days since I was intoxicated by your dear new book “[.]²³

But is it possible to excuse the overall judgment that Nietzsche makes about women by describing the inculcated minelessness of women? In Nietzsche research, it is often argued that the alleged mental limitations of Elisabeth and Franziska Nietzsche provoked or even legitimized Frederick's misogynistic attitude. But this view is entangled in an absurd perpetrator-victim reversal: Victims of repressive education and intellectual incarceration are burdened with moral responsibility for a male system of thought that justifies precisely that oppression. It is the perfection of the circle: Women are blamed for providing the philosopher with the arguments for their own devaluation through their (forced) immaturity. The deformation caused by education and paternalism among women is transfigured as the cause of male resentment instead of seeing it as its product. And didn't Nietzsche have enough “countermaterial” from women in his hand that could just as easily have freed him from his “fate”?

In contrast to Elisabeth Nietzsche, Nietzsche's mother never attempts to reach independent intellectual judgments herself. Whenever it is appropriate, she consults someone who can tell her what things look like. And when she does not feel what she is thinking about, she falls into inner turmoil. The attending physician imposes the following verdict on her lack of understanding that the insane Nietzsche is incurable: “Mother makes a limited impression.”²⁴. Probably the most self-powerful act in her life will be the decision to take the sick Nietzsche²⁵ and to keep him with her even in exchange for the sister's appropriations. She finally relinquishes authority over his spiritual inheritance²⁶ Even though the publication of the Antichrists It hurts a lot²⁷ And it remains questionable which work would have survived if the powers of attorney had remained in mother's hands and whether she had not yielded to the pastor's insistence to destroy one or the other document.

When it comes to woman-male relationships, we can regard both Friedrich, Elisabeth and Franziska Nietzsche as victims of their time. And anyone who has suffered more from others in the end will always remain our own imaginary product:

When I look for the deepest contrast to myself, the incalculable baseness of instincts, I always find my mother and sister—to believe I am related to such a canaille would be blasphemy against my divinity. The treatment I experience from my mother and sister, up to this moment, fills me with an unspeakable horror: here a perfect infernal machine works, with unfailing certainty about the moment when I can be wounded bloody[.]²⁸

On August 15, 1900, Nietzsche, who had been mentally abducted for a good 10 years, dies in good custody by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche at Villa Silberblick in Weimar.

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The article image ‍was drawn by Zwickau artist Christina Stephan, who also inspired us to create this small series. Learn more about her and her art on her website. It shows Nietzsche's mother with her children Elisabeth and Friedrich and her husband who died young.

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Literature

Decker, Kerstin: The sister. The life of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Berlin & Munich 2016.

Gabel, Gernot U. & Carl Helmuth Jagenberg (eds.): The incapacitated philosopher. Letters from Franziska Nietzsche to Adalbert Oehler from the years 1889-1897. Hurth 1994.

Janz, Curt Paul: Frederick Nietzsche. biography. The years of infirmity. documents. Sources and registers, Vol. 3. Frankfurt a.M. 1993.

Overbeck, Franz: Works and estate. Autobiographical. “My friends Treitschke, Nietzsche and Rohde”, edited by Barbara Reibnitz and Marianne Stauffacher-Schaub. Stuttgart & Weimar 1999.

Podach, Erich F. (ed.): The sick Nietzsche. Letters from his mother to Franz Overbeck. Vienna 1937.

Schmidt-Losch, Ursula: “a missed life”? Nietzsche's mother Franziska. Aschaffenburg 2001.

Volz, Pia Daniela: Nietzsche in the maze of his illness. A medical-biographical investigation. Würzburg 1990.

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footnotes

1: Ecce homo, Why am I so wise, § 3; translation: Daniel Fidel Ferrer (Kuhn von Verden Verlag: 2023).

2: Quoted by: Pia Daniela Volz, Nietzsche in the Labyrinth of His Illness, p. 471.

3: On the Christian language in Nietzsche's parents' home, see the chapter”The good Lord will “... religious language in the house of Nietzsche 1844-1850 and its early (st) consequences at Ursula Schmidt-Losch, “a missed life”?, p. 105-120.

4: “I'm me Isn't it who has shown you an excess of undeserved kindness over the past year? Are you ungrateful through and through? Or lie in the last reason that the simplest truth is upside down with you? Who behaved badly against me if not you? Who has put my life at risk if not you? Who abandoned me as completely as you did, and when I needed comfort, answered me with ridicule and defile my entire life and aspirations? I know Even more so, and from childhood on, the moral distance that separates me and you, and I needed all my gentleness, patience and silence so as not to make you feel them all. Don't you understand anything about the reluctance I have to overcome to be so closely related to people like you are! What makes me vomit when I read letters from my sister and have to swallow this mixture of nonsense and audacity that even cleans itself up morally? “(Letter to Franziska Nietzsche in Naumburg (drafts), Nice, January/February 1884, No. 482.)

5: Letter to Franz Overbeck v. 06/03/1883, No. 386.

6: Letter to Franziska Nietzsche v. 13/07/1881, No. 126.

7: Schmidt-Losch, “A missed life”? Nietzsche's mother Franziska, p. 29.

8: Letter to Franz Overbeck v. 10/02/1883, No. 373.

9: Franz Overbeck, Works and estate, p. 25.

10: Human, all-too-human I, Aph 417.

11: Human, all-too-human I, Aph 411. Could Nietzsche also have thought of his mother, who was extremely adept at making financial provisions for herself and hers when it came to pragmatic housekeeping? Schmidt-Losch writes, taking Franziska Nietzsche's correspondence into account: “In doing so, she develops a degree of skill, even virtuosity, which is in astonishing discrepancy with assessments of her intelligence, to which Franziska was subjected by many biographers. Even the young Röcken widow knew how to pull out all the stops when it came to organising support; and towards the end of her seventh decade, Franziska brilliantly played out her mastery of requesting support “(”A missed life”? Nietzsche's mother Franziska, p. 27).

12: Human, all-too-human I, Aph 414.

13: Human, all-too-human I, aph. 420.

14:On the genealogy of morality III, paragraph 8.

15: Cf. Human, all-too-human I, Aph 433.

16: Cf. Human, all-too-human I, aph. 412 & Beyond good and evil, Aph 239.

17: Cf. Beyond good and evil, Aph 232 & 239.

18: Cf. Human, all-too-human I, Aph. 416, 419 & 425 and Beyond good and evil, Aph. 232, 233, 234 & 239. You can see a shift in the accent of judgment between the two works. While women's inability to do science in Human, all-too-human is described as a current situation which could also change one day (cf. Aph. 416 & 425), is used in Beyond good and evil asserts the innate flatness of women and the unnaturalness of their instincts when they are interested in the mind (cf. Aph. 234, 238 & 239). In this respect, the development can be described as an aggravation of misogynous thought within Nietzsche's philosophy.

19: Beyond good and evil, Aph 231.

20: Ibid.

21: This reminder and also her mother's response “'this mistake is improving every day my child, '” Franziska Nietzsche writes down in her memoirs (see: Franziska Nietzsche: My life. At: Schmidt-Losch, “a missed life”, PP. 80-103; 99).

22: This is how Schmidt-Losch describes Franziska Nietzsche's “re-education” in the new marriage as follows: “[A] us the natural and uncomplicated girl from the countryside should a woman become a pastor. In a concept book, she practices writing letters that her master and master will correct. A draft letter is obviously so lousy that the pastor finally drafts a sample letter based on Franziska's text, the pleasant wording of which Franziska will be well-behaved in the future” (“a missed life”?, P. 19).

23: The sister P. 157.

24: Curt Paul Janz: Frederick Nietzsche. Vol. 3, p. 51.

25: Even the decision to move Nietzsche from Basel to Jena can be understood as a compromise with Overbeck, who replies in a letter to Köselitz: “I was of the opinion at all a year ago that Nietzsche should stay close to me, fought in particular against the hasty way Nietzsche was taken away by his mother, demanding that she should first travel alone and first seek suitable accommodation near her Formal search” (cited below ibid.).

26: Although reluctantly: “I signed the just signed regarding the transfer of my son's intellectual property for foreign money only at the request and insistence of my daughter Mrs. Dr Föster and it was therefore done through a deliberate need” (Gernot U. Gabel & Carl Helmuth Jagenberg [eds.] The incapacitated philosopher. Letters from Franziska Nietzsche to Adalbert Oehler from the years 1889-1897, P. 74).

27: “[I] think that the terrible Antichrist and several poems could be omitted in the eighth volume, I feel bitter grief about this: has he already said more than enough about it in his works and I now understand his words twice: 'Don't read it mother, it is written from a completely different point of view. '” Franziska Nietzsche naively writes these complaining words about the document to Franz Overbeck, to whom she can fortunately report that, as a woman, she is also not able to judge at all with regard to philosophical books, because “[ue] in general I think that philosophy is not for women, we lose ground under our feet.” (Erich F. Podach [ed.], The sick Nietzsche. Letters from his mother to Franz Overbeck, p. 180 f.). The latter can certainly be understood as a side-swipe at the daughter, who sees herself as suitable for publishing her brother's philosophical works.

28: Ecce homo, Why am I so wise, § 3; translation: Daniel Fidel Ferrer. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche had the sheet with these lines picked up by Köselitz from publisher Naumann and destroyed it. However, Köselitz had already made a copy. Franziska Nietzsche only learned orally from her daughter of the derogatory body with the aim of injuring her.

"I confess that the deepest objection to the 'eternal return', my actually abysmal thought, is always mother and sister."¹

On Nietzsche's Relationship with his Mother. Mother's Day Greetings

Nietzsche's philosophy is regarded as an act of self-liberation — but even the superman remained powerless against his own family. This essay highlights the pathological tension between the lonely thinker and the “canaille” relatives, mother Franziska Nietzsche and sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. While the philosopher (de)constructs “woman in itself” as flat, independent and mindless in his writings, he also has stockings stuffed and sausage boxes sent from Naumburg. An essay about the deepest objection to eternal return: one's own kinship.

This is the second part of a small series for this year's Mother's Day. In first part Henry Holland wrote about Franziska Nietzsche's life with a particular focus on her time before Nietzsche and her last years.

I. Wrangling Over a Lucrative Legacy

When Nietzsche’s ‘Mama’ came to write her memoirs on May 12, 1895, ‘69 years, 3 months & 10 days old’,¹ she was late entering the interpretative fray surrounding her now internationally famous but mentally largely-vacant son. Her daughter Lieschen (Elisabeth-Förster Nietzsche) had struck first that same spring, publishing the first volume of her biography on her brother. This was the flank of a multi-pronged attack to wrestle the glory and sizeable profits to be had from her brother’s literary estate out of her mother’s hands and into her own. Writing, over Whitsun, to her nephew Adalbert Oehler, co-guardian of Nietzsche alongside herself, Franziska reports how Lieschen has just written a letter full of outright calumnies about her supposedly poor care of her son to the family doctor, Gutjahr. Left feeling ‘“paralyzed”’ at Lieschen’s language, Gutjahr intended to reply to Frau Förster-Nietzsche that she might have to become acquainted with the magistrate’s court, should she persist in ‘“such obloquies”’.² Acknowledging the biography’s ‘wonderfully pretty’ style, it has nonetheless hurt Franziska deeply: ‘it is too sad, in one’s 70^th year, to look back on what Lieschen sees as a failed life’. Worse still: it pains her how the book ‘tells tall tales to an extraordinary degree’, and that Lieschen, confronted with the question ‘“and what about the mother in all this [writing]?”’, had held tight to the moral high ground: hadn’t her brother’s books made them both ‘“suffer unspeakably”’ once?³ Put a sock in it, mum, in other words: I’ve as much right to cash the cheque on this suffering as you have.

Lieschen’s was only the latest intervention in a more or less public wrangling over Nietzsche’s legacy, fought out with all the decorum and passions of a naked mud-wrestling contest. Lou Andreas-Salomé, who later became one of the first generation of psychoanalysts, and who was already a pivotal figure in German letters, had pitched her bid first, bringing out her account of Nietzsche in his Works the year before. Franziska was ultimately unable to hold her own amongst such rhetorically talented competitors. The ignorant and rude put-downs against her, which have continued until our own day, did not make her situation easier. Sue Prideaux’s claim in the most widely-read anglophone biography of recent years, I am Dynamite!, that Franziska was ‘barely literate’⁴ is insupportable. How copyeditors at Prideaux’s prestigious publishers Faber & Faber didn’t catch that one is a head-scratcher: Franziska’s 1895 fragment, which trails off after thirty-odd pages, demonstrates more lexical and narrative prowess than your average phone-addicted, millennial university graduate will ever do. It reads like an entertaining, edifying autobiographical novella, telling of her pastoral childhood, and courtship and subsequent marriage to Carl Ludwig Nietzsche (1813-1849), called simply Ludwig in her memoir, before falling silent after the newly-weds return from their honeymoon to set up home together. As her nephew Adalbert comments, if this fragment had been fleshed out and published, it would have left us with an utterly different picture of Mrs Nietzsche:

If the mother, or someone else back then from her circles of friends and relations had facilitated the publication of a coherent life description, which would have spoken to the reader with the same gusto and clarity as the promising opening chapter, then public opinion would have granted her a place, without further ado, alongside women like Goethe’s mother, whose elemental heartiness has become legendary.⁵

When students of the past stumble over Franziska’s existence it is, at first, in her role as mother of Nietzsche. But a small group of explorers go further, posing questions as to this person’s lifeworld and convictions, uncircumscribed by the unintended consequences of her most-discussed deed: giving birth to and mothering a fellow who was later able to reroute intellectual history.

Franziska’s narrative begins classically, recounting the occupations and social positions of her parents and grandparents, and aiming to set facts straight, after Lieschen’s book has put the same through the wringer. Her paternal grandfather, ‘master weaver Oehler’,⁶ lived to the ripe age of eighty-four. Contrary to Elisabeth’s fast-paced fiction,⁷ Lieschen’s ‘grandpapa’ (i.e., the weaver’s son) was not ‘educated in an orphanage’ after her great-grandparents had been ‘wiped away by an infectious illness … at a young age’.⁸ The misunderstanding came about because David Oehler had been a carol singer while at school, wassailing each Christmas time to raise a little extra cash; and Lieschen, accomplished in fabrications when truth-telling seemed too arduous to manage, concluded that only parentlessness could explain such behaviour.⁹ The bigger battle was who Friedrich’s genius should be ascribed to, now that said genius was no longer really present in the room, to speak for himself?

Lieschen won’t tolerate, it must be said, the idea of the least intellectual influence from my side, from the ‘Oehler side’ I mean, and simply ascribes everything to the ‘Nietzschean [side]’, and so the only thing remaining that she cannot deny is that I bore Fritz.¹⁰

Rather scorned among contemporary secularists as an interpretative tool, the Nietzsches saw looking to one’s ancestors for clues regarding one’s own peculiar character as inescapably necessary, and thus as a worthy obsession. While still compos mentis, Friedrich had jotted down a memory of ‘having been taught to trace the origin of my blood and my name back to Polish nobles, who were called Niëtzky … the only German blood in me comes from my mother’s family, the Oehlers, and from the family of my father’s mother, the Krauses’.¹¹ Elisabeth cites this passage in her 1895 biography. It suits her purposes to have her marketable brother and herself descend from Polish Protestants forced to relinquish ‘their home and their aristocratic title’ in the face of ‘unbearable religious persecution’¹²—rather than from Oehler, ‘weaver of stuff, linen, and wool’, in Zeitz, present-day Saxony-Anhalt. Municipal archives describe this grandfather of Franziska as a ‘citizen’, and so inured against the period’s worst poverty. But further documents show him and his wife scraping by on the citizenry’s lowest fringe, with no money to support Franziska’s father through his theology degree.¹³ Small wonder that Lieschen lets such a great-grandfather die young, and puts her money on the Poles instead.

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II. Franziska Strikes Back

As 1895 wore on, Franziska continued to refute these tall tales about their ‘Polish origin, about which I’ve never heard anything, neither from my husband, nor from my mother-in-law’.¹⁴ Unlike her daughter’s, her own account of her young self, her suitor, and of the places they both grew up holds fast to truths. These are idealized and expressed in language more devout than the one she spoke as a child, which would have been articulated in a thick rural accent. Her parents are resolutely ‘the good father’, and ‘the good mother’, and hardly ever plain mother, father, or papa. The sixth or middle-child of eleven siblings, Franziska was sure that ‘growing up sandwiched as the only girl between five brothers … helped me towards good health’: if she had sat out of their ‘their wild games & entertainments’, which involved white-knuckle sledge-rides, she’d have only been made ‘subject to their scorn’.¹⁵ This troop of kids tumulted their way around the parsonage and its outbuildings, which their father ran as a small farm to supplement his spartan ecclesiastical income, and which stood on a slight rise above Pobles within the Prussian province of Saxony, a hamlet of 130 souls. These parishioners greeted their parson in unison, of a Sunday, when Franziska’s father, also observing etiquette after the solemnities, strode the few steps back home alone, ahead of his family. The front door closed shut behind them, demonstrative piety lost its grip: Franziska saw her father then throw of his long black talar, reach for his long pipe, and listen to what Franziska’s mum – who was known as Wilhelmine, but was actually christened Johanna – had to say about the service.¹⁶  

In these childhood memories, and in her many extant letters written later in life, Franziska commits so fully to the doctrine that her closest family constitutes the core of who she is, that trying to sketch Franziska in her own right, feels like grasping after one’s own shadow towards dusk. This conviction billows out even further when the eighteen-year-old Franziska gives birth to her first child on 15 October, 1844: almost exactly a year after marrying Ludwig. Most importantly for both parents, the baby arrived: ‘to the sound of church bells, rang to invite the parish to celebrate the birthday of … Friedrich Wilhelm IV’.¹⁷ Married to a conservative, and a fanatical monarchist, there was no real question that Franziska’s child should receive any name other than that of the Prussian king, after God had given such an unmistakable temporal sign.  

Such omens surface and resurface in Franziska’s memoirs, emblems of an upbringing and a mindset that is more resistant to pigeon-holing than commentators have allowed for. Though Carol Diethe is right to refuse critics who will blame Nietzsche’s psychological peculiarity on Franziska’s religiosity—‘could Franziska have acted otherwise?’¹⁸ is still a captivating psychological-philosophical puzzle—Diethe muddles what this religiosity consisted of. Her father and her husband were thoroughly religious, but only her husband ‘in a pietistic way’.¹⁹ Klaus Goch sees no evidence that Franziska grew up in a pietistic home. On the contrary, he finds it ‘astonishing’ that Franziska’s descriptions of father and childhood narrate

almost nothing about Christian-Protestant devotional rituals, prayers, attending church or spiritual exercises, but definitely report on reading and singing lessons, poetry recitals, and performing theatre, i.e., all those leisure pursuits that are characteristic for a family culture defined by its educated, civic, open, and humanistic manner.²⁰

What’s more, Franziska’s nephew Adalbert Oehler confirms that his grandfather David had been no pietist but rather a freemason, and links this positioning to David’s rationalism.²¹ Pietistic and orthodox Protestant circles combatted freemasonry, so its fanciful to think that David could have stood on both sides of the divide.²²

The masons of David Oehler’s day combined the rational with the more speculative—‘It is this mixture of reason and play, of rationality and the search for the exotic, that gives the lodges [of nineteenth century Germany] their fundamentally modern appearance’²³—so that Franziska’s penchant for divination could have partly come from her father, alongside the companions she grew up with. In the period of the visits by suitor Ludwig along with his two sisters and his mother, when Franziska’s parents had chosen to return the visits without permitting Franziska or her sisters to accompany them to the Nietzsches, the Oehlers went to visit another clergyman’s family, ‘with 4 grown-up daughters’. In a little garden house out of sight of the older generation, one of these daughters was ‘“laying cards”’ for the young women, and

as we came in she intoned: “I want to lay cards for these people [meaning Franziska and her siblings] too” … . How astonishing when, for me, she turned up all kings and who knows what else & our prophetess pronounced excitedly that “what will soon befall Fränzschen is perhaps unknown to any of us.”²⁴

You needn’t be a tarot expert to guess what followed briskly after: the marriage proposal and subsequent wedding, themselves succeeded, within a span of just over six years, by Franziska giving birth to three children, the final stages of her husband’s torturous illness, and death, in summer 1849, and the sudden death of her youngest, Joseph, aged two in January 1850. As if this weren’t enough, she was subjected to psychological cruelty by her overbearing mother-in-law, Erdmuthe (1778-1856), and by Ludwig’s aforementioned sisters, Rosalie (1811-1867) and Auguste (1815-1855), who saw themselves as their young sister-in-law’s superior from the moment she moved into the Röcken parsonage—a full hour’s ride from her childhood home—with her new husband. Franziska was ‘relegated to a back living room and given the use of two bedrooms whilst her dominating mother-in-law, Erdmuthe (1778-1856), ruled the roost in the sunny rooms on the first floor’.²⁵ Through his inability to contradict his mother, or to bear any audible domestic conflict, Ludwig was complicit in this cruelty. Given the rigid hierarchies adhered to, the onus was on Ludwig to insist, as Carol Diethe points out, that his wife be ‘installed as mistress in the front rooms’—which after all came with his job.²⁶ Like several people close to Franziska, in failing to engage compassionately in her fate, he failed her ethically.  

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III. A Horrendous, Love-Based Marriage

Akin to hints dropped in the opening scene of a classic horror movie, Franziska’s recollections scatter breadcrumbs for readers to follow towards the pain and upset that was to come later for her. In a pre-marriage conversation, Ludwig’s older sister Rosalie, ‘who was extremely highly-strung’ told Fränzschen that you could get a ‘really pretty view’ from the acres surrounding her brother’s parsonage: which Rosalie couldn’t enjoy, however, ‘because of her nerves. I had never heard this word “nerves” in my life. […] But once our guests had gone, I told dear mother about the conversation with Miss Nietzsche & asked “what are ‘nerves’ actually[?]’’’²⁷ Fränzschen gets a full whack of them at the start of 1846, when Ludwig bursts into a hefty flood of tears in the middle of conducting the liturgy: apparently a nervous reaction to an unpleasant conversation with a parishioner prior to the service.²⁸ The role played by nerves in her son’s later breakdown and ultimately fatal illness is the stuff of a hundred other essays and books, both past and future. A little quaint, perhaps, to our modern ears, ‘nerves’ came readily as an idea to these protagonists, in thinking about the psyche.

Another ominous-feeling occurrence is when the newly-weds are driven back to Röcken after the wedding, to be met by the local schoolmaster and his pupils singing them a hymn, and to be presented with gifts from the three parishes that make up Ludwig’s ministry: ‘2 dz. silver table spoons’, and what have you. Aware of etiquette’s demands, Ludwig then gave a thank-you speech on the threshold to the parsonage, but wanted his ‘little wife’ [‘Frauchen’] beside him in the doorway, which was up a few steps, and so forced open

the otherwise never opened & probably warped other half of the double door, whereby the whole lower part of the frame fell out; but I cannot remember that we happy ones would have seen as it an evil omen & yet one could see it so regarding the later, sad experiences, if one were at all superstitious.²⁹

Despite her cautious use of the conditional, the incident is not trivial enough for Franziska to forget it over half a century later, when she writes her life story.

After being widowed, she moved with her children, her mother-in-law, and her sisters-in-law to nearby Naumburg in 1849, which was larger than Röcken but still a small town.³⁰ This decision was laid down by Erdmuthe, who had grown up in this community several decades previously. Changes could be seen on their return, as the Awakening movement, known at the time simply as ‘the Awakening’, had been sweeping through the town as it had through all of Protestant Germany, leaving people being born again publicly, and renouncing their past sins.³¹ Erdmuthe hadn’t countenanced this fervour when her son had shown such inclinations, perceiving in it a threat to the class order and behavioural codes she held dearly, and Ludwig had responded by keeping his sympathies mostly in the closet. Correspondingly, she tried her best to steer Franziska clear of the movement.  

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IV. Cruel Providence?

But although her immediate society was no friend of superstition, or of emotional religious sentiments, Franziska still communicated privately with her recently dead husband, certain he could hear. In a diary note penned eight days after his funeral, she tells him that this occasion, at which ‘you my dear and forever blessed Ludwig were honoured by so many witnesses of love and of respect’, has done ‘our deeply afflicted hearts good’. What’s more, she wants Ludwig to intercede with  

dear God, also in my name, that he lets you be the good angel who will lead and guide me, with my whole life, so that we can continue to rear our three children as a community, in honour of dear God.³²

She writes another diary note to Ludwig half a year later, after her youngest son Joseph dies, not yet two years old:  

[Y]ou know with what my soul has been burdened anew, och, my glorious wee Joseph as you’ve often heard me lamenting the little boy of my heart is no more!³³

Terrible things happen in our own lives, and in the lives of those we love, and we hope those we know closely will grow through and past these tragedies—that they’ll develop. If it was the main route to a middle-class woman of her time gaining more independence, and a better financial standing, why didn’t Franziska choose to develop through the vehicle of a second marriage? She was still very young, unusually attractive, as portraits from the time testify, and not uneducated. Evidence suggests she felt so depressed by events, and threatened existentially by the prospect of bringing up her children alone, and on the sparse widow’s pension left her, that she went for the safety of a repressive but financially adequate household with her mother-in-law, rather than any break for freedom.

As she’ll have seen this as the right sacrifice to have made, how bitter must it have been to learn the scale of her surviving children’s disdain, and dismissal of her towards the end of her life: especially Elisabeth’s pitiless and tenacious rejection.³⁴ In the disturbing 1895 letter to Dr. Gutjahr, Elisabeth calls her mum a

woman without character, who doesn’t really love her children, and who’s also not loved by them, because there’s never been anything true about her, it’s all just playacting, calculated to appeal to others. This caused us boundless anguish, our mother’s Christianity for example, what pathetic pomposity and a kind of fencing in mirrors, a batting of eyelids etc. etc. and one’s surprised that Fritz has turned into the Antichrist.³⁵

Despite resisting the pressure initially, at the end of 1895 Franziska signs over ‘the Nietzsche Archive and all royalties, including those from Naumann’ to Elisabeth for a lump sum of 30,000 marks, plus an annual pension of 1,600 marks, to be paid to her for the care of ‘good Fritz’.³⁶

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V. Franziska’s Death

The sixteen-or-so months left to her brought Franziska some reconciliation and peace. Writing again in March 1896 to Franz Overbeck—theology professor and close friend of Nietzsche’s since they lodged together in Basel in the early 1870s—Franziska Nietzsche supplies her correspondent with the latest Naumburg gossip. Her son is lying sleeping beside her on the sofa as she writes. Some of the nastiness between her and her daughter seems to have dissipated. ‘Lieschen’ is now immersed in supervising the reconstruction of Villa Silberblick, a slightly overblown mansion on Weimar’s southside, which Nietzsche’s aristocratic patron Meta von Salis-Marschlins has purchased to rehouse the Nietzsche Archive. Its sale price of 39,000 marks—combined with the prospective value of Nietzsche’s estate— makes Franziska’s newly negotiated carer’s pension look meagre.³⁷ Still at this late stage, her report focuses on the doings of others, and on what others say about her conduct, and her care for Friedrich. It’s vital for her that she presents this as good care, as it undoubtedly was—utterly superior to that he would have received if he had stayed in the psychiatric clinics in which he lived out the early stages of his severe mental illness. To Overbeck she recounts a second-hand comment attributed to the psychiatrist Otto Binswanger, who supervised Nietzsche’s early institutional treatment, and who’s been back to visit them recently. Binswanger is said to have commented that ‘“the mother’s love has taken the edge of Professor Nietzsche’s illness.”’³⁸

Franziska Nietzsche’s own health deteriorated rapidly from Christmas 1896, and she died a painful death of cancer in April of the following year. Unable to continue caring for her son in this world she would, on her view, have had not long to wait before he joined her in heaven—however mawkish that could sound. Her antagonisms and discontents remained those shared by many nineteenth century women: how could they live, work, and exist on their own terms? Questions that put Franziska in mind of an anecdote from her youth. Right at the beginning of their courting, Ludwig Nietzsche is on his way to pay his first visit to the Oehlers, accompanied by the godfather of Franziska, ‘Rev. Hochheim of Starsiedel.’ As they tramp along, Rev. Nietzsche asks the ‘lovely old bachelor’ Hochheim ‘what’s she called then, Rev. Oehler’s youngest daughter?’ This puts the absent-minded senior cleric into a flap, as all he can do is repeatedly reply: ‘she’s my wee godchild, but the name’s not coming to me’. Their conversation moves on, until her godfather suddenly cries out: ‘She’s called Fränzschen! She’s called Fränzschen!’³⁹

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The article image was painted by the Zwickau based artist Christina Stephan—who also inspired us to do this little series. Find out more about her and her art on her website. It shows the young Franziska as a ‘daughter and sister in Pobles’ with her siblings—whose faces we don’t know—and her parents. Her mother Johanna could only see out of one eye.

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Bibliography

Bohley, Reiner: ‘Nietzsches christliche Erziehung’. Nietzsche-Studien 16 (1987), 164–196.

Diethe, Carol: Nietzsche’s Women: Beyond the Whip. Walter de Gruyter: 1996.

Diethe, Carol: Vergiss die Peitsche: Nietzsche und die Frauen, transl. Michael Haupt. Europa: 2000.

Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth: Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche’s,  1. C. G. Naumann: 1895.

Förster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth: Der junge Nietzsche. C. G. Naumann: 1912.

Goch, Klaus: Franziska Nietzsche: Ein biographisches Porträt. Insel: 1994

Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig: The Politics of Sociability: Freemasonry and German Civil Society, 1840–1918, trans. Tom Lampert. University of Michigan Press: 2007.

Kloes, Andrew: The German Awakening: Protestant Renewal after the Enlightenment, 1815–1848. Oxford University Press: 2019.

Nietzsche, Franziska: [Autobiographical memoir]. Unpublished manuscript, GSA 100/851, Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, Weimar. 36 pp. (including loose-leaf pages). Annotated transcript published in: Klaus Goch, Franziska Nietzsche: Ein biographisches Porträt. Insel: 1994, 32–64.

Nietzsche, Franziska: Der entmündigte Philosoph: Briefe von Franziska Nietzsche an Adalbert Oehler, ed. Gernot U. Gabel and Carl Helmuth Jagenberg. Gabel: 1994.

Nietzsche, Franziska: Der kranke Nietzsche. Briefe seiner Mutter an Franz Overbeck. Bermann-Fischer: 1937.

Oehler, Adalbert: Nietzsches Mutter. Beck: 1940.

Peters, H.: Zarathustras Schwester, trans. H. Peters. Kindler: 1983.

Prideaux, Sue: I am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, ebook edition. Faber & Faber: 2018.

Schaberg, William H.: The Nietzsche Canon: A Publication History and Bibliography. University of Chicago Press: 1995.

Schenkel, Gotthilf: Die Freimauerei im Lichte der Religions- und Kirchengeschichte. Klotz: 1924.

Stadt Naumburg (Saale): 'Einwohnerzahlen der Stadt'. Stadt Naumburg (Saale) municipal statistics portal: n.d. [2025], https://www.stadt-naumburg.de/Stat/Einwohner.html.

Stern, Fritz: ‘The Trouble with Publishers’. London Review of Books 18 (1996), https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v18/n18/fritz-stern/the-trouble-with-publishers.

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Footnotes

1: Franziska’s handwritten manuscript of autobiographical recollections, GSA 100/851, in the Goethe-Schiller-Archive, Weimar (36 pages total, including loose-leaf pages). The annotated transcript is published in: Klaus Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 32-64. In the following, I cite the manuscript in the transcript in Goch, i.e., in this case: GSA 100/851 in Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 32. This and all other translations from German sources are the author’s own, unless otherwise stated.

2: Franziska Nietzsche to Adalbert Oehler on June 8, 1895, in Briefe von Franziska Nietzsche an Adalbert Oehler, 31.  

3: Franziska Nietzsche to Adalbert Oehler on June 23-24, 1895, in ibid., 33-34.

4: Sue Prideaux, I am Dynamite!, chapter 22, ebook location 28.61.  

5: Adalbert Oehler, Nietzsches Mutter, 49-50.

6: Franziska Nietzsche, GSA 100/851 in Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 32.  

7: Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 354.

8: See Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche's, 13.

9: Franziska Nietzsche, GSA 100/851 in Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 34.

10: Franziska Nietzsche to Adalbert Oehler in October 1895, as cited in Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 30.

11: Posthumously published fragment 1882 21[2]. Paul Stephan wrote for Nietzsche POParts in 2024 about Nietzsche’s ‘Poland Complex’.  

12: Nietzsche, posthumous fragment 1882 21[2]. Elisabeth quotes this fragment in Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsche’s, 10-11.

13: Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 73-74.

14: Franziska Nietzsche to Adalbert Oehler in October 1895, as cited in Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 353.

15: Franziska Nietzsche, GSA 100/851 in Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 35.

16: Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 83.

17: Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Der junge Nietzsche, 14, as cited in Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 129.

18: Diethe, Nietzsche’s Woman, 3.

19: Diethe’s claim that not just Franziska’s spouse but also her father were pietists isn’t convincing, cf. ibid. Reiner Bohley takes a further step and argues that Carl Ludwig wasn’t a pietist either, but rather joined the Awakening movement: on Bohley’s view, not the same thing. Cf. Bohley, ‘Nietzsches christliche Erziehung’, 171.

20: Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 76.

21: Adalbert Oehler, ‘Erinnerungen meines Lebens’ [unpublished manuscript], cited in: Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 78-79, and endnotes 97-98, at 361-362.  

22: Cf. Gotthilf Schenkel, Die Freimauerei im Lichte der Religions- und Kirchengeschichte, 34, as cited in Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 361-362.

23: Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, The Politics of Sociability, 24.

24: Franziska Nietzsche, GSA 100/851, cited in Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 51. Emphasis in the original.

25: Carol Diethe, Nietzsches Women, 12.  

26: Ibid., 14.

27: Franziska Nietzsche, GSA 100/851 in Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 54.

28: Narrated in Ludwig’s letter to Emil Julius Schenk from January 21, 1846, cited in: Reiner Bohley, ‘Nietzsches christliche Erziehung’, 177.  

29: Franziska Nietzsche, GSA 100/851, cited in Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 61-62.

30: Population figures from Stadt Naumburg (Saale), 'Einwohnerzahlen der Stadt'.

31: Two contrasting accounts of the movement are given at Prideaux, Dynamite, ebook location 7.61; and in Kloes, The German Awakening. Kloes refers to the Germanophone scholarship on the Awakening by Friedrich Kantzenbach in the 1950s to explain that, although they had much in common, the Awakening and Pietism were ‘two movements’ with ‘fundamentally different orientations. In its late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century context, Pietism was ecclesiastically inward-looking in its primary concern for those who were already Christians. […] the Awakening was “antithetical to the Enlightenment and Idealism” and outward-looking in its efforts to resist what it considered to be alien influences that had come into the church’. Katzenbach, as paraphrased in Kloes, The German Awakening, 16.

32: From ca. August 1849 in Franziska Nietzsche’s diary, GSA 100/849, cited from Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 150-151.

33: From ca. January 1850 in Franziska Nietzsche’s diary, GSA 100/849, cited from Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 152.

34: Nietzsche’s vitriol towards his mother and his sister in Ecce Homo, Why I’m So Wise, §3, written just weeks before his breakdown, is every bit as fanged. It’s a good job that Franziska probably never got to see it (although it’s possible that she did since Nietzsche’s entire estate was in her house until 1896): ‘When I seek the most profound opposite to myself, the incalculable commonness of the instincts, then I always find my mother and sister—to believe myself related to such riffraff would be to blaspheme against my own godliness.’ Not published until 1908, and then only in a redacted form censored by Elisabeth, a reliable edition of the text wasn’t published until 1969: edited by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari in the Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGW) edition.

35: Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s letter to Dr. Gutjahr, general practitioner for Franziska Nietzsche, from 1895. Emphasis in the original. The original citation, H. Peters, Zarathustras Schwester, 202, is cited again in Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 13. Peters first published his research on Elisabeth in English, see: H. F. Peters, Zarathustra's Sister. The Case of Elisabeth and Friedrich Nietzsche, Crown: 1977.

36: Franziska Nietzsche in Naumburg to Franz Overbeck on December 26, 1895, in: Franziska Nietzsche, Der kranke Nietzsche. Briefe seiner Mutter an Franz Overbeck, 193-194. The printer C.G. Naumann of Leipzig became Nietzsche’s principal publisher from around 1886, a status that also accorded him a rights-share for works published after Nietzsche lost copyright to his own works following his mental breakdown in 1889. For more on the economics of publishing Nietzsche, see: William H. Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon; and the in-depth review of the same work by Fritz Stern (‘The Trouble with Publishers’).

37: Prideaux, Dynamite, chapter 22, location 28.72.

38: Franziska Nietzsche in Naumburg to Franz Overbeck on March 27, 1896 in: Briefe seiner Mutter an Franz Overbeck, 198.

39: Franziska Nietzsche GSA 100/851 cited in Goch, Franziska Nietzsche, 49-50.

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‘She’s called Fränzschen! She’s called Fränzschen!’

On the Early Life, and Embattled Demise, of Franziska Nietzsche

For Mother’s Day this year, two of our regular contributors are dedicating articles to an often-forgotten figure from the Nietzscheverse, without whom the philosopher would not have existed: his mother, Franziska Ernestine Rosaura Nietzsche, née Oehler. The pastor's daughter was born on February 2, 1826, and died on April 20, 1897, just a few years before her son, whose mental illness was by that stage so developed that he probably didn’t notice his mum’s death. Who was this woman? How did she shape and influence Friedrich Nietzsche?

In this first part of our small series, Henry Holland reports on her life and origins, while, in part two, Natalie Schulte will delve deeper into her relationship with her son, and the question of how it coloured his writing and thinking about women.

What were the decisive factors that shaped Franziska Nietzsche's life? How could she, a woman in a world thoroughly defined by patriarchal structures, who never pursued paid employment, achieve a certain degree of self-determination? How did she cope with the traumatic early death of her husband? How religious was she? An often-neglected autobiographical fragment, written shortly before her death, sheds new light on her life.

In the dignified Christian Wolff Hall of the Halle City Museum, between paintings from the 18th century and equally old furniture, there is a dominant chaise longue on the parquet floor. On it, wrapped in blankets, huddled up, an androgynous person with a distinctive footed moustache who immediately electrifies the room with her first exclamation: “Don't look so concerned! It is the worried faces that make me ill.” A clear message: No one here wants to be pitied as Christians, but rather to be admired tragically... It rises, wearing a nightgown and with a confused look: Friedrich Nietzsche. And reach out to the ranks of the audience. Ask “Peter Gast” from the audience to get a bottle of wine from his cupboard because his pain is too great. He later also asks to scratch his back: “Not so timid — or are you a convent student? “And rips apart under the exclamation “I destroy all altars! “a picture of Wagner, throws paper into the audience as “brain footage.”

Yes, anyone who sits at the front of this piece gets up close and personal with the Nietzsche of the 1890s, not at all, but between madness and rearing, storming and urging genius, oppressed by sister and mother in Naumburg¹. The play tells this narrative Nietzsche, or The German Misery by Austrian Alexander Widner, brought to the stage in Halle an der Saale by solo theatre artist Andrea Ummenberger.

It tells a fictional episode in which Lou Salomé (who in reality did not meet Nietzsche in person after their intensive time together in 1882) visits the “House of the Dead,” as Nietzsche calls the location of his sisterly care in the play. Lou tries to encourage Nietzsche, who believes in his recovery in the sunny south, although severely physically and mentally impaired, to travel to Italy again. Both Lou and he himself fluctuate between motivation and doubt — Nietzsche once again embodies exactly the qualities he criticized crushingly in his actions, for example:

You should only live in countries where garlic is appreciated! Countries hostile to garlic are sense-hostile countries! That's where you write; instead of nurturing and pampering your senses. You write your fingers sore, you think your ganglia crooked, you pour out your heart — instead of filling it. To the south! To the south! In a paperless area!

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Nietzsche, the poetic philosopher of ambiguity, an apologist of statements such as: “There are no facts, only interpretations.”² In this piece, he is presented in facets that can be interpreted in many ways, including from his left-wing, anti-German and state-critical side. In this respect, the choice of Alexander Widner's piece, which bears criticism of the German nation in its title, is certainly a good one — especially in the current times when, according to surveys, a nationalist party in the federal state has 40% of the performance.

Alexander Widner portrays Nietzsche as a critic of all “supernatural” instances, from state to church to spirit itself, as a philosopher of the body who upholds the power of nature and instinct. He makes him call, in reference to Zarathustra³: “We are body, not mind! [...] We are Earth! Earth! Earth! [...] I implore you, my brothers, remain loyal to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of supernatural hopes! ”

More relevant than ever: Back then, it was the Christian priests who wanted to stir up false hope with the supernatural god, today it is the tech billionaires who preach infidelity to the earth in other ways: hope for extraterrestrial colonies in space, hope of immortality through genetic engineering and nanochips, hope of disembodiment through digital alter egos. With Nietzsche, this can also be countered here by respecting the earth in terms of the environment and not striving for limitless growth on a limited planet.

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But even more than these serious subtexts, the piece is also an ode to the “dancing and laughing God,” because Andrea Ummenberger knows how to incite viewers to laugh and smile with subtle or direct humor and therefore — as Nietzsche certainly approved — to stimulate the affects instead of the ganglia. As a result, she has already secured a certain fan base in Halle. Good conditions for taking on the complex matter of Nietzsche as a “one-woman show” as a next step and refreshing to see the “whipping” Friedrich on stage in a woman's body — at the same time an acknowledgment that, despite all criticism of it, the spirit (and philosophy) is exactly what is beyond gender and thus a bridge-building force.

In view of so much courage and commitment, minor technical faux pas can easily be overlooked and express the hope that this piece, with Ummenberger as Nietzsche, will find many more spectators, may travel to the stages of many cities and that the outstanding actress may even be able to afford a few more people on or backstage at future performances.

Anyone who wants to experience the “old” Nietzsche “resurrected” in his natural habitat should not miss the opportunity to see, hear and feel him so close to his penultimate place of work and so authentically staged. The piece will be played in Halle until May 30.

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Mandus Craiss (born 1983) grew up in Ludwigsburg and studied political science, cultural studies, philosophy, new history and geography in Tübingen and Leipzig. He has socialized in the ecological and age-mondialist movement and traveled extensively in this context, largely by hitchhiking. As central editor of the former BUNDjugend magazine Kritische Masse ("Critical mass") he has also published articles and interviews on political philosophy from Fromm to Foucault. His master's thesis deals with the works of Deleuze & Guattari with regard to the unconditional basic income. He lives with his son in a house community on the outskirts of Leipzig.

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The article image was photographed by Juliane Apel.

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Footnotes

1: Widner has the piece set around 1896/97, but mistakenly locates Nietzsche to Jena, where he was in a psychiatric hospital in 1889/90.

2: Posthumous Notes No. 1886 7 [20]

3: Cf. Preface, 3.

“Facts” and a Damn Good Interpretation

Nietzsche as a Solo Piece in Halle

The actress Andrea Ummenberger is currently putting Nietzsche on stage in Halle with a solo play. In a captivating evening at the theatre, the audience can experience the thinker as he possibly was, at least in the interpretation of Austrian writer Alexander Widner, during his last years: not necessarily mentally abducted, but rather insane and in permanent conflict with his sister, his mother — and last but not least his home country. A self-proclaimed fool who rebels against the tight shackles of German small-mindedness and dreams of the South and liberated sensuality. Ummenberger shows us a Nietzsche who still has something to say to us today; not a brilliant idol, but rather a complex anti-hero who asks important questions.

What would Nietzsche — he only lived today and enjoyed brilliant mental health — say about our Pappenheimers Trump, Putin, Weidel & Co.? Would he be impressed, appalled? Would he write poisonous polemics against the Trumps of this world or would he rather write: against the Trump-haters of this world? Or even both? Anyone who wants to dismiss such anachronistic questions as idle has good arguments for this, but I old nihilistic atheist have the time for this idle on Good Friday and will therefore dedicate myself to a reflection on the question: How would Nietzsche have positioned himself in the face of today's right-wing populism?

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Define Nietzsche?

As always, there are easy answers. One of the very few questions about Nietzsche's political stance, which is (largely) answered uncontroversial in today's scientific Nietzsche research, concerns anti-Semitism: Nietzsche deeply despised it. It is easy to conclude from this that Nietzsche would have thought little of our current right-wing populists, provided that they had a new form of “anti-Semitic screaming neck.”¹ looks embodied. However, I don't want to make it that easy for myself — otherwise reading this article would be all too short! So it's a little further afield...

... A determination of proportion requires first a determination of what should be set in relation, i.e. in this case: a definition of Nietzsche on the one hand and a definition of populism on the other. Unsurprisingly, it must be stated here that the definition of both subjects of the investigation is anything but obvious. Isn't the appeal of our favorite philosopher precisely his stubborn refusal to be “unified”? What's more, isn't his philosophy itself essentially one of the “ambiguities”? What some recognize as perspectivism, others grumble completely contradictory within themselves and still others (I) call paradoxical thinking “that you can't cope with.”², is presumably determined precisely by the fact that it cannot be clearly defined and thus abandons thinkers who are looking for definitions, who are even sorely in need of definitions, with an angry smile. But that's something after all: defining Nietzsche about his indefinability, his 'anti-uniqueness. '

If this abstract definition is to be concretized politically, on the one hand, there is the problem of a philosopher who, due to the ambiguity of his political positions, cannot be assigned to any political camp. On the other hand, there is a picture of radically pluralistic thinking which not only allows, but also expressly affirms, the most diverse, even contradictory views: a way of thinking that dares to push contradiction itself, antagonism, to its extreme extreme at any time. This basic antagonistic feature appears in the first work, which Birth of Tragedy, clearly expressed when Nietzsche creates the highest of all art forms from the productive high tension between Apollinian and Dionysian. And the antagonistic spirit of Nietzsche is still at work in the last creative phase, in the development of the metaphysics of a 'will to power, 'when the will to overwhelm becomes the essential determination of life itself.

Nietzsche does not want to be defined, appears as a radical pluralist precisely because of this, but, as should not be embezzled here, he most likely identifies himself with the attribution of “aristocratic radicalism” given to him by Georg Brandes.³ Would a pluralistic aristocracy be conceivable?

As it should be, the attempt to define Nietzsche led me astray — to the brink of an impossible term, 'pluralistic aristocracy'...

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Define Populism?

What is the definitive score of populism? What does this label actually mean in more detail? Anyone who delves into the scientific debates of political theory will notice from a first superficial review that there is no agreement on this either, but rather a variety of opposing views entirely in Nietzsche's antagonistic and perspective sense.⁴

Ernesto Laclau and Jan-Werner Müller present two very different attempts to describe populism. Müller defines populism as a “shadow of representative democracy,” which combines an anti-establishment stance with a harshly anti-pluralistic stance, which can be attributed to the political campaign “We — and only we — are the people.”⁵ Populists can be recognized “by their claim to sole moral representation.”⁶ Populism is therefore opposed to pluralistic democracy, even though it appears to be indissolubly linked to it as its “shadow.” Laclau, on the other hand, develops a positive concept of populism, according to which “populist reason” is a legitimate way of constructing the political in general,⁷ by drawing a line between “us” and the “others” — freely following the antagonistic definition of the political as a friend-foe distinction in the sense of Carl Schmidt. According to Laclau, who belongs to the “we” and who belongs to the “others” results from the series of “similar” political demands (“chain of equivalence”)⁸), through which “we” identify “us” with each other. Without such a “populist” demarcation between antagonistic social groups, political struggles and changes are inconceivable. According to Laclau, anyone who does not want to think of the political as a purely economically determined, politically ultimately powerless administrative apparatus must affirm populist reason — only then can democracy be politically realized.

Both authors, Müller and Laclau, reject popular psychologizing provisions of populist attitudes as fearful, overwhelmed by modern complexity, led by resentment and therefore reactive-aggressive. But in both definitions, a hard distinction between a “we” or a “people” on the one hand and a “not us”, a “not our people” on the other hand appears to be essential to the concept of populism — which shows a significant lack of complexity as a basic element of populism. But while Müller regards this relentless simplistic demarcation as anti-democratic (and therefore as morally reprehensible), Laclau sees it as a condition of the possibility of political action par excellence (and therefore something good).

This rough outline of two populism definitions of political theory in the early 21st century includes the intricate questions that regularly arise in private and public discussions on the topic of populism: What is the state of the complicated relationship between democracy and populism? How do integrating pluralism and exclusionary nationalism relate to each other? Can, may, or must each exclude or include the other? Are populists now anti-democratic or are they the actual democrats?

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Pop — the People and Nietzsche?

What would an article be on the online blog NietzschePoparts without self-referentiality? If the POP blog already talks about populism, then the question is: Are both expressions the same “pop”?

Is it not in both cases the people who are to be alluded to, precisely in the “lowest” meaning of this word: Populus, the people who Plebs, the 'wide' mass? This mass of individuals, who become mass due to their lowest common denominators, are henceforth no longer characterized by their uniqueness, but by the mediocrity hated by Nietzsche? Average, dozens of goods, good for sale! None Fine Arts on this website, which would only be accessible to a small elite, but rather an art that opens Nietzsche's “aristocratic radical” to everyone, makes it available to every “Hinz and every Kunz” and every “Crethi and every Plethi”? What would Nietzsche say about that! Wouldn't he somersault in the grave out of sheer indignation?! Nietzsche, who considered himself so noble that he would “not give the young German Kaiser the honor of being his “coachman”?!⁹

And wouldn't this awareness of Nietzsche's own nobility also remove Nietzsche from any populist movement for miles? Just as he despised the anti-Semitic “all-Germans” of his time, he would probably also have disgusted today's 'Reichsbürger. ' If the young German Kaiser didn't seem noble enough to him in 1888 — would he have had any words at all for people like Donald Trump or Björn Höcke today? It's hard to imagine. It seems more obvious that Nietzsche would not have condescended to any comment at all in view of the appearance and ramblings of today's right-wing populists. On the other hand...

... Perhaps the sheer audacity of Donald Trump would have impressed him on some level after all. Perhaps he would have had nothing but ridicule and ridicule for those who are morally indignant at such audacity. Perhaps he would certainly have appreciated the Machiavellian skills of some populists and their aggressive political style — didn't he profess to be a big fan of the power-hungry human butcher Cesare Borgia?¹⁰ In view of the historical examples of 'great politicians, 'whom Nietzsche liked to cite provocatively (Napoleon, Julius Caesar...), all of our current populists appear almost pious and humanist...

And perhaps Nietzsche would have secretly enjoyed a popular online blog, in which his writings circulate and his thoughts are interpreted and interpreted again and again, like a Snow King. In any case, throughout his (mentally healthy) life, he has tried to make his thoughts accessible to an audience through language communication and publication. If this audience was very small or remained completely uninterested, Nietzsche was in no way amused! — And what is an audience other than a broad mass to whom something should be conveyed?

Like most of Nietzsche's work, his relationship with the “people” proves to be ambiguous despite all the polemics he regularly raises against them. Is an extremely paradoxical relationship with the “people” not also a genuine characteristic of Nietzsche's Zarathustra? The prophet descends from his mountain to speak to the people. His devotion to the people, the desire to know their truths mediate, are the driving force behind his entire journey! But the people understand him poorly — Zarathustra fails in his attempt to make himself understood: “Do you have to smash their ears first so that they learn to hear with their eyes? Do you have to rattle like timpani and preachers of repentance? Or do they just believe the stammerer? ”¹¹ Is Zarathustra perhaps failing precisely because it is impossible for him to speak like a current populist: rattling and stammering?

Mediation is just the word after mediocrity. In the end, letterpress gives birth to pop culture. Paradoxically, the aristocratic radical Nietzsche strives for popularity as a journalist. Nietzsche's aristocratism is to be taken seriously, because what he expresses with him is worth considering. But it should not be forgotten that Nietzsche counteracts his own aristocratism often enough and clearly enough — sometimes explicitly, sometimes subtly and very often implicitly, if only by seeking to make a public impact: by writing books.

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Nietzsche, the Failed Anti-Populist?

It is quite possible that Nietzsche would have profoundly despised our current right-wing populists. It is not unlikely that he would have had just as little left for moralizing populism abusers. It cannot be ruled out that Nietzsche would even have spoken positively about a populist political style out of provocation or genuine admiration. Idle speculation...

Anyone who primarily recognizes Nietzsche as a complex thinker of radical pluralism and suspects the most important characteristic of populism with Müller in its anti-pluralistic nature, will regard Nietzsche and populism as irreconcilable opposites. On the other hand, anyone who essentially interprets Nietzsche's philosophy as one of antagonism and sees populism with Laclau as a way of constructing the political through a clear social demarcation, will attribute to Nietzsche a clearly populist tendency on the basis of the antagonistic principle of his thinking — and will not criticize him for it, but rather praise him.

A reflection on today's right-wing populism, as well as a reflection on Nietzsche's politics, is exposed to the torrid tension between aspects of popularity and aspects of elitianism. I am convinced by the idea that Nietzsche (did not) want to be both: popularly — beautiful and accessible, understandable to all, loved by everyone — and elitist — beautiful and reserved, misunderstood by most, hated by many. He succeeds in both, he fails at both. Against this background, how appropriate does the subtitle appear to be Zarathustra? — A book for all and none.

Nietzsche would probably not have acted as a populist or as a supporter of populist politics today. But would he have acted as an anti-populist? Wouldn't he also necessarily have failed as an anti-populist? Is it not failure itself that he presents again and again, in ever new constellations, with his devising work — even in the triumphal howl of the author of Ecce homo? Is today's populism not itself a symptom of failure and, as such, perhaps even to be affirmed in the sense of completing nihilism according to Nietzsche? More question marks than exclamation marks — that is perhaps the biggest discrepancy between the effect of Nietzsche and that of Trump. Although: even a question mark can be deceptive, because it is often used purely rhetorically...

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Jenny Kellner (born 1984) studied acting, philosophy, and sociology in Hamburg and received her doctorate at the Berlin University of Arts with a thesis on the political implications of Georges Bataille's reading of Nietzsche. Her doctoral thesis was published in 2025 under the title Anti-ökonomischer Kommunismus. Batailles nietzscheanische Herausforderung ("Anti-economic communism. Bataille's Nietzschean challenge") at Campus Verlag. She currently teaches at the Berlin University of Arts and at Hafencity University Hamburg and is a speaker for the electronic beat prose projects Nach uns die Ewigkeit ("After us eternity") and Deimos with.

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Article Image

Tobias Fendt: The Vision of Ezekiel (1565) (source)

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Sources

Kellner, Jenny: Anti-ökonomischer Kommunismus. Batailles nietzscheanische Herausforderung. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main: 2025.

Laclau, Ernesto: Populist Reason (2005). Passagen Verlag, Vienna: 2022.

Müller, Jan-Werner: What is populism? An essay. Suhrkamp, Berlin: 2016.

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Footnotes

1: Beyond good and evil, Aph 251.

2: waiter, Anti-economic communism, p. 52 f.

3: Cf. Letter to Georg Brandes v. 2. 12.1887: “The term 'aristocratic radicalism' that you use is very good. That is, with all due respect, the scariest word I've ever read about myself. ”

4: In this regard, see, for example, Müller, What is populism, p. 15 f. & 25 f. and Laclau, Populist Reason, PP. 29-41.

5: Müller, What is populism, p. 18 f.

6: Ibid., p. 20.

7: Laclau, Populist Reason, P. 23.

8: Ibid., p. 164.

9: Ecce homo, Why I'm so wise, paragraph 3.

10: See e.g. Beyond good and evil, Aph 197, The Antichrist, paragraph 61 and Götzen-Dämmerung, rambles, Aph 37.

11: So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, paragraph 5.

Nietzsche as a Populist?

Attempt at an Anachronistic Determination of Proportions

What would Nietzsche have said about the rampant populism of our time? Does his elitist attitude, his “aristocratic radicalism,” not make him an anti-populist par excellence? Or did he not himself dream of populist leaders inspiring the masses and the mass success of his books? — But what is “populism” anyway and what is the score of Nietzsche's stance on populist movements in his own time?

These are not entirely unimportant questions for our blog, which Jenny Kellner addresses in detail in the following article.