>
>Justin, maybe you know something about this, having
>studied under Kaufman. It's been a long time since
>I have read anything biographical on Nietzche but
>wasn't his sister the one that drew together the notes
>for "Will to Power" and didn't she and her
>proto-fascist husband have something to do with his
>later appropriation by the Nazis?
>
It's been a long time--I mean, 1975! or maybe it was Spring 76. But I used to be really attracted by Nietzsche, he got me interested in philosophy. Obviously I had my brain washed since by the analytical phils, but I never quite lost my earlier affection for what Kelly might call that "fruithat," or Brad that "fruitbat," which I rather like too. How could one not like someone with such incandescent German, he's one of the great literary masters of the language, ranking (as he immodestly but correctly put it) up there with Goethe. I would teach him, on and off, when I taught 19th century, existentialism, or continental, usually the Geneaology of Morals and On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense, maybe the section on nihilism from The Will to Power and The Gay Science. I think I did Beyong Good and Evil a few times, a bits of Zarathustra. I'm no Nietzsche scholar, though.
Anyway, your question. Yes, Elisabeth Foester-Nietzsche and Georg Foester had a great deal to do with N's appropriation by the Nazis, not everything. E took him in after his bats got loose in his belfry, and appointed herself his literary executor (she was after all his next of kin, his bad luck); she wrote or anyway signed a perfectly stupid and vile book that I used to have that tried to represent N's philosophy as the expression of all that she loved and he loathed, thsi was I think in the teens. She lived a long time and actually cozied up to Hitler in the early 30s, if I recall.
N was pretty popular with the younger German petty aristocracy; officiers used to carry pocket copies of Zarathustra into the trenches in WWI, I used to have one of those too, all printed in Fraktur of course (I had complete sets of Goethe and Lessing in tiny Fraktur, gave them to a German friend, impossible to read without getting a headache); the better element so called among the Freikorps would read him too. Ernst Junger loved him. Apparently they missed all the German self-loathing of this emigre to Switzerland, his admiration for Poles and Jews, his hatred of militarism and bureaucracy and mass anything, and only registered the ironic praise of the "blonde beast," not registering that he thinks the beastis a stupid brute, and the slave morality, for all its deficiencies, has ahd the advantage of making us smart. Or maybe they didn't care. So E can't be blamed for all of N's appropriation. As Shirer says, something in N resonated with the proto-fascists too. I don't think you can blame him for that, though.
jks
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