Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [192]
For his next subject Strauss moved to the core of his time. By 1896, the world had discovered Friedrich Nietzsche. Living in solitude, disillusionment and chronic drug-blurred battle against insomnia, this other German had produced a body of work around the central idea of the Superman, which was to reverberate down the corridors of his country’s life. Responding early to its influence, Strauss determined to make Also Sprach Zarathustra the subject of a tone poem.
Nietzsche’s alluring concept of “rule by the best,” of a new aristocracy which would lead humanity to a higher plane, of man rising to superior fulfillment to become Übermensch, seduced the imagination of Europe. It stirred both the yearning hope of human progress as well as the beginning disillusionment with democracy. Nietzsche rejected the democratic idea of equal rights for all men as hampering natural leaders from realizing their full capacities. Where Lord Salisbury had feared democracy as leading to political, and Charles Eliot Norton to cultural, debasement, Nietzsche saw it as a ball and chain holding man back from his highest attainment. He saw the dominant weight of mass tastes, opinions and moral prejudices as a “slave morality.” Mankind’s leaders should live by a “master morality” above common concepts of good and evil. The goal of human evolution was the Übermensch, the higher man, the “artist-genius” who would be to ordinary man as ordinary man was to the monkey.
Through Also Sprach Zarathustra and its sequels, Beyond Good and Evil, The Will to Power and the final Ecce Homo, Nietzsche roamed wildly. His ideas rolled and billowed like storm clouds, beautifully and dangerously. He preached Yes to the promptings of energy as good per se, regardless of conflict with conventional morality. Law and religion which discouraged such promptings frustrated man’s progress. Christianity was a sop for the weak, the meek and the poor. The Superman had no need of God but was a law unto himself; his task was self-fulfillment not self-denial; he shook off the chains of tradition and history as the intolerable burden of the past. Nietzsche stated his credo, not in logical declarative language, but in a kind of prose poetry like the Psalms, meandering and obscure, full of mountain tops and sunrises, the singing of birds and dancing of girls, perorations to Will, Joy and Eternity and a thousand colored metaphors and symbols carrying Zarathustra on his soul’s quest toward the goals of humankind.
When he published in the eighties no one listened. Despising the Germans for their failure to appreciate his work, Nietzsche drifted to France, Italy and Switzerland, working himself up, as Georg Brandes said, “to a positive horror of his countrymen.” It was a foreigner, Brandes, a Dane and a Jew, who discovered him and whose articles on him, translated and published in the Deutsche Rundschau in 1890 introduced him to Germany and began the spread of his fame. By this time Nietzsche was mad and Max Nordau, the author of Degeneration, discovering this, naturally seized on him as a prime example of his case and lavished on him some of his most excoriating pages. Since Nordau’s book was translated and read all over Europe and in the United States, it helped to make Nietzsche known. He was lauded as a seer, denounced as an Anarchist, examined and discussed by the reviews, English and French as well as German. His aphorisms were quoted as verse titles and chapter headings, he became the subject of doctoral dissertations, the model of a train of