Book Reviews

Humour: Nietzsche in Five Minutes

Everybody's Nietzsche is different. The weirdiest versions make him out to be some kind of raving, lunatic, proto-Nazi. He died in 1900, when Adolf Hitler was only eleven. So it's kind of unlikely. It was his sister Lizzie who did all the raving Nazi nonsense after he was dead. And boy did she Nazi it up. She married a Nazi, she went to Wagner concerts with Adolf. (I'm not kidding, she did.) And she wrote a whole bunch of fake books and signed them with her brother's name. That's mostly how come loads of people are confused about him. Oh, and he was best pals with, the already famous, Richard Wagner, a foaming-at-the-mouth anti-semite and German-Aryan-Race believer. The German Aryan Race Myth? Hitler's folks didn't invent that. Somewhere between Sir W Jones' famous lecture in 1876 and the works of an obscure Russian occultist called Blavatsky, in the late eighteen-hundreds, its meaning got corrupted to mean white-European. And the rest, as they say, is History.

Now, Nietzsche didn't help himself by saying that, "I'm the most terrible human-being that there has ever been." Nor did he help himself by describing his second most famous creation, the Ubermensche, in Ecce Homo & Twilight of the Idols, as a cross between Napoleon Bonaparte and Ceasar Borgia! And if, to paraphrase, "philosophy takes a dangerous stand against convention and stands beyond good and evil," following Napoleon and Borgia's examples, every thinking, reading person will be up to his neck in gunpowder smoke, entrails and gore by lunch time.

So, if Nietzsche wasn't advising us to start practicing Borgia's devious arts of Niccolo Machiavelli on our neighbours. And he wasn't trying to persuade us to copy Bonaparte, invade Europe and then install all our brothers on the thrones of every neighbouring country, then what exactly was he doing? I think a guess is in order here. My guess is he wanted Jesus out and manliness in. If you listen to him ranting about the Christian Church, you soon cotton onto the fact that he wasn't all that keen on it. (And that's putting it mildly.) I think he was saying, "Look folks, it's time to put an end to all this cow-towing and forelock-tugging to the Church elders. Put some beef in your broth and some belief in yourselves and make your own minds up about things." But, since thinking for themselves, didn't come easy to the people who surrounded Nietzsche back then, he invented an imaginary being who just didn't have the hang-ups that regular folks had.

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