Nietzsche's Influence and Reception

Nietzsche's writings have been interpreted very differently by different people, and cases even exist of Nietzsche being used on both sides of an argument to support contradictory views. For instance, Nietzsche was popular among left-wing Germans in the 1890s, but a few decades later, during the First World War, many regarded him as one of the sources of right-wing German militarism. Another example is around the time of the Dreyfus Affair. The French anti-semitic Right levelled the accusation at Jewish and Leftist intellectuals, who were defending Dreyfus, that they were Nietzscheans. The German conservative right-wing wanted to ban Nietzsche's work under charges of subversion in 1894/1895, while Nazi Germany used a highly selective version of Nietzsche to promote its idea of a revival of traditional German culture and national identity. Many Germans read Thus Spoke Zarathustra and were influenced by Nietzsche's appeal of unlimited individualism and the development of a personality.

During the interbellum, various fragments of Nietzsche's work were appropriated by Nazis, notably Alfred Baeumler in his reading of The Will to Power. During the period of Nazi rule, Nietzsche's work was widely studied in German (and, after 1938, Austrian) schools and universities. The Nazis viewed Nietzsche as one of their "founding fathers." They incorporated much of his ideology and thoughts about power into their own political philosophy. Although there exist few, if any, resemblances between Nietzsche and Nazism (see political views above), phrases like "the will to power" became axioms of Nazi society.

The wide popularity of Nietzsche among Nazis was due partly to Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth FÐ"¶rster-Nietzsche, a Nazi sympathizer who edited much of Nietzsche's works. However, Nietzsche disapproved of his sister's anti-Semitic views; in a Letter to his Sister, dated Christmas 1887, Nietzsche wrote:

You have committed one of the greatest stupidities Ð'- for yourself and for me! Your association with an anti-Semetic chief expresses a foreignness to my whole way of life which fills me again and again with ire or melancholy. Ð'... It is a matter of honour with me to be absolutely clean and unequivocal in relation to anti-Semitism, namely, opposed to it, as I am in my writings. I have recently been persecuted with letters and Anti-Semetic Correspondence Sheets. My disgust with this party (which would like the benefit of my name only too well) is as pronounced as possible.

Ð'-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Letter to His Sister, Christmas 1887

Furthermore, Mazzino Montinari, one of editors of Nietzsche's posthumous works in the 1960s, argued that FÐ"¶rster-Nietzsche had deliberately cut extracts, changed their order, and added false titles to the posthumous fragments, thus constituting the fake Will to power [1].

Ironically, since World War II, Nietzsche's influence has generally been clustered on the political left, particularly in France by way of post-structuralist thought (Gilles Deleuze and Pierre Klossowski are often credited for writing the earliest monographs to draw new attention to his work, and a 1972 conference at CÐ"©risy-la-Salle is similarly regarded as the most important event in France for a generation's reception of Nietzsche).

In his 1916 Egotism in German Philosophy, American philosopher George Santayana dismissed Nietzsche as a "prophet of Romanticism".

Among the first to recognize Nietzsche's importance was the psychologist Carl Jung, who held a seminar on Nietzsche's Zarathustra in 1934[1]. In 1936, Martin Heidegger lectured on the "Will to Power as a Work of Art", and would later publish four large volumes of lectures on Nietzsche. The German novelist Thomas Mann also showed Nietzsche's influence in his novels, especially his 1947 Doktor Faustus.

In 1938, the German existentialist Karl Jaspers commented about the influence of Nietzsche:

The contemporary philosophical situation is determined by the fact that two philosophers, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who did not count in their times and, for a long time, remained without influence in the history of philosophy, have continually grown in significance. Philosophers after

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