Denouement

by Douglas Mercer

ADOLF HITLER FAMOUSLY SAID that one could not understand National Socialism without understanding Wagner; that is very true; of Nietzsche he said he could do nothing with him; this latter is not strictly true — with his notion of the all-importance of whatever is life-enhancing and his sensible proposal to raze all Christian churches and raise poisonous snakes on the sites, the philosopher was channeling National Socialism avant la lettre.

But in the larger sense, Hitler, with his unerring instinct for the truth, was right on the mark; there is every reason why Nietzsche became the darling of the left wing and why he was a major god to the deconstructionists: It’s true that these evil ones left behind their hero of decomposition before the point where he overcame the ruins and soared to spiritual domination and heroism; but it is nonetheless true that in many (if not most) important respects Nietzsche’s sensibility paralleled the Jewish: the critical eye for tearing down, for the overthrowing of values; and, though he saw the Jews in a clear enough light, he was sometimes strangely sympathetic to them and certainly soft on them. So while we can still do something with him, there are times when his spirit nullifies itself. The crosscurrents of his thinking are not infinite but neither are they simple; and until the final wind blows, we must disentangle them patiently and with great care, stitching and unstitching this way and that, as befits the foremost seamstress for our little band that has always been and always will be.

It’s an understatement to say that the friendship that arose between Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche was of an epochal nature. In them, Germany as the nation of poets and thinkers found its ineluctable pair. Wagner mania hit right off the bat but the mania for the latter was somewhat delayed. But it’s safe to say that by the 1920s there was not a modernist artist in Europe that was not saturated and besotted by the art and thought of both. Their influence was incalculable.

At the heart, it was the aestheticization of the world, the life-philosophy of the lived experience, of life becoming art; Wagner had his music of the future and his concept of the total artwork of pure immersion in word and image, of sound and vision, of being immured in the sphere of the muses, the daughters of memory. Nietzsche made short work of the “moral” and plunged ahead into the art of tragedy from the spirit of what alone gives life: music.

The two famously had a falling out; aside from the personal predilections and minor scandals that beset them, the crux of the matter was their only love: music, and in this the image of Nietzsche gets curiously reversed. At bottom he had a fear of music, of its irresistible hold on him and his dread that it would plunge him into bottomless depths and fling him to dizzying heights from which he would never return — as if he had a vague presentiment of his future madness. It was the operatic and lush and depthless vibration from which he pulled back, as if at a brink; he had stared into the abyss and found he did not have the mental balance for it; and so he retreated into a kind of absurd classicism of muted tones and moderate balance in his taste, of the Carmen-like scenes of sunny skies and not dark and brooding mists. For all his talk of being a Hyperborean he was not one at heart; essentially mentally unbalanced with a penchant for raving, he needed to soothe himself in the dry tones of some level place. The fact that he never loved Germany says it all; anyone not at home in those deep and profound forests is not a high poet or thinker; but in the end a dilettante of life.

One always finds out who one is when the barometric pressure rises.

For his part, Wagner in the end was a fop; they say he could never even carry a tune, and one should trust no man who cannot carry a tune. They say that after the ending of the first performance of the Ring Cycle, he came on stage in front of the glittering political and artistic aristocracy of Europe in his signature baggy pantaloons and his floppy hat, doffed the latter, and pointed behind him, saying in essence: This is what I and my artists can do; this is the music of the future; if you want to, you can do it too; and so we can, and so we have; we have filled the vacancy with the vibration. But in the end he was not able to stand there on that stage of the world and take us to the final state; and so suffered a diminution of spirit; that is, he fell short. By the end he was writing his paean to the quasi-soap-suds of a worn-out Christianity in Parsifal — the knight-errant gone astray in search of a false Grail; and he was telling Gobineau that the answer lay in a purging of Christianity of its Jewishness, which is like trying to rid water of its wetness.

The irony is that both Wagner and Nietzsche have been “tarred and feathered” with “Nazism,” which might seem understandable to the untrained eye; but see with true vision and you’ll quickly understand that neither one, in the end, could come even close to holding that flame. Their ideas about art live on, but they could not carry their greatest inklings and inspirations to the end. And the reason is not any lacking in their gifts for music or for words, which were flawless; it was in their thoughts and concepts, which ruled over both: Plainly put, until the thought is in order nothing will work out. The body must not only be strong — but the spirit willing, and the mind clear as a bell on midwinter’s eve.

In the end it will be strictly aesthetic categories that the world falls into — that is, thinking is being. But always, like a homunculus on our back, it was the Jews who have been the enemy and the succubus of being; it was they who, in their clever offshoot guise of Christianity, overthrew in the heart of men the ancient and eternal gods, put an end to their reign; they destroyed our sacred temples; they drove away the spirits of the wood and the river; they made profane the sacred haunts; they converted our people to a false religion and they put our former world of enchantment and love to the knife. And, worst if all, they placed a false idol in the center.

It is the Jews, in whatever form or incarnation — in their true face, or the false face of their Jesus, or any of their myriad false faces — who suck the life blood out of our people and who are opposed to nothing less than Life itself. There is no doubt that Richard Wagner gave us our revivified myth. There is no doubt that Nietzsche showed us a part of the path to our way back home. But, in the end, a man’s view of the Jews is the ne plus ultra test — and both failed it miserably. What that means is that together they came to the brink of showing us the way of the art of the future; but in the end they could not grasp the palm.

To read Friedrich Nietzsche on the Jews is to become perplexed. Certainly he saw them with clarity; and yet a strange kind of naïveté had him in thrall; perhaps, most, it was his justified contempt for the German philistinism of his time, and the “low-class anti-Semitism” that went hand in hand with it. For instance he detested his brother-in-law with his rudimentary “anti-Semitism”; but for anyone’s money, a bar-stool “anti-Semite” beats a high-flown Jew sympathizer any day; and by a mile. Indeed, a justified hatred of Jews and an implacable enmity towards all they embody is the first and the last and the sign and the sum of all wisdom.

Europe may fall into their hands like a ripe fruit, if they would only just extend them. That the Jews, if they wanted it could even now have preponderance, indeed quite literally mastery over Europe, that is certain; that they are not working and planning for that is equally certain.

Madness! Safe to say that historical acumen was not his strong suit. He saw plainly what the Jews were capable of, he even speaks of mastery; the advantage to coming into the prophetic network at a late date (the latest and the last, in fact) is we have all the facts at our fingertips (me and the little mouse in my pocket) and we can be the King Shot-Caller and figure out who went off the beam and where; and it’s safe to say that in this his judgment was seriously flawed — likely because he saw the Germany in his day descending into smugness and mediocrity and bourgeois philistinism. This after all, was essentially Hitler’s analysis too: that the The Great War was lost not due to faulty military leadership, and certainly not due to any lack of heroism on the part of any foot soldier, but from a rottenness and a corruption in society. But Hitler never descended to becoming a Jew-lover. In Nietzsche’s heart of hearts he saw the Jews as having energy — that is, they played at being the decadent, but were really the ones who believed in domination and the Overman philosophy; so the always-tricky Jews played a two-track game: Pose as victims in one aspect, but behind their backs be as cold and calculating as any Hyperborean ever was. And that Nietzsche could not see where this would inevitably lead casts a pall over whatever he achieved. For not to see the Jew clearly is not to see at all; as the enemy of being, the Jew with his game of “wail and rule” is a practitioner of the sheer grasp for power with no positive values whatsoever. And, as the shepherd of being, we must be on the lookout for all enemies, and for whoever gives those enemies succor, aid, or comfort — even false friends, i.e, fiends

When Jews step forward as innocence itself, then the danger is great.

Here Nietzsche soars to transcendent thought — have truer words ever been spoken? Never trust a Jew in sheep’s clothing. The Jew is a wolf or, rather, the Jew is a snake; the Jews will pose as good little choir boys, as sweetness and light itself, as the paragon of mankind (the rest being pariahs). But the Jew is an actor, a histrio, the histrionic one, who wails and ululates about his pain, pretending to be a victim. Always aggrieved, always put upon, always the sinned-against party, they pose the greatest danger because they will use this status as the supposedly persecuted party as the weapon of weapons; that is, they use their false persecution to persecute and prosecute. Beware a Jew in any clothing! It is the Jew, not the Greek, one must beware of when they bring gifts, the first and foremost being Jesus Christ, the ultimate Trojan Horse, the final bill of goods. Sweetness and light he was not, but a bullet to the head.

The Jews are the most remarkable nation of world history because, faced with the question of being or not being, they preferred being at any price: the price they had to pay was the radical falsification of all nature, all naturalness, all reality, the entire inner world as well as the outer. Considered psychologically, the Jewish nation is a nation of the toughest vital energy which took the side of all decadence-instincts — not as being dominated by them, but because it divined in them a power by means of which one can prevail against the world. The Jews are the counterparts of decadents: they have been compelled to act as decadents to the point of illusion. This kind of man has a life-interest in making mankind sick, and in inverting the concepts of good and evil, true and false, in a mortally dangerous and world-maligning sense.

Here we see the Jew-envy writ large: for did not Nietzsche himself say that truth was an illusion and that one may deceive in order to foster truth? The Jews are anti-Nature but in the game of Nature they are survivors, though it will be a bastardized form of Nature that emerges should they prevail. The Jews, being in a minority, used any weapon they found on their cutting room floor — in this case, weakness in the service of their strength; as if the Jews taught mankind to love and forgive while neither loving nor forgiving — and who conjured just as much with good and evil and true and false than the philosopher himself? What we have here is sneaking, or not so sneaking, admiration for the Jews. For the Jew, to him, is really the one who is the most sorrowful but who also uses sorrow as an aggressive tactic — and who, in doing so, foster lies and illusions as a will to power and to cold self-possession. That they did this is beyond doubt — that they passed through their ordeal of civility to become the one with the aristocratic bearing; and too many of us are no longer ashamed to be ruled by them; they who mimic us and take the ripe fruit we offer to them in their surreptitiously greasy hands. As early as 1878, Wagner and Cosima accused Nietzsche of being having gone over to the dark camp of the Jews; and so he did.

* * *

Everyone knows the scene, the scene played out in repetition, in the mind; at some point Nietzsche read Dostoevsky in French translations and was quite taken with him as a fellow sufferer in the house of thought; the House of the Dead seems to have been his particular favorite; the novelist himself was a noble anti Semite but he smuggled in the Jewish religion in its disguised form of Christianity — yet another great man of our race thus laid low by pity. In Crime and Punishment the hero seeks to transgress God’s law by murder; he dreams a dream of a horse being whipped; and here we come upon the uncanny, upon the peculiar, one of those things which makes one stand up and take notice; for Nietzsche’s descent into madness was precipitated by either (take your pick) the dream being enacted before him, a dim recollection of it in the growing caverns and recesses of his addled mind, or a simulacrum of it. They say that he was in the town square in Turin and he saw a horse being whipped by his master; so overcome with emotion was he at the sorry sight that he ventured out and embraced the horse and after a time collapsed on the ground; by then he was gone. The standard trope on this is that the man who railed all his life against pity was overcome by that emotion as he slipped into the dark night of madness, divine or otherwise. But that is simplistic. Perhaps there was in his head by then a saccharine feeling for all creatures great and small, who knows? But he who had such contempt for mankind may not have, strictly speaking, abjured it in that moment of awesome fellow-feeling. After all, it was the human with the whip, the human who drove the nag; and what he had pity for was the horse. We might say that — unlike all-too-human humans — a horse, after all, is human.

I have had Caiaphas put in fetters. Also, last year I was crucified by the German doctors in a very drawn-out manner. Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites abolished.

If there is one sentence of his that deserves close reading, it is this one, written by the philosopher in the early stages of his madness proper. For here we have the whole sordid mess stuck together. A confused mind, needing to be disentangled strand by ideational strand; the one who killed Christ must be bound and presumably killed; presumably then Christ is a hero; then he becomes Christ (“the way things are going they are going to crucify me”) and he would also sign his letters “the crucified one” meaning a complete identification with the man from Nazareth; then anti-Semites are to be proscribed in a statement showing that he associated this belief system with its base leadership of the time. What strikes one most in this is that he views the death of Jesus Christ as a hinge point of history, the man who killed Christ having set in motion the current historical tableau, and he sides with the victim.

What he has right in this is that the eternal battle between the Aryan race and the Jewish race is the veritable tunnel of history and of time itself; the two have been revolving around one another since time immemorial became time out of mind, and continue to do so still.

What makes it odd is how the one (the Jewish one) transmogrified into a “new” religion and took over its enemy (the Aryan race). So the enemy of the Jews, in too many instances, fights in what is really the name of his opponent, so one had and has a sort of peculiar catty-corner situation. But proper names are only make-believe and what bleeds and breathes beneath is always the only thing that matters; the fact is that one party (the Aryans) are the shepherds of being, and the other (the Jews) are its antagonists. In his flight from reason, Nietzsche crossed over to the other side in the name of the man to whom he gave a surprisingly even-handed and even praise-filled encomium in his penultimate book (ironically titled The Anti-Christ). And the truth of the matter, when the final positions of being are arrayed with and against one another, is that the friends and enemies will be of a confusing nature — so much so that any but the most perceptive will not be able to tell who is who and which is which, at least until the masks all come off and the faces appear in their final clarity.

“I am the god who made this joke” — so used to sign off the mad Friedrich Nietzsche in what seems to be a flourish to make one giggle; but he is wrong, wrong on the facts; this is no joke, no rehearsal for death in fancy dress, nor a game of the gods; but a deadly serious business. You best believe that this thing is real. And in his final denouement, which may be a faint prefiguration of ours to come, he picked the wrong horse.

* * *

Source: Author