Posthumous existences
An endless story of resurrections or at least of conversions. Attempts to bring people home from exiles misunderstood. Make them like us. Change them. Jews into Christians or corpses. Brown men in their homes in the heart of darkness into Christians or corpses. Nietzsche into something he never was - a man who believed in all this conversion while he had in fact fought all his life for quite a different kind of resurrection - a death of God announced by a madman who comes into the square carrying a burning lantern under the midday sun. A woman so very eager to be converted who in her hurry converts his writings into their opposites and her brother into a warrior for Nazism. Blanchot wrote, ‘How strange it is that the greatest literary glories of our time should be born of entirely posthumous works Kafka, Simone Weil, Hopkins; or partially so as with Hölderlin, Rimbaud, Lautréament, Trakl, Musil, and, in a crueller sense, Nietzsche’. And he adds, ‘One would like to recommend to writers - don’t leave anything behind you, destroy yourself all that you wish to see disappear; do not be weak, do not put your faith in anyone; you will necessarily be betrayed one day’.
Nietzsche asks: ‘Why is it that from Plato onwards every philosophical architect in Europe has built in vain?’ and, if this is the case, then are we not in a posthumous philosophy today, beyond the closure of the history of all those philosophical architects, a closure the beginning of whose end was brought about by none other than Nietzsche himself? But is any such beyond possible and, if so, how can we still think of posthumous existences?
And then there is the little problem of the eternal recurrence of the same which seems, surely, to deny all endings and beginnings and, along with them, all posthumous existences. Here is Heine again, ‘according to the eternal laws that control the combinations of this eternal play of repetitions, however much time may pass all configurations that have heretofore existed on this earth must still meet, attract, repel, kiss, and corrupt each other again’. Then it must be that you have wanted back that moment that is passing even in its passing. You want, more than that, you will it to pass again and again. The other side of closure is a place forbidden to thought.
Nietzsche, of course, called himself a posthumous thinker but he did not mean by this that we would reading about him and pulling his sentences apart after his death when constantly changing interpretations would be demanded. Rather he meant that he was untimely. Great art is made through intoxication, the intoxication of spring, of sex, of the brave deed, even of cruelty. With this intoxication of desire, of will, ‘one amplifies everything out of one’s own abundance’. The moment of creation is nothing other than a dive into the future, a making the future present and a creating, not a recreating, of the past. Eternal recurrence denies consequitive reason which ticks away in the discrete moments of clock time. What might happen has already happened in one moment which occurred ‘six thousand feet beyond man and time’ - in 1881, a reversible date - where the world and its justifications fall away, a moment which draws into itself both past and future and ‘transforms every “it was” until it will say: “but I willed it thus! thus shall I will it”’. Or as Theodore Herzl put it somewhat later, ‘If you will it, it is no dream’.
It might, of course, also have meant something rather different to a man with intimations of his own syphilitic mortality. The child of a father who died of softening of the brain and left him fatherless. The father of no child. The man who had to become a childless father. The self that had to be overcome was a self ‘without a father’ and without any son other than text which flowed or overflowed from the eternal moment. This self whose paternity was syphilitic, which had at his core intimations of mortality from both directions, could do nothing other than retire into the eternal moment of negative capability and be ‘left to bleed at sacrificial altars’. Posthumous existences will always be ours not his and the more so the less he is understood. No wonder, then, that it was left above all to Elizabeth to ferment eternal recurrence into a Nazi brew.
………………………………..
The remains of history are taken up and changed. Manipulation for the sake of a history quite at odds with the place where it lay for centuries. The Ahnenerbe or Ancestral Heritage Society, a department of Himmler’s SS were given the task of recreating history in their own Nazi image and discovered the origins of civilisation in the distant Neolithic past of Germany. As the legend has it, ‘The journey began before time when the last gods transfered their secrets to the first human beings in an icy country at the edge of the world. Some called this place Thule, others believed it to be Atlantis and the people who learned the secrets of the gods were know as Germans’.
Incidentally, of the heads of the forty-six departments of Himmler’s organisation nineteen had doctorates and another nineteen were full professors, many with internationall reputations. The allied report on the society concluded that they were, ‘engaged in a project to rewrite the past in order to influence the future course of history’ which is not so unlike Elizabeth’s much smaller project.
………………………………..
Back to that Nietzsche of the Archive who may not be entirely sane. He lay in bed, propped up on a pile of pillows so like Heine on his mattress grave. He was dressed in a flowing white gown which gave him the appearance of an ancient philosopher or, maybe, the inmate of some asylum. His hands rested on the coverlet, one of them half clenched and slightly twisted, the other open with thumb and first finger gently touching. His hair was brushed firmly back over his head and his enormous moustache was combed in exactly the opposite direction, down over his mouth, covering it completely. His shoulders and upper body rested on the pillows but his head was held upright and his deep eyes stared out towards the left of the picture and followed the setting sun.
In his last years Nietzsche was always drawn facing the setting sun. watching the setting sun. Like that sun and perhaps that ailing philosopher, Zarathustra, he also wanted to go down, ‘now he sits here and waits, old shattered law tablets around him and also new tablets - half written’. The older and madder he got, the more pictures we have of him and those made after he could no longer object to them are as strange as the lack of them earlier. He is both present and absent. Another Satan fallen from glory, he shines like the setting sun he so often watched from the balcony at Weimar or like a sun eclipsed, a light dissipated and thus more wonderful, much more wonderful, than the clear light of midday.
What can we discover by speaking of a likeness? What impossible irrelevant baggage does every detail drag along in its wake? We speak here of his black eyes and instantly know him to be deep and passionate, potentially mad. We describe a high forehead and presume great intelligence or are forced to acknowledge a high forehead because we speak of Nietzsche. And that contemplative stare into the distant sunset must, of course, be the inward stare of the philosopher. Of what help can all this be? With Nietzsche every possible chance was taken to hide behind an image which was false and deceptive which is why there were, perhaps, so few portraits or photographs. The picture of himself which we read in his texts is intense by its very falsity, is intended to convince and thus to mislead. The image that he gives us is only what we see and the only help he gives is helping to mislead.
But why bother with the likeness? Is not the likeness there in the text jumbled up amongst the words and their meanings? Well, with Nietzsche no excuses are needed. He lives in his texts. Lazarus can raise himself to a posthumous existence. The fire of an impossible future is always there between the words and even in the books he will never have time to write. He repeatedly thought up a stream of new title pages, writing to his friends and even out of the blue to people he had never met with further outpourings of plans and projects stretching into the …
Impossible. It can’t be done. He sits there staring out of the window at the setting sun. Another retreat. There is no following him. The books also constantly shift, go out of focus and fall back into the shadows in order to make us squint and stare so much the harder. He was always the exception, the friend who lived in loneliness behind a thousand masks. He wore a different one for each occasion. No two portraits of him are alike and the portraits which he paints of himself are also mirages which waver and disperse and re-appear transformed. And yet there are descriptions although not many. For Dr Paneth, ‘He has an unusually high forehead, smooth brown hair, wan, sunken eyes - as is natural in someone half blind - bushy eyebrows, quite a full face, clean-shaven, apart from a heavy moustache’. For Meta von Salis he has ‘a quiet melodious voice and his extreme soft-spokenness, made an immediate impact […] When a smile illumined his face, bronzed in the fresh Mediterranean air, the expression was movingly childish, inviting involvement’. And Lou Salomé was impressed by his ‘noiseless way of talking’, his ‘neat style of dressing’, and his ‘cautious, wistful gait, shoulders slightly rounded […] He gave the impression of standing to one side, alone’. And here is a description of 1875 from Ludwig von Scheffler, ‘He was of small rather than middle stature […] the iridescent glasses and deep moustache gave his face that impression of intellectuality which often makes even short men somewhat imposing’.
Earlier he had been a bit of a dandy. At Basle he attracted notice because of his overdressing. He was described as being a little below average height, solidly built. He was the only man in the town to flaunt a grey topper except for an old state councillor from Baden. He already sported the famous moustache, perhaps to hide his youth. There is a shot of him taken in 1865 which shows it already in place. From then on it grew bigger and bigger. It was already growing during the stay in Basle. By 1882 there is the picture in which it completely covers his lower lip and in another of 1892, taken with his mother, it has grown to cover his entire chin.
He hated the photographer. In 1888, Georg Brandes pleaded with him to have a likeness taken because he was ‘extremely anxious to know what you are like in appearance’. Nietzsche had to admit that he hadn’t got a single one to send as ‘my sister, who has married and gone to America has taken with her the last photographs of myself that I possessed’ and he refused, ‘I entertain a profound mistrust of ordinary photographers’. Later he relented and asked a friend to send one on to Brandes. This was finally received but was ‘a profile picture, characteristic in outline but with far too little expression’ and, Brandes complained, ‘Surely you must look different from that’.
And there are other photographs. There is one from 1864 where he is posing in a studio at the age of 17, leaning against a pedestal which is also shared by a huge vase of sprouting greenery. No moustache yet, his hair sleeked down, hand tucked Napoleon-like into his neat frock coat. Expression serene but confident. Three years later and another abstracted image, a head and shoulder affair with no background. Glasses now, metal framed and elongated so that the eyebrows show above them, the hair still short and close to the head. The heavy lower face with its slight sneer because, as his medical notes later mention the right corner of his mouth turned down somewhat. This the moustache was later to hide although Lou Salomé speaks of his ‘beautiful mouth’. Another, this time as a horseman with the field artillery, very military in baring, dressed in uniform with sword at the ready, hair and glasses the same but now the moustache very much in evidence. And then the wonderful grainy figure taken in 1871 in Lugano. Again no background but this time jaunty with heavy overcoat, the collar raised against the weather and a bowler perched above it. Arms folded in front of his chest. Moustache still there and still somewhat military and the same glasses. The suspicion of a smile.
Another from 1882, one of those typically Victorian set pieces and not a little ludicrous. Nietzsche with Paul Rée and Lou von Salomé. All three of them looks as stiff as statues while posing in a way which they must have thought natural. Rée and Nietzsche are holding the holster of a cart, Rée staring direct to camera and Nietzsche glancing off to the right, the reverse of his usual direction. Lou is kneeling in the cart itself holding what looks like a toy whip. All three of them have embarrassing smiles. Behind them is a studio landscape, an oak tree to the right and a cloud to the left. The two men are dressed smartly in suits and bow ties. The idea was Nietzsche’s. They had arrived together at the studio of Monsieur Bonnet and discovered the cart which was there to give a touch of rural reality to his pictures. Nietzsche was struck by the thing and had it brought centre stage for the first and probably only time in its photographic history. He insisted on Bonnet finding a piece of rope which was placed around his left and Rée’s right arm and held by Lou who was placed kneeling in the cart. The little whip was made out of a piece of stick and some spare rope. Thus the famous montage which Nietzsche thought best represented the relationship of the three friends. There is another portrait picture of Nietzsche clearly taken at the same session; same bow tie and coat, same fuzzy grain. It is inscribed to Lou from ‘Friedrich Nietzsche, formerly a professor now a roaming fugitive’.
Finally, before he vanishes altogether, Nietzsche’s head moves even further to the right and almost out of the picture. Now a black statue, he is still looking out beyond the frame to his left but all except his forehead and that huge walrus moustache, are out of the picture. Now, between him and the beautiful setting sun, a figure imposes itself, a figure dressed in a uniform with black hair sleeked down across its forehead and a small toothbrush moustache. Everything in him is Nietzsche’s opposite; the tiny moustache, the thin hair brushed forward, the small shifty eyes. And he looks away from the sun. Their eyes cannot meet.
Eyes that do not meet. And in the background is a figure dressed in mourning who presides over this event. She holds her head high and her chest out and in her hand, as always, is a small umbrella. For her this is a moment of great pride, this encounter in which there is no meeting, in which even Nietzsche’s statue has almost absented itself, leaving behind only his nose and moustache as tokens. From this encounter, from this non-encounter, the written word has vanished from the page like Nietzsche’s head from the picture and it has become , except for tokens, invisible.
………………………………..
Did the ceiling above Elizabeth’s burgeoning archive, the ceiling upon which the steps of the madman trod back and forth represent so radical a break? Were those footfalls in another world or in ours? Was Nietzsche a lost soul pacing across the rocks of a Hades above the world of the living? Did his afterlife contradict his life? Nietzsche himself thought not. He had already said that there was no such thing as a radical break in a man’s life. However forcefully a man or Nietzsche himself seems to leap from one contradiction to another, close observation will always reveal the dovetailing. Earlier he had written a little conversation between A and B in which A had said, “You are removing yourself faster and faster from the living; soon they will cut you off their list” to which B had answered, “It is the only way of sharing the privilege gained by the dead” and A had asked, “What privilege?” and B had answered, “To die no more”. Again, ‘Now that the affirmative part of my task is done, it is the turn of the denying, the No-saying and No-doing part’.
But then of course this thought itself was lodged in the world of the living and might not be able to force its way into the consciousness of Hades, of the other world. Metaphysical frenzy is suffocating, ‘it has at last reached the point where I could feel it pressing on my throat as though it would suffocate me’.
And Nietzsche had enough to say about madness before he went mad. Just as the Christians say that death is rebirth, that the life of the living merely a preparation for the posthumous existence of a land of shadows, so Nietzsche thought of madness before he went mad, ‘The madman is a mask and speaking trumpet of divinity’ and, ‘The madman crosses a divide between the old and stale, between the world we already know and think we understand and the world of the dead which is the new world, the world of Montezuma which Cortez never reached’. Again, ‘Madness prepares the way for the new idea and the prophet immolates himself upon it’. And again, ‘Everyone who is profound loves a mask […] and behind the mask is not only cunning but within the cunning an abundance of good […] a man who is so elusive and whose instinct is to use speech for silence and concealment and is inexhaustible in eluding communication, wants to replace himself with a mask so as to roam among the heads and hearts of his friends and thus makes certain that he does so. [..] Every deep spirit needs a mask - more, around every deep spirit a mask is perpetually growing’ and later, ‘please give me - What? What? Say it! - one more mask! A second mask!’ This hiding behind masks, this wanting to hide behind masks, is also a danger, ‘How can we find ourselves?’ he asks, ‘How can man know himself? He is a dark and veiled thing […]It is a tormenting, dangerous beginning to dig down into oneself in such a way and to force one’s way down the well of one’s being […] The man who does this can easily do so much damage to himself that no physician will be able to cure him’.
It seemed as if he was putting a mask between himself and the real world, as if he was using a pseudonym behind which he could hide his real feelings. Gast felt that Nietzsche did not want to be drawn forth from behind his similar kind of mask. He would refuse all such attempts. From Ecce Homo, ‘The eye of the sun just fell upon my life […] How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?’ and, ‘Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves’.
Gast wrote, ‘I believe that Nietzsche would be about as grateful to his rescuers as somebody who has just jumped into the water to drown himself and has been pulled out by some idiot of a lifesaver’. Gast felt that he did not want to be cured, ‘It seemed - horrible though it is - as if Nietzsche were merely feigning madness, as if he were glad for it to have ended in this way’.
In that long journey since Plato, the new has always been heralded by madness and distrusted, martyred and destroyed. In the ancient world the new man, the framer of new laws, the messenger of the new morality, if he was not already mad, had to pretend to be mad or to make himself mad. The madder the man the more he was admired. The saint who vanished into the desert and draped himself in sackcloth, spending his months and years fasting on top of a pillar. The hermit who shed his courtly clothes and retired to sit under a tree. The lady who gave all her wealth to the poor and passed the rest of her days in a little cell build on to the side of an insignificant church. And what were all of these committed to but madness. They contemplate only what can bring on ‘ecstasy or disorders of the mind’. They prayed to the powers of heaven to bring on deliriums and convulsions, sudden lights and darkness ‘until I crawl like a beast of the field’. If the new message does not come from out of the old, if it can make no sense to the living then it must come from you, from the lord of hosts or I am nothing’.
Once he awoke suddenly and surprised all those at his bedside by crying out loudly ‘Blessed be almighty God, who has favoured me with this great blessing. His mercies are indeed boundless, nor can the sins of men limit or hinder them’. To one of those who were sitting with him these words seemed more rational than his general speech before his illness and she asked, ‘of what mercies, do you speak and of what sins of men?’ He answered that the mercies of which he spoke were those that God showed him at this moment and that allowed him to think at last without impediment and had cleared his mind from the mists of ignorance to which his continuous reading of books had led him, ‘Now I understand their absurdities and deceptions. Now that I am approaching the end I should like to meet it so as to leave the world convinced that my life has not been that of a madman’.
………………………………..
The ‘Perception of tortured genius who suffers horribly for the sake of his vision skimming along the surface above depths of madness is probably accurate’ writes Dr Post, a modern psychiatrist who, ‘having looked at the lives of nearly 300 famous men, believes exceptional creativity and psychiatric problems are intertwined. He concludes that philosophers in the severe class include Kierkegaard, Cardinal Newman, Ruskin, Marx and Nietzsche. Among composers he mentions Wagner . . . ‘
………………………………..
Escape is from the world of suffering to another world where suffering and contempt are defeated. All Nietzsche’s writings are located at the exact point at which these two worlds meet. At the point where the one world is brought to heel and the new world imposed upon it. Overcoming suffering, ‘What cannot kill me makes me stronger. The more I suffer the more suffering is defeated and the greater sanity of another sphere is made possible’. From the mythic nonsense of Elizabeth’s museum to the living footfalls of Nietzsche dying in his Hades just above the floorboards. He writes to his doctor, ‘My existence is a dreadful burden and I would have thrown it off long ago if I had not been making the most instructive tests and experiments on mental and moral questions in just this condition of suffering and almost complete renunciation’. This pleasurable thirst for knowledge which carries him to heights at which he conquers all torment and hopelessness makes him happier than ever before. Brandes writes in his obituary, ‘After thirsting for recognition to the point of morbidity, he attained it in an altogether fantastic degree when, though still living, he was shut out from life’.
Or into life. For anyone versed in dialectics, deception is crucial for, ‘without it, how can a person be deceived into the truth?’ Kierkegaard understood this perfectly and used deception to ‘bring into the truth one who is in an illusion’. Direct communication supposes that the hearer is able to hear but if an illusion stands in the way and deafens him so illusion is needed, masks and pseudonyms are needed, the writer must hide his truth behind a mask and step out into the illusion of his audience in order to have the power to speak to them and give them the chance to understand him. But, of course, this also means that he may step back again behind the mask into the truth and refuse to speak any more.
………………………………..
Perhaps a man who is ‘but mad North-north-west’ and who can see the tiny demons fluttering over the shoulders of the guilty can prophecy against the horrors that he knows will come. The little man stands there in front of him, this little man like so many thousands of little men who have killed god and already taken the first steps from which they will never return. Facing the prophet who can ask him, unseeing yet seeing so many horrors in that bland actor’s eyes, ‘How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually. Backwards, sideways, forwards, in all directions? Is there still any up and down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?’
Thus spoke the madmen who had the audacity ‘to light a lantern in the bright morning hours’ in which so many others thought they lived. Across that final photograph glares the lion’s head in stone that fails to see the little man with his little moustache and his hair brushed forward who stares at him with such an appearance of reverence but who certainly had never read a single word of his warnings. That glare of stone saw so much more.
………………………………..
Binswanger’s original diagnosis was that Nietzsche’s madness did not come on suddenly but had been developing for a long while. He noted Nietzsche’s own comment that his father had suffered from the same illness. His mother wrote to Overbeck quite early on, while Nietzsche was in his first days at Jena, that she had read through the ‘Twilight of the Ghosts’ (as she called it) and comments that, ‘it is enough to torment anyone’s brain and I suppose the others are just like it’. She takes it along to Binswanger as an aid to him in diagnosing Nietzsche’s illness.
………………………………..
The few and the many, the Master and the slave. Nietzsche became more and more antagonistic to the many and wrote increasingly for an audience that dwindled to nothing.
To Meysenbug, ‘I have unreeled my line to “the few” instead of the many and I did this even without “impatience”. Soon even the few were discarded in favour of the none. I speak only to myself more and more. A steady withdrawal from any communication with the world. Into madness?’
To Reinhard von Seydlitz, ‘If I have been speaking to almost no one it has not been a ‘proud silence’ but, on the contrary, a very humble one, that of a sufferer ashamed to reveal how much he suffers. An animal crawls into its burrow when it is sick; so does la bête philosophe. How rarely a friendly voice reaches me! I am now alone, absurdly alone. And in the course of my relentless underground war against everything men have until now honoured and loved, imperceptibly I myself have unwittingly become something of a burrow, something hidden that can no longer be found even when you go out and look for it. But no one goes out to look for it. Confidentially, it is not impossible that I am the leading philosopher of this epoch, and perhaps even a little more than that, something decisive and fateful standing between two epochs. But one is made to pay constantly for such an isolated position - with an isolation that is growing evermore icy, ever more cutting’.
As early as 1876 he wrote to Gersdorff about the Christmas that has just passed, ‘I have just been through the worst, most painful, most dismal Christmas I have ever known. On the very first day, after numerous danger signals, there was a real breakdown. I could no longer doubt that I was in the throes of a serious disease of the brain, and that only this centre could cause so much pain in my stomach and eyes’. And he adds despairingly, ‘My father died of brain fever at thirty six; it’s possible that I’ll go even sooner’.
To Georg Brandes, ‘Just now a choral work of mine with orchestra called “A Hymn to Life” is being published. It is intended to go down to posterity and to be sung one day “in memory of me” assuming of course that enough of me survives to be remembered. You see on what posthumous thoughts I am existing. A philosophy like mine is like a tomb - it seals one off from the living. ‘He who hides well has lived well’, that is what is written over the grave of Descartes ‘. An epitaph (stolen from Horace) if ever there was one.
To Carl Fuchs, ‘Throughout the last years the vehemence of my inner vibrations has been frightening. Now that I have to move on to a new and higher form of expression, I need first of all a new sense of alienation, a even greater depersonalisation . . . ‘
To Gast, ‘All my previous life has been ruled off at this point […] truly until now my existence has shown itself to be what it really is - a mere promise.
………………………………..
He had become another or was pretending to be another. He scribbled notes transferring the first and third persons. He wrote down that, ‘He is very happy to have visitors’ and that, ‘He recognises voices from earlier times’. Even in his madness rewriting himself.
As his sister rewrote Nietzsche so Nietzsche scribbled what she was thinking, ‘I am monstrously good’. And he referred on her behalf to the colony in Paraguay as if she was speaking of her colonising over him and her precious archive beneath his feet, ‘As mother of the colony I still have much to do for all the colonists. God has always helped me. I am very glad to give’.
………………………………..
Madness, like labyrinths or mazes, are designed to confuse like the most famous of all labyrinths, the one at Crete (a labyrinth which, as we know, preyed on Nietzsche’s mind). From this confusion there is only one sure way out and that is to return by the way we have come following Ariadne’s thread. But to return thus step by step exactly by the way we have come is to find our way back through our mother’s womb to the nothingness from whence we came. And this, as we know, is contrary to human nature. Our return does not turn back but forward, ever onwards towards the nothingness beyond death which is not the same as the nothingness before existence for the reason that it incorporates existence, a hundred thousand acts which we have reeled out behind us. Living leaves a trail, a trace, which, even dead, we can hardly efface. Every life, indeed every act, has a posthumous existence, has affects, which it cannot retrieve or alter or even deny. Life is forever with his hand at his lips bidding adieu. Death is merely another form of this inevitable movement. To cower beneath such a mountain of actions, of words, of loves and hates, is already a kind of madness or confusion or loss and finally, with a sigh (whether heavy or light we are too far away to hear) to turn away, to drop the thread, to give up Ariadne and all she stands for and stand in the gloomy passageway of the labyrinth waiting for . . .
………………………………..
Or like some insomniac who, after shifting this way and that through the darkest reaches of the night, finally finds a comfortable position on the pillow and can get some sleep.
………………………………..
Elizabeth tells us that her brother enjoyed the lovely view from his window. He could see Weimar and the mountains beyond and beyond that ‘the wide horizon with its cloud forms and sunsets’. Elizabeth tells us that ‘his happiest hours were spent on the front veranda’ and ‘how he rejoiced every day in the beautiful view over Weimar and the lights on the Ettersberg hills’. It was in those Ettersberg hills with their woods of beeches towards which the mad philosopher gazed that the Germans built the concentration camp known as Buchenwald, an exercise amongst other things, in how hard work and devotion to duty can create opposites.
For not so long after Elizabeth had finished busying herself turning Nietzsche’s philosophy inside out, over there in those hills towards which her dying brother had gazed, other devoted men had done marvels with opposites, building huge cities of the dead with the labour of men hardly alive.
And how were these human creatures done away with? Well here’s how. By convincing them that quite the opposite was happening, that they were going to a shower house or a medical examination. Out there at Buchenwald, quite close to the gnarled Goethe oak which the builders left in place in reverence to German culture, the prisoners were pushed one at a time through a kind of medical procedure carried out by men in white coats with encouraging smiles on their faces. But when they stood on a slatted surface to have their height measured and one of the assistants was busying himself with the equipment, a dull shot would ring out and a body would slump to the floor. Why? Because hidden behind the wall on which the measuring rod had been nailed was a little chamber with a table and a magazine and an SS guard with a pistol. His job was to raise the pistol at regular intervals and shoot a bullet into the back of the neck of the man, woman or child on the other side of the wall who was in the middle of his medical and standing straight as he could to help his doctors. The body was then removed and the blood washed away ready for the next examination. Over the gates at Buchenwald were the words, ‘My country right or wrong’. In the magazine were, quite possibly, quotes from Nietzsche. As for other medical experiments conducted by real doctors in Ward 46 at Buchenwald (‘well equipped and a model of cleanliness’) with instruments and supplies donated by some of the biggest names in German pharmacology, both business and professional, the more said the better.
………………………………..
Buchenwald is, of course, another posthumous existence for it is still there like the confessional in the shadows of the nave of a cathedral dedicated to a god who is still sort of alive. You can get to it by road from Weimar although there is a slight suspicion that the signposts are not as accurate as they might be. The journey is pleasant enough and takes you on a gentle climb through pine forests until you arrive at a huge open area. A desire to take a deep breath for more than one reason but at least partly because the forest falls away on three sides and the sky, deep blue, seems to pulse upwards and away also. Expansiveness and space, the very opposite of oppression. The site is beautiful. Of course, the place is a tourist attraction now. One of the reasons that people from all over the world come to Weimar. Areas for parking; here for coaches and there for cars. Little arrows directing you to the various sites. The museum with its mock-ups of the huts in which so many thousands lived and died not one of which remains, the cabinets of uniforms and tools and documents and so much else which we can stare at in a sort of horror that is numbed so that it may not be felt. They have the chamber where doctors organised the murder of their patients. At the perimeter a few small buildings where the inmates were processed. The ovens stand oddly silent and cold with a few flowers on the floor in front of them. The trolleys for the bodies still standing motionless on their rails. Outside the gentle hills falling away on all sides. The sun shining in a clear sky. One of the hottest days of the year and yet here everyone was shivering. Visitors standing about in silence. Schoolgirls in tears.
………………………………..
Hovering over these horrors was - nothing. For no God could allow such things to happen, allow such madness to take the form of meticulous control of every detail. No. It was clear. As the power of Satan had steadily increased, the power of God had slowly died. God was dead. Do we need a madman to tell us that ‘We have killed him - you and I. All of us are his murderers […] God is dead. God remains dead and we have killed him’. And to continue, ‘How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? […] Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves?’ Nietzsche puts himself in the place of the Judas who kissed god and took his blood upon himself and upon his children.
And what replaces the God who is now in his grave and for whom we are singing a kadesh, a requiem aeternam deo? Why, of course, it is the superman and not the one who flies through the air and wears his pants outside his trousers but another much more dangerous one. Nietzsche writes of his ubermensch or overman, ‘The overman is the meaning of the earth’ or, ‘is it not the time, now that the type “herd animal” is being evolved more and more in Europe, to make the experiment of a fundamental, artificial and conscious breeding of the opposite type and its virtues?’ or again, ‘There is only nobility of birth, only nobility of blood’ or, ‘the conviction that one has duties only to one’s equals, towards the others one acts as one thinks best’.
This is what the Nazis liked to think and to quote and to use to justify . . . and yet these snippets are embedded in something so much more difficult as Nietzsche also tells us, ‘never yet has there been an overman’ and why? Because to be overman is to be . . . almost an impossibility, ‘the man who has overcome himself has become an overman’ and he writes on the title page of Ecce Homo, ‘How one becomes what one is’. The Nazi is the reverse of this because he follows, he does his duty. What was it that they all said like a mantra at Nuremberg? - ‘I was only doing my duty’. The follower is passive, he does nothing, there is nothing for him to overcome. Even his God is not worth killing. Is this the Nazi? Does he ‘desire no praise’? Does he have ‘care for most external things?’ does he avoid ‘petty honours and mistrust all those who are ready in their praise’? Does he ‘protect artists and poets?’ Does he have ‘disgust for the demagogic?’ and finally does he ‘love him who lives for knowledge and who wants knowledge so that one day the ubermensch may live. And thus wills his own downfall?’
………………………………..
And what, you may well ask, about the will to power? How does that fit in with the constant and dramatic deconstruction of the posthumous existences which smash dreams and create echoes which sound so very different from the original and formidable shout sent out across the canyons of the years? Well, how indeed? Is this yet another and particularly frightening example of Nietzsche’s famous irony, of the invisibility which faith demands? Or is the will to power merely the promise of yet another existence about which we can do nothing and in the face of which we should resign all gnashing of teeth and grant ourselves a gentle smile.? For history is the muse which Hegel followed with a smile and which rules our lives from afar. Fighting it is a smaller sign of virility than succumbing to its forces which are considerable and can destroy nations. ‘The expropriators of history’ Marx might just as well have said, ‘will be expropriated’ and bring down on their heads a terrible fury.
That which will happen anyhow in spite of the greatest drive to will it is what we must accept just as we must accept the impossibility of altering the horrors of the past, of wanting and willing just those horrors. The creative will must say to it, “But I willed it thus!”’ and again, ‘“But I will it thus! Thus shall I will it!”’ I must will even the destruction of all that I most profoundly will. This is the will to power which has reached the final extent of its own power.
Is there, hidden away somewhere behind those penetrating eyes a premonition of his sister’s betrayal? How well, after all, he must have known her. Did he persuade himself that even such horrors as were still to come must be willed as an inevitable inversion of what is merely wanted, of what is merely written? God had turned away his face so there was no other will behind such horrors other than the lonely philosopher’s desperate knowledge that the very things he wanted most would be twisted into their opposites and multiplied to the very edge of the possible. Is that the will to power: the love of that beyond all understanding, even that of Nietzsche himself?
………………………………..
Rebirths and unquiet graves and posthumous existences and Christian and Jew bring another story creeping to the fore, that of Zvi Michalowsky who was unlucky enough to have been in Eysyski on the day of the New Year in 1941 when the Jews of the place were taken in groups of 250 to the old Jewish cemetery and lined up naked in front of open ditches where they were shot in the back of the head by their Lithuanian guards.
So frightened was he that he fell forward a second before the bullet hit him. He lay there in the pit as the bodies fell into it on top of him. When the shooting stopped he was left there, presumed dead. He waited until dark and then, like Lazarus and he who brought Lazarus to life, arose, alive and stumbled out of the grave and into the night. Shivering with the cold he made his way to the hamlet where he could see the shape of the church around which, he knew, were the homes of the Christian people of the village who knew him well.
He knocked on the first door which, after a moment, opened. ‘Please let me in’ he begged. The peasant lifted up his lantern throwing its light on the naked body covered in blood. ‘Jew’, he told him, ‘go back to the grave where you belong’ and shut the door in his face. The poor man tried one house after another but always there was the same response until he came to one a little apart from the rest nearer to the forest where an old widow lived. When she opened the door to his knocking she had in her hand a burning piece of wood. ‘Let me in’ begged Zvi and she replied as had all the others ‘Jew, go back to the grave where you belong’ and chased him away with the burning branch as if she were exorcising an evil spirit.
But Zvi turned around and faced her, ‘I am your Lord Jesus Christ come down from the cross’, he told her, ‘Look at me - the blood, the pain, the suffering of the innocent! Let me in’. At this the widow crossed herself and fell on her knees at his blood-stained feet. ‘My God, My God’ she kept repeating. After a while she got herself together and opened the door for him.
Zvi entered. He promised to bless her children, her farm and her but only if she kept his visit a secret for three days and three nights and didn’t reveal it to a living soul, not even to the priest. She fed him and washed him and gave him some clothes. Before he left he told her once again that the Lord’s visit must on no account be revealed because of His special mission on earth.
Dressed, clean and fed he made his way to join the partisans in the forest.
………………………………..
While Nietzsche was enjoying the beautiful view over the Ettersberg hills he was allowed the occasional visitor. They describe his ‘high forehead, the bushy eyebrows, the noble deep eyes and the strong hanging moustache’. Again, ‘The forehead, the mighty forehead, the strongly protruding lower face, the nose, very delicate and elegant. Thick hair, completely black and soft as silk, like a woman’s. Eye sockets deep, quite expressionless’. His eyes were not extinguished, ‘dark and velvety in the depths of the fine and richly arched brows’. His features were as if chiselled, except that the moustache grew beyond the line of the mouth.
Elizabeth speaks warmly of the improvements which she saw in her brother because of the move to this new house, ‘The lofty, sunny sitting rooms and bedrooms, the comfortable bathroom and the winter veranda at the rear of the house also pleased him immensely. He had always said that his constitution was made for light and air, and now his words were being proved true in an unexpected way. He began to hold conversations again and comment on what was read to him and even tried to write - a feat made impossible for years by the paralysis of his right side’. She wrote as if Nietzsche was a quite normal invalid, physically fit and astute to the last ‘He kept his politeness and affability to the end, understood everything that went on around him, listened to what was read to him very attentively and sometimes even chose the books he wanted to have read’. Elizabeth, of course, was always considerate and compassionate in the extreme. No shadow of an ulterior motive crossed her mind.
………………………………..
Gast took Nietzsche six doughnuts every time that he visited. On 1st February, however, Nietzsche said, ‘No, my friend, I do not want to get sticky fingers now because I want to play a little first. Then he sat down at the piano to improvise. Oh if only you had been listening! Not one wrong note! Interweaving tones of Tristan-like sensitivity! Pianissimo alternating with the fanfares of trumpets and the sonorous sound of trombones, Beethoven-like profundity with jubilant songs rising above it. Then again reveries and dreams. It beggars description! Oh for a phonograph!’ So Gast took his leave of Nietzsche ‘enormously strengthened in my belief we shall have our Nietzsche back again’.
There is even the hint that he may have been writing in secret. Here is his mother, ‘He found a pencil and, as I had an old envelope, he began to write on it and was happy to be in his element. I could not prevent him from taking this pencil and another one out of the auditorium as well as paper which we finally discovered; and when I also said to him as a joke, “Old Fritz, you are really a little pack rat” and he whispered in my ear as he took his leave quite cheerfully, “but now I will have something to do when I creep back into my burrow”’.
Indeed, one of the members of the staff at Jena, a Dr Simchowitz, writes of his personal talks with Nietzsche that he was astonished at the way in which the man spoke. He had never heard anything like it before and he tells us that, ‘later when I read Nietzsche, it became clear to me what had puzzled me so much. For the first time I sensed the magical effect of the Nietzschian style. For he spoke just as he wrote. Terse sentences full of peculiar word combinations and ingenious antitheses; even the interspersed French and Italian phrases which he loved so much in his later writings were not missing. His manner had nothing of the professor of the lecturer about it’.
Which tallies with Overbeck’s feelings when he came to Jena in February. After seeing his friend he wrote, ‘I have always maintained that his madness, the beginning of which no one witnessed more closely than myself, was a misfortune as sudden as a flash of lightning. It came on between Christmas 1888 and Epiphany 1889’. Before this, in spite of his state of mental exaltation, Nietzsche cannot have been mad, ‘Still, I will not lay that down as a hard and fast opinion, at times it has almost wavered, as I cannot escape the ghastly suspicion […] that his madness is simulated. This impression can only be explained by the experiences I have had of Nietzsche’s self-concealments, of his spiritual masks’.
Nietzsche to Overbeck, ‘I have lost interest in everything. Deep down, an unyielding black depression and weariness too. I spend most of the time in bed […] the worst of it is, I no longer see the point in living for even half a year more. Everything is boring, painful, dégoûtant, I have suffered and sacrificed too much; I feel so incomplete, so inexpressibly conscious of having bungled and botched my whole creative life. It is all hopeless. I will do nothing worthwhile again. Why do anything any more!’
And, writing of the Engadine to Carl von Gersdorff, ‘For hearing my innermost voices it can never be too peaceful and high and lonely’.
To Rohde, ‘I felt as if you were holding my hand and looking at me mournfully as if to say, “How can it be that we now have so little in common, that we live in such different worlds” […] It is all over, past history, merely a matter of being considerate. We still get together. But the truth can be seen in their eyes which say to me (I hear it well enough) “Nietzsche, you are now all alone”’.
To Overbeck again, ‘My “philosophy” - if I have the right to give that name to that which tortures me to the very roots of my being - is no longer communicable, at least not in print’.
To Gast on starting ‘Ecce Homo’ he writes of, ‘embarking on the frighteningly solitary act of revaluation’.
In ‘Daybreak’ Nietzsche wrote, ‘Let us go one step further. All superior men who were irresistibly drawn to break apart the yoke of any morality and to give out new laws, if they were not actually mad, had no option but to make themselves, or pretend to be, mad. […] “How can one make oneself mad when one is not and dare not to appear mad?” - this terrible train of thought was followed by almost all the significant men of ancient civilisations; a secret teaching of artifice and dietetic hints was propagated on the subject together with the feeling that such reflections and purposes were innocent, even holy […] ‘Ah, give me madness, you heavenly powers! Madness, that at last I may believe in myself! Give deliriums and convulsions, sudden lights and darkness, terrify me with frost and fire such as no mortal has ever felt, with deafening noise and prowling forms, make me howl and whine and crawl like a beast only so that I may come to believe in myself!’
From ‘Ecce Homo’, ‘To know thyself is the recipe for ruin […] To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion of what one is’.
Lou Salomé suggested that, ‘Nietzsche’s madness was integral to his thinking. He had experimented with himself as the subject for his thought for too long. The great thing that Nietzsche knew was that he was going under and yet with a laughing mouth he parted from life, absolving and justifying and transfiguring it’. And don’t forget what Nietzsche had written about wisdom in ‘The Gay Science’, ‘it is a screen behind which the philosopher can save himself when he becomes weary, old, cold, hard - when he feels that the end is near, like the instinctive wisdom animals have before their deaths: they go off by themselves, become still, choose solitude, hide in caves and become wise’.
In a letter to Gast, ‘It is noble to regard solitude not as an option but as a given’ and ‘It is noble to have a resolute appearance of frivolity masking a stoic hardness and self-control’.
To Malwida von Meysenbug, ‘This frightful and almost unremitting agony makes me hunger for the end and, judging by several indications, the cerebral coup de grace is close enough at hand to make me hopeful. As far as suffering and self-denial go I will match the last years of my life against those of any ascetic of any age’.
To Elizabeth in Paraguay, ‘I take one sleeping pill after another to deaden the pain and for all that I cannot sleep. Today I will take such a dose that I lose my wits’.
To Strindberg, ‘There is no question but that the hereditary criminal is decadent, even insane, But the history of criminal families […] always leads one back to an individual who is too strong for his particular social environment. The latest major criminal case in Paris, Prado’s, is a classic example. Prado was more than a match for his judges, even his lawyers, in self-control, wit and bravado. This is in spite of the fact that the pressure of the trial had already affected him so much physically that several witnesses recognised him only from old portraits’.
To Gast, ‘My daily battle with headaches, together with the ridiculous assortment of ills that plagues me, demands so much attentiveness that I run the risk of becoming small-minded. But at least it serves to ballast the very general, very high-flying impulses which rule me to such a degree that without great counterweights I would surely go mad . . . ‘
To Lou Salomé and Paul Rée, ‘Even if some emotional disturbance should happen to drive me to suicide, there wouldn’t be all that much to mourn. Why should my fantasies concern you? (Even my “truths” haven’t concerned you up to now). Do bear in mind that at bottom I am sick in the head and half insane, completely confused by long isolation’.
To Hans von Bülow, ‘For years now I have lived somewhat too close to death and, what is worse, to pain. I seem designed for lengthy torment and skewering over a slow flame, and don’t even know enough to lose my mind in the process’.
To Overbeck, ‘I won’t hide it from you; I am in a bad way. Darkness has closed in on me again […] For a short time I was completely in my element, basking in my light. And now it is over. I believe I am surely done for unless something (I have no idea what) happens’.
Again that letter to Strindberg, ‘I want, I want to be mad […] It is a joy to be mad’.
………………………………..
Elizabeth, as expected, gave different reasons for her brother’s insanity, ‘Among the immediate causes […] I include the enormous strain both on his intellect and on his short-sighted eyes. He worked extremely hard just before the onset of his madness’ and she noted how exhausted he must have been. Thus, the stooping position which ‘has an effect which injurs the nerves of the head and stomach and the terrible weather in the Engadine’. These ‘brought on an attack of influenza which tormented him for weeks and had a very depressing effect’. It left behind an ‘absurd insomnia which made him resort to sleeping draughts again’.
Then comes the real reason, ‘I regard two sleeping draughts, chloral and Javanese narcotic, as responsible for his paralytic stroke’. She wrote that ‘He used both of these in considerable quantities because he wanted to get through the enormous task before him’. The chloral was a help because it didn’t leave him feeling weak the morning after using it. It also allowed him to sleep well and have pleasant dreams. She tells us he was worried by the habit but that the doctors assured him that it was harmless. However, she calls his taking it ‘a very risky experiment’.
The Javanese narcotic was more of a problem. She wrote that he was introduced to it in 1884 by a Dutchman who ‘presented him with a fairly large bottle of the specific. The stuff tasted like rather strong alcohol and had an outlandish smell. The Dutchman impressed on us the fact that only a few drops should be taken at a time in a glass of water’. It produced, according to Elizabeth, a false feeling of gaiety and made her brother ‘suddenly throw himself on the ground in a fit of convulsive laughter’. This laughter, along with the grins, the forced gaiety and his artificial laughter, was a feature of his insanity. She concluded by writing that, ‘during the early days of his insanity he used often to say in confidence to our mother that he “had taken twenty drops” (he did not mention of what) and that his brain had then “gone off the rails”’. She decided that ‘the correct diagnosis, perhaps, would be that his brain had been exhausted by overstrain of the nerves of head and could no longer resist taking drugs to excess, and thus became disabled’.
………………………………..
Nietzsche wrote about ‘The history of criminal families’ thus, ‘Wherever I seek my most profound opposite, that is, incalculable vulgarity of instinct, I always find my mother and sister. If I thought that I was in actual fact related to such canaille it would be a veritable blasphemy against my divinity. The treatment that I have always received from my mother and sister, up to the present moment, fills me with unutterable horror. Here a highly perfected, hellish machine is at work, one that operates with unfailing accuracy at the very moment that I am most vulnerable and likely to bleed […] In these moments one lacks all the energy that would be needed to defend oneself against venomous vipers’.
………………………………..
At last he said with sadness, ‘I know my fate . Well then! I am ready. My last solitude has just begun’.
‘Ah, this sorrowful, black sea beneath me! Ah, this brooding reluctance! Ah, destiny and sea! Now I have to go down to you!’
‘I stand before my highest mountain and my longest wandering therefore I must first descend deeper than I have ever descended - deeper into pain than I have ever descended, down to its blackest stream! My destiny will have it so. Well then! I am ready’.
………………………………..
What ceremony else?
Wagner is buried in the cemetery of Bayreuth near the grave of his father-in-law Liszt and his son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain. Also nearby is the tomb of Winifred Wagner, buried with her husband Siegfried of the Idyll. She held artistic sway over the Theatre while the Third Reich held sway over most of Europe. Just six years after the holocaust, when the Festspielhaus was reopened in 1951, a head of Wagner was carved and put on a pillar in a garden in Bayreuth not far from these graves. It is in the Nazi style and was carved by Arnold Preger. Who? He was Hitler’s favourite sculptor.
In other less dignified graves are some other friends of Elizabeth’s who had been hanged within an hour of each other in the gymnasium of the jail at Nuremberg: Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frick, Seyss-Inquart, Franck and Sauckel who had read the funeral oration over the body of Elizabeth at the request of an influential friend. That friend, dictator, was also dead and almost ready for resurrection. His charred body had mysteriously vanished never to return except for half a cranium with a bullet-hole through it that is now part of a touring exhibition.
Many who should have met their deaths at the hands of the hangman of Nuremberg were never captured or tried. Instead they made their way, with the connivance of the allies, the church which worshipped another saviour of Europe and others in authority, to South America where they lived in some comfort for the most part and died (Eichmann excepted) in their beds.
Sightings are legion, not least in ‘Nueva Germania’ where every now and then, a figure leading a sad looking horse appears out of the jungle mists and makes its way to that overgrown, cracked gravestone and studies it intensely for a while, is invited to stay for a few days and sometimes does but then, invariably, vanishes again leaving nothing but vague talk of even vaguer similarities to . . .
No surprise at all to find that Nietzsche was read out during that trial at Nuremberg. Nazism, one of the prosecutors told the court, was the morality of immorality and the result of Nietzsche’s purest teachings which regard the destruction of conventional morality to be the highest duty of man. Elizabeth had done her job thoroughly.
………………………………..
And at this point, perhaps, the eminence grise of the final solution inverts things in yet another kind of posthumous existence. In the diaries he wrote in jail, after his public trial in a Jerusalem theatre, Adolf (yes another one) Eichmann chose for his frontispiece a line from Plato’s cave, that eerie Hades below ground where light from the upper world never filters, where illusion is the real and the real is an illusion, ‘And he would consider his shadow world as real, but the real world as an illusion’. Those pieces of paper he shifted around his overneat desk so far away from anything real, where he was concerned only with the banality of a normal day at the office but where outside everything was inverted into its terrible opposite, into a reality which could not be conceived down there below ground. In his opinion his duties had nothing whatever to do with the actual, the acts, the actions of others and, where they did connect, he always sought the seal of the Gestapo chief, Heinrich Mueller. He had, as the high-ranking head of the Jewish Department, every right to command but made no use of it. In fact, his shadow world was real enough, that is shadowy enough, for many. Later Emil Fackenheim was to write that the Jew must accept and proclaim his Jewishness or, by assimilating and hiding in those very shadows through fear of recognition, he hands to Hitler another posthumous victory.
At the time Buber stated that Eichmann should not have been hanged but should instead have been forced to work among the Jews he would have had killed in the flourishing orchards of Israel so that he could see each day how unfinal the solution had been and instead of death would have lived a posthumous existence.
………………………………..
And the figure whose footfalls have been crossing and recrossing the floor above us had become Nietzsche’s phantom, a ghostly mirror image of the living man, so much more dead than simply lifeless. He had become the supreme exhibit of the archive which only the most special of guests were allowed to see. Just as Wagner had made a shrine to himself at Tribschen and Hitler had turned his rallies into living shrines to himself, so Elizabeth had built a shrine to her brother at Weimar. She dressed him in long flowing robes that made him appear like an ancient Greek philosopher or a Catholic priest. It was their mother’s faithful maid Alwyn who did the cooking and cleaning and sat with him all those endless hours while Elizabeth busied herself with her myth making beneath his feet. But it was Elizabeth who brought in the visitors and showed him off to the world. And she created yet another myth, the myth of her devotion to her brother. In her account Alwyn vanished and the nursing became her responsibility. One of the last things Nietzsche had written was to express the ‘terrible fear that one day I shall be pronounced “holy”’ and Elizabeth wrote as if in response ‘His eventide was to me too holy!’ She compares herself to the women around Socrates who were asked to leave because of their constant sobbing, because they cried and wailed, disturbing the thinker’s repose in that Athenian prison. She was determined, so she says, not to be like them. She would protect the real Nietzsche from that kind of disturbance. Everything would be comfortable and well organised. Nothing for the philosopher to overcome. Nothing for him to write. No thinking. Elizabeth had taken those tasks to herself.
Already in 1897 Ferdinand Tinnies was writing, ‘A philosophical writer who is read by many is already a remarkable thing. But suppose this writer should be read with enthusiasm, that readers should call themselves disciples, that his thought should be received as an emancipation and a revelation, that these people should feel that in the thinker they had found a Führer’.
No longer a man, it took only one further small step to turn him into a god. Rudolph Steiner wrote what he was thinking as he worked on the documents downstairs, ‘He sat enthroned on the veranda above in solemn awfulness, unconcerned with us, like a god of Epicurus. Whoever saw Nietzsche at this time as he reclined in his white pleated robe, with the glance of a Brahman in his wide and deep-set eyes, beneath bushy eyebrows, with the nobility of his enigmatic, questioning face and the leonine, majestic carriage of his thinker’s head, had the impression that this man could not die, but that his eye would rest for all eternity upon mankind. This man, the thinker who had had the temerity to kill the gods and have done with all the immortals on Parnassus, had been placed there by their sides’. What he had overcome had itself been overcome and the dead had been brought to life. Lazarus had been raised from the dead and returned to life inverted, had been taken from life and returned before his time to immortality and been given back his death. What a myth by which to judge all the myths of the future.
One of those allowed up the hallowed staircase into the presence of the living corpse was the Baroness van Unger-Sternberg and she saw ‘all the loftiness and beauty of his soul shining through his form!’ She writes of the beauty of his eyes, of those eyes which had caused the living writer so much pain. She sees them ‘no longer veiled by spectacles, as simply overpowering. Those deep-set, melancholy, star-like eyes, that seemed to rove the distance and yet to look within’. Those eyes exerted a magnetic influence. How carefully had the stage been set, and the visitor prepared. The archive as church to the new god and the staircase as steps to the altar. To destroy the creativity of the gods is one thing and can only be done through the mouth of a madman. This Nietzsche understood while he was still a man. But to recreate the gods again in your own image, to make of the holy nothing more than another myth, for this you need a madman who has given up even his madness and can himself be turned into something holy.
‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the lord of ghosts’.
And even Lou von Salomé had written that, ‘He parted from his life, absolving, justifying and transfiguring it’. Not unlike another Salomé who ordered the death of another god-like figure or the other Salomé who, after weeping over another kind of lingering death, went to another tomb with spices to anoint a god but fled from the place.
And what was it that Lou’s lover, Rilke, had written about that wax figure of Christ in a booth at the Munich Fair, about the dead being martyred for their very lack of faith, about the wandering Jew in quite another shape. The figure on the cross whose final words had spoken of his loss of faith and of his death without belief, who looked down on the poet and spoke:
This is my curse
Since my disciples robbed my grave of me,
deluded by their proud and boastful faith,
there is no pit can hold me - none.
So long as rushing steams reflect the stars
and life bursts forth under an April sun,
I must go on and on across the earth,
And pay my penance now from cross to cross
Know you the legend of the Wandering Jew?
I am myself that ancient Ahasvar
Who daily dies and daily lives anew.
As Disraeli wrote, ‘Over every altar […] we find the tables of the Jewish Law’, above a writhing figure of the Jewish Christ, a flying Dutchman, a wandering Jew, forced to live in exile against his most ardent wishes.
………………………………..
We have the final moment from Elizabeth. On Monday August 20th he suddenly caught a feverish cold and his breathing became more and more difficult. There was a real risk that he would get an inflammation of the lungs. This risk persisted for a few days, but, with the help of the doctor, it seemed that the danger had passed. Yet, just before midday four days later, while Elizabeth was sitting opposite him his whole expression changed suddenly and, seized with a paralytic stroke, he dropped back unconscious. As this happened a terrible storm began outside as if Friedrich was trying to die in the midst of thunder and lightning (There is no mention of the raiment of the Temple). However, he came round again and even made an effort to speak to her.
The end came towards two o’clock the following night. Elizabeth was moving the lampshade to one side in order to hand him a refreshing draught when he looked at her and cried our her name joyfully, ‘“Elizabeth” was the last word that passed his lips for now his beloved face began to change little by little and his breathing became more and more of an effort and the shadow of death began to spread across his features’. For the last time he opened his glorious eyes to gaze upon her and opened and closed his lips once or twice as if he still had something to say but could say nothing. Then there was a slight shudder, a deep sigh and softly, without any struggle, with one final glance in her direction, he closed his eyes forever. ‘Such was the passing of Zarathustra’.
………………………………..
The footfalls are hardly audible through the thick boards of the first floor ceiling yet, nonetheless, are still resounding through this enormous story. If you could be silent for a moment and even stop the rustling of those documents, maybe hold your breath … Yes there they are - one two three four five six seven wheel one two three four five six seven wheel. The shuffling of slippers to and fro. The padding back and forth of a great thinker for whom music was an abiding passion. This ghostly shuffling is all that remains of such heroic love of music - a tuneless pulse, a shadowy heartbeat, - one two three four five six seven wheel one two three four five six seven wheel. Will you not try to snatch a little sleep?
And the Maestro, of course, resurrected art after it had taken a long sleep. Nietzsche was ‘a disciple of art resurrected’. The birth, no the rebirth, of tragedy out of the spirit of music and the rebirth also of the “aesthetically responsive spectator”’.
‘As far as suffering and self-denial go I will match the last years of my life against those of any ascetic of any age’. ‘Ah, give me madness, you heavenly powers! Madness, that I may at last believe in myself! Give deliriums and convulsions, sudden lights and darkness, terrify me with frost and fire such as no mortal has ever felt, with deafening noise and prowling forms, make me howl and whine and crawl like a beast so that I may only come to believe in myself!’
‘The patience of the scream has no limits. It outlasts martyrdom’ wrote Edmund Jabès.
And other bodies which were transformed into shapes of a different kind, ‘a habitual feeling of my real life having past and that I am leading a posthumous existence’. ‘A little later, when he was quite forgotten, she began to - A little later, when as though he had never been, it had never been, she began to - ‘. From the mythic nonsense of this so loving sister and her archive, her museum with its living, breathing exhibit. Footfalls of the dead. He is in his Hades just above the floorboards.
And who was it who said, ‘I cannot escape the ghastly suspicion […] that his madness is simulated. This impression can only be explained by the experiences I have had of his self-concealments, of his spiritual masks?’ Yes, Overbeck, the friend who was so grateful for the moment of recognition he had received in that railway carriage, the man he had loved most of all, the man who knew that this was no longer his friend but another man, a mask, a mystery.
‘I felt as if you were holding my hand and looking at me mournfully as if to say, “How can it be that we have so little in common now, that we live in such different worlds?” Yet at one time - And this is how it is with everyone I care about, ‘It is all over, past history, merely a matter of being considerate. We still get together. But the truth can be seen in their eyes which say to me (I hear it well enough) “You are now all alone”’.
‘Now all profane books are odious to me and I understand my folly and the peril I have received from reading them’. They had understood nothing of what he had written when he was as sane as any man but now that he was clearly mad the relief in their faces when they realised that they had understood that he was making no sense whatsoever was manifest. Now, at last, they were on safe ground. The incomprehensibility of the sane was a problem but that of a madman they could deal with. Elizabeth’s job was to resurrect a kind of sanity out of this madness even though he had told her, ‘You wish to sacrifice your life, not to my lofty aims but to the ideals which I have got beyond and must now fight against’.
Now that they all understood at last that he was both a dying man and mad they fell to their knees and begged him not to die, ‘for the maddest thing that a man may do in this life is to let himself die just like that, without anyone killing him’. But he answered, ‘Let us go gently for there are no birds this year in last year’s nest. I was mad but now I am sane’.
Another metamorphosis, ‘As he opened the door he thought I’ve an idea I don’t grow any older now, and when I come to die, it’ll seem an odd, out-of-date sort of catastrophe. Hardly was he well inside his room when the door was hastily shut, bolted and locked. The sudden noise in his rear startled him so much that his little legs gave way beneath him. It was his sister who had shown such haste. She had been standing ready waiting and had made a light spring forward, he had not even heard her coming and she cried out At last! as she turned the key in the lock’.
………………………………..
The grave is as good a place to close as any and, like so many other things in this story, it is not as is seems for it is just possible that those three bodies in their small plot in the churchyard at Röcken are not directly beneath their gravestones.
Elizabeth had a tombstone prepared for herself which matched her brother’s exactly and she was careful to leave a gap for her own coffin between those of her brother and mother thus reserving for herself, in death as in life, a central place. There is a rumour to the effect that she was forced to shift her brother’s headstone a metre or more to the left to make enough space for her own. If the rumour is true, then Elizabeth’s headstone is, at least partly, above the body of her brother. A metaphor in solid stone if ever we should need one .
Biography of the author:
David Pollard was born under the bed in 1942 and has been a furniture salesman, accountant, TEFL teacher and university lecturer. He got his three degrees from the University of Sussex and has since taught at the universities of Sussex, Essex and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has been published in other volumes and in learned journals and poetry magazines.
Discover other titles by the same author:
The Poetry of Keats