DAVID STRAUSS AND GERMAN CULTURE

The next group of entries will follow Nietzsche’s group of four cultural essays united by their common title Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, but each having a title of its own and published at different times: from 1873 through 1876. The author’s original intent was to have thirteen of these essays, but it was never realized in full, with an attempted fifth item Wir Philologen appearing posthumously.

David Strauss: der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller is the first such essay, published in 1873. Nietzsche uses Strauss’s wildly popular (and just as scandalous as his earlier work Das Leben Jesu) last work Der alte und der neue Glaube, published in 1872, to portray him as the preeminent cultural icon of the degenerate German culture, which believes that winning the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, Germany demonstrated the superiority of the German culture as such.---

Public opinion in Germany seems strictly to forbid any allusion to the evil and dangerous consequences of a war, more particularly when the war in question has been a victorious one. Those writers, thus, command a more ready attention who, regarding this public opinion as final, proceed to vie with each other in their jubilant praise of the war, and of the powerful influences it has brought to bear upon morality, culture, and art. Yet it must be confessed that a great victory is a great danger. Human nature bears a triumph less easily than a defeat; indeed, it might even be urged that it is simpler to gain a victory of this sort than to turn it to such account that it may not ultimately prove a serous rout.

But of all evil results due to the last contest with France, the most deplorable, perhaps, is that widespread and even universal error of public opinion and of all who think publicly, that German culture was also victorious in the struggle, and that it should now, therefore, be decked with garlands, as a fit recognition of such extraordinary events and successes. This error is in the highest degree pernicious: not because it is an error,—for there are illusions which are both salutary and blessed,—but because it threatens to convert our victory into a signal defeat. A defeat? —I should say rather, into the uprooting of the “German Mind” for the benefit of the “German Empire.” (Opus Cit. I)

Before Nietzsche even touches Strauss, he uses an argument to authority, namely, to Goethe, to help him to demonstrate to the readers that the Germans have been barbarians throughout their history.---

…Meanwhile, let us not forget that in all matters of form we are, and must be, just as dependent upon Paris now as we were before the war; for up to the present there has been no such thing as an original German culture.

We all ought to have become aware of this, of our own accord. Besides, one of the few who had the right to speak to Germans in terms of reproach publicly drew attention to the fact. “We Germans are of yesterday,” Goethe once said to Eckermann. “True, for the last hundred years we have diligently cultivated ourselves, but a few centuries may yet have to run their course before our fellow countrymen become permeated with sufficient intellectuality and higher culture to have it said of them, it is a long time since they were barbarians.” (Opus Cit. I)

Of course, it is much better for a barbarian to remain a barbarian than to fake a culture which turns out to be a Philistine culture. And here comes such a Philistine leader: David Strauss.

With a subtle combination of biting sarcasm and good-natured levity, Nietzsche proceeds to deconstruct the authority of Strauss, essentially ridiculing him for “confessing” his religious beliefs to the public, which has no interest and is not supposed to have it, in the author’s personal faith. On the other hand, Strauss the writer is hardly competent to discuss other matters, such as German philosophy, literature, music, etc., because no Philistine is competent or should ever be allowed to discuss matters so much above his head.---

“Have pity on the exceptional man!” Goethe cries to us; “for it was his lot to live in such a wretched age that his life was one long polemical effort.” How can you, my worthy Philistines, think of Lessing without shame? He who was ruined precisely on account of your stupidity, while struggling with your ludicrous fetishes and idols, with the defects of your theatres, scholars, and theologists, without once daring to attempt that eternal flight for which he had been born. And what are your feelings when ye think of Winckelman, who, in order to turn his eyes from your grotesque puerilities, went begging to the Jesuits for help, and whose ignominious conversion dishonors not him, but you? Dare ye mention Schiller’s name without blushing? Look at his portrait. See the flashing eyes that glance contemptuously over your heads, the deadly red cheek—do these things mean nothing to you? In him ye had such a magnificent and divine toy that ye shattered it. Suppose, for a moment, it had been possible to deprive this harassed and hunted life of Goethe’s friendship, ye would then have been responsible for its still earlier end. Ye have had no finger in any one of the life-works of your great geniuses, and yet ye would make a dogma to the effect that no one is to be helped in the future. But for every one of them, ye were “the resistance of the obtuse world,” which Goethe calls by its name in his epilogue to the Bell; for all of them ye were the grumbling imbeciles, or the envious bigots, or the malicious egoists: in spite of you each of them created his works, against you each directed his attacks, and thanks to you each prematurely sank, while his work was still unfinished, broken and bewildered by the stress of the battle. And now ye presume that ye are going to be permitted, tamquam re bene gesta, to praise such men! and with words which leave no one in any doubt as to whom ye have in your minds when ye utter your encomiums, which, therefore, “spring forth with such hearty warmth” that one must be blind not to see to whom ye are really bowing. Even Goethe in his day had to cry: “Upon my honor, we are in need of a Lessing, and woe unto all vain masters and to the whole aesthetic kingdom of heaven, when the young tiger, whose restless strength will be visible in his every distended muscle and his every glance, shall sally forth to seek his prey!” (Opus Cit. IV)

Here is an absolutely exceptional Nietzschean vitriol that reaches far beyond David Strauss as its target and can in effect be applied in a broadly generic way to all philistines and users of all nations and all ages, very prominently including our own.---

…A corpse is a pleasant thought for a worm, and a worm is a dreadful thought for every living creature. Worms fancy their kingdom of heaven in a fat body; professors of philosophy seek theirs in rummaging among Schopenhauer's entrails, and as long as rodents exist, there will exist a heaven for rodents. In this, we have the answer to our first question: How does the believer in the new faith picture his heaven? The Straussian Philistine harbors in the works of our great poets and musicians like a parasitic worm whose life is destruction, whose admiration is devouring, and whose worship is digesting. (Opus Cit. VI)

It is altogether amazing how the supposedly iconoclastic irreligionist Nietzsche attacks the actual iconoclast and quasi-rationalistic formalist Strauss (whose Das Leben Jesu attributes all supernatural things and events in the life of Jesus to mere mythology, thus authoritarianly dismissing them even on the purely theological, as opposed to the legitimately scientific, level) on the holy ground, as well as across the board... Here is the powerful conclusion of Nietzsche’s essay, with which I am also concluding my own entry.---

To put it in plain words, what we have seen have been feet of clay, and what appeared to be of the color of healthy flesh was only applied paint. Of course, Culture-Philistinism in Germany will be very angry when it hears its one living God being referred to as a series of painted idols. He, however, who dares to overthrow its idols will not shrink, despite all indignation, from telling it to its face that it has forgotten how to distinguish between the quick and the dead, the genuine and the counterfeit, the original and the imitation, between a God and a host of idols; that it has completely lost the healthy and manly instinct for what is real and right. It alone deserves to be destroyed; and already the manifestations of its power are sinking; already are its purple honors falling from it; but when the purple falls, its royal wearer soon follows.

Here I come to the end of my confession of faith. This is the confession of an individual; and what can such one do against a whole world, even supposing his voice were heard everywhere! In order for the last time to use a precious Straussism, his judgment only possesses “that amount of subjective truth that is compatible with a complete lack of objective demonstration” — is not that so, my dear friends? Meanwhile, be of good cheer. For the time being, let the matter rest at this “amount which is compatible with a complete lack”! For the time being! That is to say, for as long as that is held to be out of season which in reality is always in season, and is now more than ever pressing; I refer to... speaking the truth. (Opus Cit. XII)