The Age of Atheists: How We Have Sought to Live Since the Death of God

by Watson, Peter

  HARD WISDOM

  Throughout the nineteenth century there had been endless arguments about what actually was and was not German (its borders did keep changing), and Nietzsche was press-ganged into this debate. During the 1890s and thereafter more and more people began to adapt his Germanness and the Nietzsche-German relationship into an ideology. By this account, Germanness was an exclusive precondition for truly understanding him and what he was saying. Here, for example, is Oswald Spengler on Nietzsche:

  “Goethe’s life was a full life, and that means it brought something to completion. Countless Germans will honor Goethe, live with him, and seek his support; but he can never transform them. Nietzsche’s effect is a transformation, for the melody of his vision did not end with his death. . . . His work is not a part of our past to be enjoyed; it is a task that makes servants of us all. . . . In an age that does not tolerate otherworldly ideals . . . when the only thing of recognizable value is the kind of ruthless action that Nietzsche baptized with the name of Cesare Borgia—in such an age, unless we learn to act as real history wants us to act, we will cease to exist as a people. We cannot live without a form that does not merely console in difficult situations, but helps one get out of them. This kind of hard wisdom made its first appearance in German thought with Nietzsche.”3

  Carl Jung was no less impressed. He viewed Nietzsche as a development beyond Protestantism, just as Protestantism was itself an outgrowth beyond Catholicism. Nietzsche’s idea of the Superman was, he believed, “the thing in man that takes the place of the God.”4

  Notwithstanding the enthusiasm of these and other luminaries, it was the youth and avant-garde of the 1890s who made up the bulk of Nietzsche’s followers. This had a lot to do with the state of the Kaiserreich, which was perceived then to be both spiritually and politically mediocre. To these people, Nietzsche was seen as a pivotal, turn-of-the-century figure, “a man whose stature was comparable only to Buddha, Zarathustra or Jesus Christ.”5 Even his madness was endowed by supporters with a spiritual quality. For here was Nietzsche like the madman in his own story, someone who had been driven crazy by his vision and the alienation of a society not yet able to comprehend him. The German Expressionists had a fascination with madness for its allegedly liberating qualities, as they did for all extreme forms of life, and they identified Nietzsche as both a spokesman and an exemplar. Opponents dismissed him, quite wrongly as it turned out, as a “degenerate” who would “rave for a season, and then perish.”6

  Despite the divisions he aroused, his popularity grew. Novels and plays tried to capture and dramatize his already dramatic ideas. People all over Europe started to have “intoxicating” Zarathustra experiences. Le Corbusier had a Zarathustra-Erlebnis (a Zarathustra “experience” or “insight”) in 1908. Nietzschean concepts like the will to power and Übermensch entered the vocabulary.7 Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra was premiered in Frankfurt-am-Main in November 1896, the most famous but not the only major artwork stimulated by Nietzsche—Mahler’s Third Symphony was another, originally entitled The Gay Science.

  The glossy illustrated magazine Pan featured Nietzschean poems in his honor but also printed drawings and sculptures of him, seemingly whenever they got the chance. Between 1890 and 1914 his portrait was everywhere, his bushy mustache becoming a widespread visual symbol, making his face as famous as his aphorisms. From the mid-1890s, encouraged by the Nietzsche archives (under the control of his sister), “Nietzsche-cult products” were made available in generous amounts, a move that would certainly have maddened him had he been capable of such feelings. Hermann Hesse was just one well-known writer who had two images of Nietzsche on his study wall in Tübingen. His face was also a popular device on bookplates, one image showing him as a latter-day Christ, with a crown of thorns. The working-class press appropriated his image as a familiar and succinct way to mock the capitalist commercialization of culture.8

  Some even adopted what they called Nietzschean “lifestyles,” the most striking example being the designer/architect Peter Behrens. Behrens designed his own “Zarathustrian” villa as a centerpiece of the experimental Darmstadt artists’ colony. The house was adorned with symbols such as the eagle, and Zarathustra’s diamond, which radiated “the virtues of a world that is not yet here.” Behrens surpassed even this in the German pavilion he designed for the Turin 1902 Exposition. In a surreal cavern, light flooded the interior in which the industrial might of the Second Reich was on display. Zarathustra, cited explicitly, progresses toward the light.9

  Bruno Taut (1880–1938), an Expressionist architect, became a prominent exponent of a cult of mountains that emerged and was associated with Nietzsche. Taut’s “Alpine Architecture” attempted to envision an entire chain of mountains transformed into “landscapes of Grail-shrines and crystal-lined caves,” so that, in the end, whole continents would be covered with “glass and precious stones in the form of ‘ray-domes’ and ‘sparkling palaces.’”10

  NIETZSCHEAN KITSCH

  In a similar vein was the Zarathustrian cult of Bergeinsamkeit, “the longing to escape the crowded cities and to feel the pristine mountain air.” Giovanni Segantini, a painter and another enthusiastic Nietzschean, specialized in views of the Engadine, the mountain region that inspired Nietzsche when he was writing Thus Spoke Zarathustra. So popular did his work prove that pilgrims and tourists flocked to these mountains: “The Einsamkeitserlebnis—the experience of being alone—was transformed into a mass business!” The flourishing of a Nietzschean kitsch industry, which would have horrified Nietzsche himself, was another ironic indication of his popularity among the “philistines.” Paul Friedrich’s play The Third Reich was one of several that put Zarathustra onstage, in this case clad in a silver-and-gold costume and a purple coat, a golden ribbon in his blond hair and a leopard skin flung insouciantly over his shoulder. At times, people worried that the Nietzsche cult was outdoing Nietzsche himself. In 1893, Max Nordau wrote about the Nietzsche Jügend—the Nietzsche youth—as if they were an identifiable group.11

  As time went by it became increasingly clear that Germany, and to a lesser extent the rest of Europe, was now populated by Nietzsche generations—in the plural. Thomas Mann was one who recognized this:

  “We who were born around 1870 are too close to Nietzsche, we participate too directly in his tragedy, his personal fate (perhaps the most terrible, most awe-inspiring fate in intellectual history). Our Nietzsche is Nietzsche militant. Nietzsche triumphant belongs to those born fifteen years after us. We have from him our psychological sensitivity, our lyrical criticism, the experience of Wagner, the experience of Christianity, the experience of “modernity”—experiences from which we shall never completely break free. . . . They are too precious for that, too profound, too fruitful.”12

  Nietzsche was in particular looked upon as a new type of challenge, paradoxically akin to the forces of socialism, a modern “seducer,” whose advocacy was even more persuasive than the “odious equalizing of social democracy.” Georg Tantzscher thought Nietzscheanism fitted neatly the needs of the free-floating intelligentsia, trapped as they were “between isolation and a sense of mission, the drive to withdraw from society and the drive to lead it.” In his 1897 book on the Nietzsche cult, the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies accused Nietzscheanism of being “pseudo-liberational.” People, he said, “were captivated by the promise of the release of creative powers, the appeal to overcome narrow-minded authority and conventional opinions, and free self-expression.” But he condemned Nietzscheanism as superficial, serving elitist, conservative and “laissez-faire functions” that went quite against the social-democratic spirit of the age.

  A little later, in 1908, in The Nietzsche Cult: A Chapter in the History of Aberrations of the Human Spirit, the philosopher Wolfgang Becker also appeared puzzled that so many “cultured luminaries” were attracted to the Nietzschean message, but he agreed with Mann that it meant different things to different people
. To the young, Nietzsche’s analysis seemed “deep”; but the German colonial officials in Africa employed his Herrenmoral ideal practically every day, as they felt it was suited perfectly to “the colonial mode of rule.”13

  The sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel also took his color from Nietzsche. His central concept, Vornehmheit, the ideal of “distinction,” owed everything to Nietzsche. Simmel looked upon Vornehmheit as the defining quality by which individuals “could be separated from the crowd and endowed with ‘nobility.’” For Simmel, this was a new ideal stemming from the dilemma of how to create personal values in a money economy. Nietzsche had encouraged the pursuit of specific values—Vornehmheit, beauty, strength—each of which he said enhanced life and which, “far from encouraging egoism, demanded greater self-control.”14

  Marxists thought that Nietzscheanism nakedly served capitalism, imperialism and afterward fascism, and that Nietzscheans were no more than the ultimate in bourgeois pseudo-radicalism, never touching on the underlying exploitation, and leaving the socioeconomic class structure intact.

  People liked to observe the irony that Nietzsche was dead long before God, but Aschheim maintains that he was simply “unburiable.” “Nietzsche was not a piece of learning,” wrote Franz Servis in 1895, but a part of life, “the reddest blood of our time.” He has not died: “Oh, we shall still all have to drink of his blood! Not one of us will be spared that.”15 As this book will show, he was right.

  Even the choice of Weimar as the location of the Nietzsche archive was intended to emulate—if not surpass—the similar shrine of that other self-styled protector of German spirituality, at Bayreuth. Nietzsche’s sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and her colleagues played a deliberate role in the monumentalization and mythologizing of the philosopher. The place was no mere archive but a house of creative powers. For example, his sister sought to create an “authorized” Nietzsche, her main object being to “depathologize” her brother, and in so doing remove the subversive from his ideas, making him—as she thought—“respectable.”

  The most grandiose and monumental of plans—much more so than the archive—came from the more enlightened and cosmopolitan adherents. In 1911, for instance, Harry Graf Kessler, the Anglo-German patron of the arts and author of Berlin in Lights, envisaged building a huge festival area as a memorial, comprising a temple, a large stadium and an enormous sculpture of Apollo. In this space, intended to hold thousands, art, dance, theatre and sports competitions would be combined into a “Nietzschean totality.” Aristide Maillol agreed to build the statue, using none other than Vaslav Nijinsky as the model. André Gide, Anatole France, Walther Rathenau, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Gilbert Murray and H. G. Wells joined the fund-raising committee. The project failed only when Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche withdrew her support in 1913.16

  Until the First World War, Nietzsche exerted a wide influence on the arts. However, the Great War, as we shall see, totally changed public attitudes toward Nietzsche and the impact of his ideas.

  Probably, Nietzsche’s most explosive and enduring impact was on the intellectual, artistic and literary avant-garde—his invitation “to be something new, to signify something new, to represent new values” was emblematic of what Steven Aschheim also calls the “Nietzschean generation.” Nietzsche gave point to the avant-garde’s alienation from the high culture of the establishment.17 The two forces he favored were radical, secular self-creation and the Dionysian imperative of self-submersion. This led to several attempts to fuse the individualistic impulse within a search for new forms of “total” community, the redemptive community, a theme that recurs throughout this book.18

  While Nietzsche’s identification of the nihilist predicament was a starting point, people swiftly moved on. They sought a transformed civilization that encouraged and reflected a new übermenschlich type, creating excitement, authenticity, intensity, and in all ways superior to what had gone before. “What I was engaged in,” recalled Ernst Blass, the Expressionist poet, referring to café life in imperial Berlin, was “a war on the gigantic philistinism of those days. . . . What was in the air? Above all Van Gogh, Nietzsche, Freud too, and Wedekind. What was wanted was a post-rational Dionysos.”19

  Freud and Nietzsche had in common that both sought to remove the metaphysical explanation of experience, and both stressed “self-creation” as the central meaningful activity of life. While Freud strained for respectability, Nietzscheanism reveled in notoriety, but in most ways they were compatible, being stridently anti-scientific and anti-rationalist; and, with its Dionysian rhetoric, the artistic production of the Nietzscheans sought to unlock the wild reaches of the unconscious. Übermensch strongmen feature prominently in the novels of Gabriele d’Annunzio and Hermann Conradi, where the characters are involved in often brutal searches for innocence and authenticity, as often as not destroying in order to create.20

  ALL ARE EQUAL IN REGARD TO INSTINCT

  More than one critic has remarked on the general mood, in the wake of Nietzsche, as being in some ways not unlike that among the “counterculture” of the 1960s and ’70s (see chapter 22). Martin Green, in his book on the Nietzsche generation, concentrates on one noteworthy home, located in the small Swiss village of Ascona. There, a remarkable number of feminists, pacifists, literary figures, anarchists, modern dancers and Surrealists came together to consolidate their radical ideas and initiate certain “life-experiments.” Green says Ascona was part-Tolstoyan and part-anarchist, with a decidedly naturalist—at times occult—orientation. Among the better-known luminaries who passed through were D. H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, Carl Gustav Jung and Hermann Hesse.

  Nietzscheanism was a pervasive presence, not so much the “will-to-power” form of Nietzscheanism but the Dionysian kind, where the aim is ecstatic dynamism. “They sought to create beauty in motion and to affirm life-creating values—above all that of eros. This found its most dynamic physical expression in the idea and development of modern dance.”21

  Ascona had all the elements of the counterculture that would develop later, mainly in America. Adherents sought intensity through an erotic freedom, which included nudity, sometimes orgies, and at other times embraced a cult of masculinity. There was vegetarianism, sun worship, occultism, black magic, mysticism and Satanism and a cult of festivals. What united these groupings was a belief in the irrational and in instinct, one unifying idea being that “all men are equal in regards to instinct.” By the same token, the worship of nature that was so popular in Ascona was practiced there because nature worship was understood as meaning “the worship of the nature to be found in human beings as much as in the nature of animals, plants, the soil, the sea, the sun.” That, says Green, is the Asconan form of piety, “whether peaceful or ecstatic.”22

  However, the most important—and best-established—elements of the Asconan idea were its withdrawal from city life in an effort to establish a “new human type,” a post-Christian secular type who expressed a full humanity, and “vagabondage” and dance.

  A NEW HUMAN TYPE: THE VAGABOND AND THE DANCE

  The adoption of Ascona began around the turn of the century when Gusto Gräser, known to history primarily as a vagabond, took part in a meeting in Munich at which seven young people like him decided to withdraw from the world of cities and nations to found a community of their own. In the year of 1900 the Western world had mounted spectacular shows of the technological triumphs that had marked the success of the nineteenth century. But Gräser and the others had a distaste for the world of science, technology and modern medicine. Several of them were craftspeople, in wood, metal or leather, and they wandered through Switzerland in the last months of 1900, looking for the right place to settle and form a community of their own. They found what they were looking for in Ascona.

  Ascona was then a backward peasant village of about one thousand people, on the Swiss side of Lake Maggiore, in the canton of Ticino. This area never played much of a role in Switzerland’s he
roic history. Instead, its attractions included the climate, which allowed for both pine and palm trees, snowcaps on the nearby mountains and roses on the lakeshore, and a unique variety of other trees including oak, birch, lime and olive. And then there were the local peasants who, for the artists and intellectuals who came to Ascona, were the complete and joyful antithesis of modern mankind in the cities. The population spoke Italian, practiced Roman Catholicism, cultivated vineyards, fished and smuggled (it is near the border). The land was poor and cheap, and people were steadily migrating to the cities or to America.

  For the next twenty years, Gräser lived in this landscape. He was outdoors and moving all the time; he lived off the land; his lifestyle was his work, his creation, and he worked at it by adapting his needs and his appetites to the climate and the caves, to the fruit and the edible leaves. He was a vegetarian who revered life and refused to eat what had been killed. His principles were assertions of freedom, not renunciations, were humanist, not religious, hearty, not pious.23 Gräser was in and out of jail for his beliefs (anarchist, radical pacificist, “theoretical nudist”) but found support in Hermann Hesse, who in 1918 wrote an essay based on Jungian ideas, called “Artists and Psychoanalysis,” in which he proclaimed that artists like Gräser have special ways—socially privileged ways—to declare their faith: they are exempt from the ordinary obligations.24

  Workshops were set up, to manufacture handmade objects—from jewelry to furniture—for people who were dissatisfied with mass-produced factory goods.25 Activities at Ascona were supposed to be carried out not for economic reasons, or for any particular aim—which might spark ambition—but simply for the joy of activity, for maintaining as much as possible a festival spirit. One needed just enough, it was argued, to support one’s minimal needs, in that way avoiding being sucked into the social system that was the origin of the malaise in the first place.26 They enthusiastically embraced concepts like “full humanity,” and followed Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “The world and man are not here to be improved, but to become themselves.” For example, Eugen Diederichs, Hesse’s publisher and publisher of the cultural and political magazine Die Tat (The Deed), suggested that a “third and new stage of human development” might be at hand, which would not just bring with it greater freedom but would also bring back dignity (the quality Simmel had made so much of).27 It was observed that Gräser “may be said” to have created a new human type, which had its influence mainly on youth movements.28 For Rudolf Laban, “the whole meaning of life is to foster the growth of the human, of men (as opposed to mere robots).”29