The Untouched Key Read online

  Whatever a biographer may mean by “venting” here, the feelings that had to be eliminated in the privy are unmistakably present in the philosopher’s later writings. We mustn’t forget that a grandmother and two young aunts also lived with the family. In addition to their charitable activities and their help with the household, they were mainly concerned with the upbringing of the firstborn child. When Friedrich was scarcely four, his father died after eleven months of suffering from a serious illness, probably the result of a brain tumor, which his son later referred to as “softening of the brain.” The family perpetuated the story that the father’s illness was caused by an accident, a version of events that somewhat lessened the shame that a brain disease may have caused them. The actual medical diagnosis is not completely clear to this day.

  It is difficult for us as adults to imagine how a child of four feels when his beloved father, his closest attachment figure (which his mother at that time was not), suddenly becomes ill with a brain disease. At the very least Nietzsche must have been highly perplexed. His father’s previously more or less predictable reactions were so no longer; the great, admired, and clever man had suddenly become “stupid.” His family was perhaps embarrassed at the answers he gave to questions. Possibly the boy too was scornful, but he had to suppress his scorn because he loved his father. We can assume that this same father, who disappeared so soon as his son’s companion, was proud of the child’s intelligence. But as the father’s illness progressed, the boy could no longer tell him things or ask him questions, no longer use him as a point of orientation or count on his response. Yet despite his condition, the father was still present.

  Soon after the death of his father, Nietzsche’s little brother died too, and now Friedrich was left as the only male in a household of women—his grandmother, two aunts, mother, and younger sister. This might have turned out well for him if one of these women had treated him with tenderness, warmth, and genuine concern. But they all tried to outdo one another in teaching him self-control and other Christian virtues. The originality of his imagination and the honesty of his questions were too much for their sense of morality, and so they attempted to silence the child’s curiosity, which made them uncomfortable, by strict supervision and a stern upbringing.

  What else can a child, so completely at the mercy of a regimen like this, do except adapt and suppress his genuine feelings with all his might? That is what Friedrich did, and he soon became a model child and a model pupil. One biographer describes a scene that clearly illustrates how extreme the boy’s self-denial was. Caught in heavy rain on his way home from school, Nietzsche did not quicken his pace but continued to walk slowly with head erect. His explanation was that “upon leaving school one must go home in a calm and mannerly way. That’s what the regulations require.” We can imagine the training that must have preceded such behavior.

  The boy observed the people around him and could not help but be critical; however, he was forced to keep such thoughts to himself and do all he could to suppress them, along with any other impious thoughts. In addition, he constantly heard the Christian virtues of neighborly love and compassion being preached all around him. Yet in his own daily experience no one took pity on him when he was beaten; no one saw that he was suffering. No one came to his aid, even though so many people around him were busy practicing the Christian virtues. What good are these virtues, the little boy must have kept asking himself. Am I not also the “neighbor” who deserves to be loved? But even questions such as these could have provoked more beatings. What choice did he have, then, but to keep his questions to himself and to feel even more alone with them than before because he could not share them with anyone?

  But the questions did not go away. Later, much later, after Nietzsche finished his schooling and had nothing to fear from the authorities—in this case his professors—because he had become a professor himself, the questions and repressed feelings broke out of the prison where they had been locked up for twenty years. In the meantime, by finding an ersatz object they gained social legitimacy. Nietzsche did not direct his criticism at the real causes of his rage—his aunts, his grandmother, his mother—but at the values of his chosen field, philology. Still, this took courage, for they were values that had until then been held sacred by all philologists.

  But Nietzsche also attacked values that once were dear to him although not respected by those around him—for example, the “truth,” symbolized in the person of Socrates. In the same way that a person going through puberty must first reject everything he once loved in order to establish new values for himself, Nietzsche—who never revolted during puberty, who at the age of twelve made agreeable entries in his diary—now at twenty-five set out to attack the culture he had grown up with, to mock it, to make it seem absurd by standing it on its head. He did this not with the methods of a growing adolescent but with the highly developed intellect of a philologist and professor of philosophy.

  It is all too understandable that his language became forceful and impressive. It was not empty talk that seized upon trite revolutionary slogans but a combination of original thoughts and intense feelings, rarely found in a philologist, that had a direct impact on the reader.

  We are accustomed to thinking of Nietzsche as a representative of late Romanticism and to seeing the influence of Schopenhauer on his work. Which people influence us as adults is no accident, and Nietzsche’s description of the euphoria he felt when he opened Schopenhauer’s major opus, The World as Will and Idea (1819), and began reading indicates that he had good reason for discovering in Schopenhauer a world intimately related to his own. If he had been allowed to speak freely in his family as an adolescent, it is possible that he would not have needed Schopenhauer or, above all, the Germanic heroes, Richard Wagner, and the concept of the “blond beast.” He would have found his own discriminating words with which to say: “I can’t bear the chains that shackle me day after day; my creative powers are in danger of being destroyed. I need all my energies to rescue them and to assert myself in your midst. There is nothing I can confront you with that you would understand. I can’t live in this narrow, untruthful world. And yet I can’t leave you. I can’t get along without you because I’m still a child and am dependent on you. That’s why you have so much power although you are essentially weak. It takes heroic courage, superhuman qualities, and superhuman strength to crush this world that is interfering with my life. I don’t have that much strength; I am too weak and afraid of hurting you, but I despise the weakness in me and the weakness in you, which forces me to pity you. I despise every form of weakness that interferes with my life. You have surrounded me with restrictions; prisoner that I am of school and home, there is no free space for me except perhaps in music, but that is not enough for me. I must be able to use words. I must be able to shout them out. Your morality and your reason are a prison for me in which I am smothering to death, and this at the beginning of my life when I would have so much to say.”

  Words such as those got stuck in Nietzsche’s throat and brain, and it is no wonder that he suffered continually from severe headaches, sore throats, and rheumatic ailments as a child and especially during his school days. What he was not allowed to say out loud remained active in his body in the form of constant tension. Later he could direct his criticism against abstract concepts such as culture, Christianity, philistinism, and middle-class values without having to worry that someone might die as a result (all well-brought-up children are afraid that their angry words might kill those they love). Compared with this danger, criticism of society in the abstract is harmless for an adult, even if society’s representatives are outraged by it. An adult is not facing them like a helpless, guilty child; an adult can use intellectual arguments to defend himself and even to make attacks—methods not usually available to a child and not available to Nietzsche as a child.

  And yet Nietzsche’s accurate observations concerning Western culture and Christian morality as well as the vehement indignation they aroused in
him do not date from the period of his philosophical analysis but from his first years of life. It was then that he perceived the system and suffered under it, simultaneously as slave and devotee; it was then that he was chained to a morality he despised and was tormented by the people whose love he needed. Because of his brilliant intellect, the perceptions he stored up at an early age have helped many people see things they have never seen before. The experiences of one individual, despite their subjectivity, can have universal validity because the family and the child-rearing methods minutely observed at an early age represent society as a whole.

  PUZZLEMENT

  Along with its positive side, however, Nietzsche’s manner of “mastering” his fate as a child had a devastating and disastrous effect because he used what had caused him the most trouble—his puzzlement—as a weapon against the world. In the same way that he became thoroughly puzzled—first by his father’s terrible illness and later by the unbearable contradiction between the morality preached to him and the actual behavior of the attachment figures in his family and in school—he sometimes puzzles the reader, probably without knowing it. I had this feeling of puzzlement when I recently began reading Nietzsche again after three decades. Thirty years ago I would surely have disregarded my puzzlement because my only concern then was to understand his meaning. But now I let myself be guided by the feeling. As a result, I realized that other readers must have felt the same way, even if they did not use the word puzzlement and attributed their feelings to their own lack of education, intelligence, or depth. Blaming ourselves is exactly the reaction we learn as children. If the grown-ups (who are supposed to be more clever than we are) self-assuredly assert things that are inconsistent, contradictory, or absurd, how can children raised in an authoritarian way be expected to know that what they are hearing is not the ultimate wisdom? They will make every effort to accept it as such and will carefully conceal their doubts from themselves. This is the way many people read the writings of the great Nietzsche today. They blame themselves for their puzzlement and show Nietzsche the same reverence he must have shown his ill father as a child.

  Although admitting my perplexity helped me recognize these connections, I do not consider my feeling to be simply a personal matter. I found a passage by Richard Blunck—who devoted himself to Nietzsche’s life and work for forty years—that indirectly confirms my own impression. Since a large portion of the material Blunck had collected was destroyed in the war, he himself never published the major Nietzsche biography he had planned but left further work on it to Curt-Paul Janz. I found these words by Blunck in the introduction to Janz’s first volume:

  Friedrich Nietzsche and His Mother Ullstein Bilderdienst

  Those who come across a book of Nietzsche’s for the first time, the way we did forty years ago, immediately sense that more is required to understand it than the intellect, that more is involved here than following someone’s thinking from premise to conclusion and from concept to concept in order to arrive at “truth.” They will feel that they have wandered instead into an immense field of force that is emitting shock waves of a far deeper nature than can be registered by intellect alone. They will be struck less by the opinions and insights expressed than by the person behind these opinions and insights. Readers will often react defensively to them if they have something to defend, but they will never again be entirely able to escape the man who expressed them. If readers pursue these ideas that confront, sometimes even assault, them in the form of commanding sentences, then they will soon have the feeling that they are in a labyrinth in whose intricate passageways they find not only immeasurable riches but also the threatening visage of a minotaur who demands human sacrifice. They will believe they are encountering the truest of truths, which go to the heart of things, only to have these truths cancel themselves out in the next book and to feel themselves thrust into a new passageway of the labyrinth. Still, if they have an alert mind and not merely a groping intellect, they will never lose the certainty that Nietzsche has brought them closer to life and its secrets than has any other thinker. Despite the contradictory character of his views and positions, a more profound and elevated intellectual force is communicated that is not confined to positions and truths but constantly both ignores and transcends them in the service of an authenticity that knows no law other than itself and the eternal flux of life with all its tranformations and creativity.

  Such authenticity, however, does not consist in collecting knowledge and ordering things in a rational manner, little as it can do without these processes, but is a feature of the ethical personality, of the heart’s courage, and the dauntless and indefatigable nature of the mind. It must be lived and suffered if it is to attain that intellectual force which Nietzsche’s work demonstrates. And it is because his authenticity—in combination with a great receptivity to all aspects of the European intellectual tradition as well as a critical grasp of this tradition, in combination also with a profound understanding of human nature and a prophetic farsightedness and clarity of vision—is apparent to an extent unequalled in the history of Western thought that Nietzsche’s life and work affect us so powerfully. Spurred on by this authenticity, he waged a single-minded, unwearying struggle against an age that was sinking deeper and deeper into hopeless dishonesty, a struggle against his own happiness, against fame, and even against his tender heart. This was an undertaking whose purity and necessity cannot be obscured or cancelled out, no matter how ambiguous or even dreadful its effects.

  Because of his own upbringing, the author of these lines, who actually was very close to the truth, got caught in the labyrinth he refers to and was unable to track down its biographical origins; and if he had dared to do so, his life and work in the Third Reich would surely have been jeopardized. For Nietzsche was very much in vogue when Blunck was doing his work in pre-World War II Germany. His glorification of the “barbaric hero” was taken literally and was lived out with all its horrible consequences. But the very way the National Socialists adapted Nietzsche’s ideas and formulations for their own purposes shows how dangerous it can be to view the last links in a biographical chain in isolation while remaining uninterested in and blind to the earliest links in the chain.

  Today Nietzsche’s biographers emphasize again and again a closer connection between his life and thought than biographers of other philosophers do. Yet Nietzsche’s biographers rarely refer to his childhood, despite the fact that without understanding this crucial period a life remains an enigma. The two-thousand-page biography by Janz, which appeared in 1978, devotes less than ten pages to Nietzsche’s childhood (not counting a genealogical history). Since the importance of childhood for later life is still a very controversial subject, biographers have done little investigation in this area. Nietzsche scholars search in his work for connections to the history of philosophy rather than to his life. His life, his illness, and his tragic ending, to say nothing of his work, have never been examined in the light of his childhood.

  And yet today it seems to me a simple matter to recognize that what Nietzsche wrote was his hopeless attempt, which he didn’t abandon until his breakdown, to free himself from his prison by expressing his unconscious but present hatred for those who raised and mistreated him. His hatred, and his fear of it, became all the more vehement the less he succeeded in becoming independent of its objects, his mother and sister. It is a known fact that his sister altered many of his letters for publication, that she intrigued untiringly to the detriment of his true interests and did not rest until his relationship with Lou Andreas Salomé was destroyed. Both mother and sister needed Friedrich’s dependence on them until the very end. Since the perfectly raised child had learned at an early age not to defend himself but to struggle instead against his true feelings, the grown man was unable to find his way to real liberation. His writing kept alive the illusion of liberation because on a symbolic level he actually did take steps in the direction of truth and freedom. He took them in his life as well but only insofar as they did
not involve the members of his family. After he became ill, for instance, he had the courage to give up his professorship in Basel to have more freedom to criticize the academic system. He was then free to write what he needed to say instead of having to conform to the demands of the university. But this was still an ersatz solution as long as he was unable to recognize his idealization of his parents, who were responsible for his suffering. For his true feelings (of anger, fear, contempt, helplessness, the wish to be free, destructive rage, and desperate dependence on his persecutors), originating in childhood, gave him no peace and kept demanding new ersatz objects.

  HIS MOTHER

  In several letters to Nietzsche’s friends after the philosopher had completely lost his mental faculties, his mother describes the condition of the patient for whom she has sacrificed herself and whom she takes care of like a little child. In one letter she writes that her son uttered terrible screams although he had a cheerful expression on his face. We can’t be sure how reliable this information is because mothers frequently interpret a look on a child’s face in keeping with their own wishes. But if his mother’s observation was correct, then the explanation may be that, in her presence, the very little child was allowed to scream loudly for the first time in his life and that he was enjoying the tolerance he had finally won from her. For we can scarcely conceive of someone screaming without a face racked with pain.

  There are women who can be kinder to their children if the children are no longer capable of thinking (that is, of being critical), as the result of mental illness or a brain disease, for example. Although not yet dead, the children are helpless and totally dependent on the mother. If such a woman was brought up to fulfill her duty above all else, she will feel good and noble if she sacrifices herself for her child. If she had to suppress her own criticism as a child, it will make her angry the moment her son or daughter expresses criticism of her. She feels less threatened, on the other hand, by a handicapped child. In addition, her self-sacrifice is respected and admired by society. Thus, it is very likely that Nietzsche’s mother—who was only eighteen when he was born and is described as cold, stupid, and disinterested even by sympathetic biographers—actually did sacrifice herself to look after her son in his last years when he no longer recognized his friends and could barely speak.