The Untouched Key Read online

  RICHARD WAGNER

  (The Father: Seduction and Disappointment)

  It would take a very careful reading of Nietzsche’s letters to relate the individual episodes in his life to his childhood. In addition, the actual facts would have to be sifted from his sister’s numerous falsifications. I can imagine that anyone who is not afraid of taking on the task of establishing the connections to his childhood would discover much that is new. One might look into the question, for instance, of whether Nietzsche’s relationship with Richard Wagner, who was thirty years his senior, was not a repetition of the repressed tragic experience with his father, who had taken ill so suddenly. This conjecture seems justified by the fact that his initial admiration and enthusiasm for Wagner, beginning about 1868 and nurtured at Wagner’s home in Bayreuth, so quickly turned into disappointment, rejection, and radical estrangement. Nietzsche’s break with Wagner culminated in 1882 when Wagner wrote Parsifal, which in Nietzsche’s eyes “betrayed” the old Germanic values for the sake of highly suspect Christian ones. Not until then did he become fully conscious of weaknesses in Richard Wagner, weaknesses he had previously overlooked in his idealization of the older man.

  I have searched in vain in the extensive secondary literature about Nietzsche for information describing how the highly intelligent four-and-a-half-year-old child reacted to his father’s fatal brain disease that lasted nearly a year. For lack of any indication in his youth, I turned to his later life and looked for clues there. I believe I found them in Nietzsche’s relationship with Richard Wagner. However great the disappointment in Wagner’s work may have been for the mature Nietzsche, it would never have provoked such an extreme degree of mockery and contempt (especially since Wagner hadn’t done anything to alienate Nietzsche personally and was even very fond of him) if Wagner’s personality and music hadn’t reminded him of his father and of the misery of his early childhood.

  From the mid-1870s, Wagner’s entire work and the Bayreuth atmosphere, in which Nietzsche had previously felt at home, struck him as a gigantic lie. The one thing he could not deny was Wagner’s dramatic gift, although he did not compliment Wagner with this admission, for he defined the psychology and morality of an actor in the following way: “One is an actor by virtue of being ahead of the rest of mankind in one insight: what is meant to have the effect of truth must not be true.… Wagner’s music is never true. But it is taken for true; and thus it is in order.” Wagner’s music, according to Nietzsche, contained the pretense of sacred, noble, great, and good feelings, the hoax of pseudo ideals that have little to do with the authentic feelings of real people, such as Nietzsche found embodied in Bizet’s Carmen (1875), with its ambivalence and its “killing for love.” He saw Carmen several times with great enthusiasm, experiencing it as a liberation from the lie that had afflicted him not only since his younger years with Wagner in Bayreuth but even since his childhood. And now his attack against the fatherly friend he once admired, Richard Wagner, turned into a total one: he no longer saw anything good in him and hated him with all his heart like a deeply wounded child. His hatred was nourished by despair and grief over having let himself be deceived for so long, for admiring someone for so long whom he now considered contemptible. Why didn’t he see through the weakness behind the facade sooner? How could he have been so mistaken?

  Nietzsche saw himself as the victim of a seduction that he must now unmask by every means at his command. He found Wagner’s admirers naive and could not grasp that they continued to go to Bayreuth, where they allowed themselves to be hypnotized by a lie, after he himself had seen through it. The pain this caused him kept showing through in the aspersions he cast on Wagner: Nietzsche would have liked to save the world from a great deception and bring the Wagnerians to their senses; he would have liked to lead them back to themselves and their own genuine experiences the way Zarathustra did by refusing to have any disciples.

  Although Nietzsche’s attacks derived their intensity from his repressed rage against his father and other attachment figures from childhood, they did not display any weakness in logic that would reveal their real roots. What he wrote about Wagner and substantiated with examples was so convincing (although probably not for Wagnerians) that it retains its claim to objectivity quite apart from the subjective, highly emotional background of his observations. I believe that Nietzsche’s keen powers of observation had their beginnings in his relationship with his father, to whose music the little boy listened with rapt attention, admiration, and enthusiasm. But his father was not only a musician who played the piano but also a pedagogue who approved of certain feelings (such as his son’s enthusiasm for his playing) but severely punished the display of others.

  Perhaps the boy succeeded in accepting his father’s two different sides and in overlooking the punishment as long as he was allowed to be with his father, to listen to his music making and let the music become part of him. But when his father fell ill and the child felt suddenly and completely abandoned by him, overwhelming feelings of disappointment, rage, and shame at being seduced and then forsaken would have had to break through—if the boy had not already learned that it was not permissible to show such feelings and if he had not been subsequently raised exclusively by women (“female Wagnerians”) who condemned his feelings and kept them in the strictest rein. These feelings had to lie in wait for decades until they could be experienced toward another musician.

  The sharpness and accuracy of Nietzsche’s later observations about Wagner not only were unimpaired by his feelings but, on the contrary, seemed to be intensified by them. If it had not been made impossible for him to speak out, Nietzsche the child might have said: “I don’t believe your music if you can also beat me and punish me for having genuine feelings. If your music is not a deception, if it really is expressing the truth, then I have every right to expect you to respect the feelings of your child. Otherwise there is something wrong, and the music I have absorbed through every pore is a lie. I want to shout it out to all the world in order to keep others—for example, my little brother and sister—from becoming the victims of your seduction. If your theology, your sermons, your words have been telling the truth, you would have to treat me very differently. You wouldn’t be able to watch my suffering uncomprehendingly, for I am ‘the neighbor’ you’re supposed to love. You wouldn’t punish me for my tears, wouldn’t make me bear my distress all alone without helping me, wouldn’t forbid me to speak, if you were an honest and trustworthy man. After all that’s been done to me, I think your ideas of goodness, neighborly love, and redemption are empty and false; everything I used to believe is nothing but theatrics; there is nothing real about it. What I experience is real, and what you have said must be able to be measured against my reality. But when the measurement is taken, your words prove to be pure playacting. You enjoy having a child who listens to you and admires you. It satisfies your needs. The others don’t notice this and think you really have something to offer them. But I noticed. I guessed your state of neediness, but I wasn’t allowed to say anything about it.”

  The boy wasn’t allowed to say this to his father. But as an adult he said it to Richard Wagner. He wrote it in no uncertain terms, and the world took what he wrote seriously. Neither Nietzsche nor “the world,” unfortunately, wondered about its source. Thus both missed the important point.

  NIETZSCHE THE WOMAN HATER

  In contrast to the general validity of Nietzsche’s censure of the Wagner phenomenon, of middle-class cultural values and Christian moral values, his ideas about “the nature of woman” often seem grotesquely distorted, but only if we are unaware of the actual women who gave rise to them. As a child, Nietzsche was surrounded by women intent on bringing him up correctly, and he had to use all his energies to endure this situation. He paid them back in later years, but only on a symbolic level, by attacking all women—except his mother and sister. The women who actually caused his suffering remained unassailable, at the cost of the loss of objectivity.

  Nietzsche
’s misogyny becomes understandable, of course, if we consider how much distrust must have accumulated in someone who was whipped so frequently as a child. But this doesn’t authorize him as an adult to write in his blind and irresponsible rage: “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!” There is no doubt that Nietzsche was brought up according to the principles of “poisonous pedagogy” described extensively in my previous books. The documents I cite in For Your Own Good illustrate how children must be tricked, deceived, and manipulated to make them pious and good.

  That is why Nietzsche was rarely able to show his discontent at his sister’s manipulative and insincere behavior toward him, why he didn’t allow himself to see her as she really was. If he ever did see the truth, he quickly retracted anything he may have said against her. Although he admitted on one occasion that he could not stand her voice, he immediately added that basically he had never really doubted her goodwill, her intentions, her love for him, or her trustworthiness. How could he, since he had only one sister and wanted to believe absolutely that she loved him and that her love was more than exploitation and a need to win recognition at any price. If he had been able to see the way the women in his childhood really were, then it would not have been necessary for him to generalize by making all women into witches and serpents and to hate them all.

  FASCISM (The Blond Beast)

  It is not my intention here to explain Nietzsche’s life in terms of his childhood but rather to understand the function of his philosophy in his struggle against the pain stemming from his childhood. His formative experience consisted in contempt for the weak and obedience toward those wielding power. This seemingly innocuous combination, familiar to so many of us from childhood, is the nucleus of every fascist ideology. As a result of having been treated brutally in childhood, fascists of whatever stamp will blindly accept their leader and treat those weaker than themselves brutally. The fact that this behavior can be accompanied by a longing for the release of creative powers that the methods of “poisonous pedagogy” suppress in every child is to be seen very plainly in Nietzsche and others and also in certain statements by C. G. Jung. The human being’s need to live and to be allowed to develop freely is coupled with the former persecutor’s introjected voice. Just as the child’s cries were once smothered by the principles of “poisonous pedagogy,” so too the call to life is smothered by the brutality of fascism. The introjected system allies itself with the child’s own wishes and leads to destructive ideologies that can have a fascination for anyone who experienced a cruel upbringing. Thus, it is not Nietzsche’s writings that are dangerous but the child-rearing system of which he and his readers were the product. The Nazis were able to transform what seemed to be his life-affirming philosophy into a death-affirming ideology because it was never in its essence separate from death.

  Friedrich Nietzsche as an Infantryman in Naumburg, 1868 Ullstein Bilderdienst

  It is not by chance that Thus Spake Zarathustra became Nietzsche’s most famous work, for his puzzled readers at least found in Zarathustra’s way of speaking a frame of reference familiar to them since childhood: the rhetorical style of the preacher. How familiar, too, although clothed in novel words, was the struggle for life in the face of the deadening requirement to be obedient. Again and again Nietzsche circles around this dichotomy.

  I pursued the living; I walked the widest and the narrowest paths that I might know its nature. With a hundredfold mirror I still caught its glance when its mouth was closed, so that its eyes might speak to me. And its eyes spoke to me. [Italics mine]

  But wherever I found the living, there I heard also the speech on obedience. Whatever lives, obeys. [Italics mine]

  And this is the second point: he who cannot obey himself is commanded. That is the nature of the living.

  This, however, is the third point that I heard: that commanding is harder than obeying; and not only because he who commands must carry the burden of all who obey, and because this burden may easily crush him. An experiment and hazard appeared to me to be in all commanding; and whenever the living commands, it hazards itself. Indeed, even when it commands itself, it must still pay for its commanding. It must become the judge, the avenger, and the victim of its own law. How does this happen? I asked myself. What persuades the living to obey and command, and to practice obedience even when it commands? …

  And life itself confided this secret to me: “Behold,” it said, “I am that which must always overcome itself. Indeed, you call it a will to procreate or a drive to an end, to something higher, farther, more manifold: but all this is one, and one secret.

  “Rather would I perish than forswear this; and verily, where there is perishing and a falling of leaves, behold, there life sacrifices itself—for power. That I must be struggle and a becoming and an end and an opposition to ends —alas, whoever guesses what is my will should also guess on what crooked paths it must proceed.

  “Whatever I create and however much I love it—soon I must oppose it and my love; thus my will wills it. And you too, lover of knowledge, are only a path and footprint of my will; verily, my will to power walks also on the heels of your will to truth.

  “Indeed, the truth was not hit by him who shot at it with the word of the ‘will to existence’: that will does not exist. For, what does not exist cannot will; but what is in existence, how could that still want existence? Only where there is life is there also will: not will to life but—thus I teach you—will to power.

  “There is much that life esteems more highly than life itself; but out of the esteeming itself speaks the will to power.”

  Thus life once taught me; and with this I shall yet solve the riddle of your heart, you who are wisest.

  Verily, I say unto you: good and evil that are not transitory, do not exist. Driven on by themselves, they must overcome themselves again and again. With your values and words of good and evil you do violence when you value; and this is your hidden love and the splendor and trembling and overflowing of your soul. But a more violent force and a new overcoming grow out of your values and break egg and eggshell.

  And whoever must be a creator in good and evil, verily, he must first be an annihilator and break values. Thus the highest evil belongs to the highest goodness: but this is creative.

  Let us speak of this, you who are wisest, even if it be bad. Silence is worse; all truths that are kept silent become poisonous. [Italics mine]

  And may everything be broken that cannot brook our truths! There are yet many houses to be built!

  Thus spoke Zarathustra.

  How wicked and hard a child must feel who remains true to himself and does not betray what he perceives and sees. How difficult and at the same time how essential it is to be able to say no.

  With the storm that is called “spirit” I blew over your wavy sea; I blew all clouds away; I even strangled the strangler that is called “sin.”

  O my soul, I gave you the right to say No like the storm, and to say Yes as the clear sky says Yes: now you are still as light whether you stand or walk through storms of negation. [Italics mine]

  O my soul, I gave you back the freedom over the created and uncreated; and who knows, as you know, the voluptuous delight of what is yet to come?

  O my soul, I taught you the contempt that does not come like the worm’s gnawing, the great, the loving contempt that loves most where it despises most. [Italics mine]

  O my soul, I taught you to persuade so well that you persuade the very ground—like the sun who persuades even the sea to his own height.

  O my soul, I took from you all obeying, knee-bending, and “Lord”-saying; I myself gave you the name “cessation of need” and “destiny.”

  But the life the child seeks is fraught with danger, the loveliest fantasies dimmed by early experiences and threats.

  My heels twitched, then my toes hearkened to understand you, and rose: for the dancer has his ear in his toes.

  I leaped toward you, but you fled back from my leap, and the tongue of you
r fleeing, flying hair licked me in its sweep.

  Away from you I leaped, and from your serpents’ ire; and already you stood there, half turned, your eyes full of desire.

  With crooked glances you teach me—crooked ways; on crooked ways my foot learns treachery. [Italics mine]

  I fear you near, I love you far; your flight lures me, your seeking cures me: I suffer, but what would I not gladly suffer for you?

  You, whose coldness fires, whose hatred seduces, whose flight binds, whose scorn inspires:

  Who would not hate you, you great binder, entwiner, temptress, seeker, and finder? Who would not love you, you innocent, impatient, wind-swift, child-eyed sinner? [Italics mine]

  Whereto are you luring me now, you never-tame extreme? And now you are fleeing from me again, you sweet wildcat and ingrate!

  I dance after you, I follow wherever your traces linger. Where are you? Give me your hand! Or only one finger!

  Here are caves and thickets; we shall get lost. Stop! Stand still! Don’t you see owls and bats whirring past?