Nietzsche and the Nazis.

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Nietzsche and the Nazis

The word “Nazi” has been recalled with feelings of regret, fear, horror and the threat of violent crimes throughout human history.  However, nothing can conceal or change the reality of the period of Nazi Weltanschauung and its consequences for humanity and culture.  It was a deep refreshment of German souls as the Aryan race and a collective movement of intellectuals, writers and social leaders in support of Christian and Protestant society against Jews.  Nevertheless, the appealing eccentricity of the growing ideology among anti-Semite writers and thinkers very much attracted the attention of the Nazis.  They examined the complex philosophical works of Nietzsche, Hegel, Fichte, Treitschke, and Huston Stewart Chamberlain, and ultimately concluded with the hard philosophy of Nazism, including racist, nationalistic, and anti-Semitic attitudes (Aschheim, 1992, p. 123).

It was not very difficult for Nazis to find a way to utilize many intellectuals’ ideal systems, philosophies and literature as they proceeded in the way that led to the holocaust and racial genocide.  For instance, Wagner hated Jews, thus, his operas contained myths, fighting, pagan gods, heroes and demons.  As an artist, Wagner had bred the growing hunger of anti-Semitism with his art to a great extent.  Besides Wagner, Huston Stewart Chamberlain, the British author who was the composer Richard Wagner’s son-in-law, deeply influenced Hitler with his fundamentally racist text “Foundations of the 19th Century,” and understanding this helps to explain why the Holocaust took place (Harms, 2001).  Nonetheless, Hegel believed that the state was everything and war was a great purifier.  Thus, the idea of restoring the ethical health of people was borrowed from Hegel’s philosophy by the Nazis.  On the other hand, politicians like Georg von Schönerer, a German nationalist and a strong anti-Semite, and Karl Lueger, the mayor of Vienna, supported Nazi Weltanschauung from the heart by their political policies and notions.  However, unlike the other cultural icons Nazis utilized, the relationship between Nietzsche and the Nazis developed in an odd, but widely effective manner.  

Nietzsche’s influence as a philosopher and a writer was apparently limited to his closest friends and some intellectuals in Austria, France and Denmark (Canada, 1997).  His books were not widely read or considered by publishers.  However, after becoming insane by the end of the 1890s, his fame immediately spread around Europe and he became a figure of considerable importance in German history.  Macintyre states in his book “The Forgotten Fatherland” (as cited in Canada, 1997) that Nietzsche’s name started to appear in popular German journals and newspapers as well as numerous books, which collectively promoted him as the “philosopher of the time, whose influence is stirring the entire cultural world.”  This shift in the attitude toward Nietzsche and his work was a bit because of the ideological movement from rationalism and empiricism to romanticism during the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, according to Hinton’s “Nietzsche in German Politics and Society” (as cited in Canada, 1997).  Consequently, suffering the subjugation of Napoleon as well as witnessing the growing strength of the West, the German population, experiencing a sense of inferiority, attempted to assure itself of its innate superiority by glorifying its history and culture with no doubts, according to the point of view Kohn (as cited in Canada, 1997).  At this point, Nietzsche’s mental “death” made him a prime target for this German myth-making project.

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Nietzsche and his philosophy’s affiliation with the Nazi movement occurred as a product of the need for raw material to build a new valid consciousness for humanity under the unity of a superior nation.  Hitler and other Nazi leaders made use of Nietzschean philosophy wherever possible.  In other words, Nietzsche’s philosophy was a “blueprint” for the Nazis’ war, and they took Nietzsche’s logic to drive the atheistic world view to its legitimate conclusion (Krueger, 2001). Nietzschean phrases and themes, such as “lords of the earth, the will to power, herd instinct,” were most often used in public speeches, and written ...

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