Nietzsche's Footfalls

First Sentence

Röcken still lies in the Eastern German flatlands under a limitless cobalt grey sky and, because there are signposts pointing away but none towards it, you can easily drive past without realising it is there. The village is just off a road surfaced with cobbles that shake the car violently to a crawl. It lies beyond Lützen, site of the battleground where Napoleon defeated the allied Prussian and Russian armies on his victorious march to Moscow (a march another dictator tried later with equal success and equal failure). Nietzsche mentions that he saw cheering rebels passing the parsonage on wagons during the year of revolutions but the very rarity of this contact proves the isolation of the place. Off the road are the few houses that make up the village, children playing on bikes raising dust on the earth tracks. Like the motorway a few miles away and the great armies that on to their battle at Lützen, the world has passed the place by. It is not on the map and it is not easy to get off the motorway at the right place or to get back on to it again. Once there, the steeple directs you to the church and you leave the car in the shadow of a wall.

Description

During the final decade of Nietzsche's life, when he was mad, his sister created an archive in his name. She placed him upstairs as a living exhibit while she beavered away in the rooms beneath rewriting his work and establishing him as a great name in the new world of Nazi Germany. Her efforts gave him a 'posthumous existence' totally at odds with his own expressed desires. This image is at the core of the book which deals with various posthumous lives, the way in which intentions change unexpectedly (in strange post-modernist ways) in a complex interwoven set of relationships some obvious, some less so. One of the most important of these was with his sister, Elizabeth who married an anti-semitic agitator called Förster and went out to Paraguay to found an Aryan colony and later, after he had committed suicide and her brother had gone mad, she returned to Germany and assiduously turned him into an icon for Nazi thinking. The other was with Richard Wagner who he began by loving and later rejected. Other paths also cross and recross. The book also deals with Nietzsche's madness and how (madly) things change into their opposites, for example, how anti-anti-semitism can change into anti-semitism and Nazism, then into a reaction against the holocaust and then into a new kind of revisionism and denial. Even though all the information here is true, it is not supposed to read as biography or philosophy but as a continuous meditation - as a work, I hope, of imagination - one not so much about the facts themselves but rather about their implications in the lives of these people and how they pan out in quite bizarre ways.

Subjects