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Author : Jos Hermans
Nietzsche contra Wagner (1888)
Anyone wishing to know the real Nietzsche must forget much of what the narrator in Ecce Homo says about himself. He must also learn to decode what he writes about others and especially about Wagner. For in these utterances the author mirrors himself. They are facets of an unmistakable self-portrait.
"Nietzsche contra Wagner" of December 1888, is not an official writing but a work from the estate, a compilation from his earlier work. After submitting it to his publisher, he is overcome with doubt, and on 2.1.1889, the day before his mental breakdown, he decides not to have it published. It is difficult not to see a capitulation in this.
Not exactly an example of honesty is the prehistory of Nietzsche contra Wagner: it is the attempt to win the Bernese writer Carl Spitteler or the Danzig music writer and pianist Dr. Carl Fuchs as a straw man for the publication of the pamphlet. Nietzsche had placed great, all too great expectations in his pamphlet Der Fall Wagner. Whereas Nietzsche's other recent publications had found only sparse sales, it is true that the edition of one thousand copies of Der Fall was quickly sold out.
Carl Spitteler, determined opponent of the Bayreuth master and author of an enthusiastic homage for the pamphlet Der Fall Wagner, later recalled -in the meantime, however, apparently better informed- : Nietzsche "had obviously begun his war against Wagner with great hopes of victory (...) This failed. His pamphlet Der Fall Wagner met with wise faces everywhere, I was, as far as I know, the only one who joyfully agreed unreservedly."
And Spitteler adds : "The shot had missed and Nietzsche had nothing from it but the recoil. That put him into blazing rage. (...) But Nietzsche had an immoderate, even downright mad hatred against Wagner. He confessed to me, for example, that he had praised the opera Carmen so unrestrainedly only out of malice, because he hoped to annoy Wagner green and yellow with it.(...) This hatred did not allow him to get over the unsuccessfulness of his writing Der Fall Wagner. He therefore planned a second, even sharper campaign, a ruthless war against Wagner, including the entire new music. How many parts of holy factual truthfulness, how many parts of personal vindictiveness and reviled vanity this warlike grimness contained, who would be able to separate it. In short, a war of annihilation was to take place (...) and since he had not reached his goal alone, he looked around for an ally (...) The idea came to him not to wage the second war like the first, honestly and openly with raised banner, but rather from ambush, to send the ally into the encounter and to deliver the weapons to him secretly. (Carl Spitteler, “Meine Beziehungen zu Nietzsche”)
Nietzsche sends two corresponding letters. One is addressed to Dr. Carl Fuchs: "Wouldn't you have a little bellicose mood? It would be extremely desirable to me, if an intellectual musician would now publicly take sides with me as an anti-Wagnerian and throw down the gauntlet to the Bayreuthers. A small brochure in which something new and decisive would be said about me, with a useful application in the individual case of music, what do you think about that? Nothing lengthy, something punchy, ready to strike. (Letter of 11.12.1888)
Without waiting for an answer, Nietzsche addresses Carl Spitteler with the same request at the same time: "Today, I want to make you a proposal to which I implore you not to say 'no'. My fight against Wagner has so far been misguided in an absurd way by the fact that nobody knows my writings (...) In fact, I have been waging war for 10 years - Wagner himself knew it best. (...) Under these circumstances, in order to bring this question to the height and up to the war, I now want to publish a book of the same design and the same extent as Der Fall Wagner, which consists only of 8 larger, very selected pieces of my writings, under the title "Nietzsche contra Wagner. Aktenstükke aus Nietzsches Schriften". Dear Sir, you are to edit this and write a longer preface, a real declaration of war, to go with it. [Letter of 11.12.1888]
Spitteler feels the request to lend his name to such an action and to write a declaration of war against Wagner as an imposition: "Of course, I could not agree to that." Cautiously, he declines. In the meantime, Nietzsche has already reconsidered himself. A postcard crosses with Spitteler's rejection letter, on which Nietzsche retracts his proposal: "Behind such a publication, as I proposed, one would assume me as the author under all circumstances." [12.12.1888]. The fact that he does not withdraw out of "noble concerns" but "solely out of fear of discovery - according to Spitteler - shocks him even more.
So Nietzsche now offers the manuscript to his publisher Naumann: "After I have written a little farce in Der Fall Wagner, here is where the seriousness comes into play." [15.12.1888]. But now, he himself has doubts again, and one week later, Nietzsche let his assistant Köselitz know: "We do not want to print Nietzsche contra Wagner. The "Ecce" contains everything decisive also about this relationship" [22.12.1888]. In the meantime, however, the manuscript is already set, and Nietzsche therefore decides to publish it again, especially since - as he writes to his publisher Naumann - "it is written to me from all sides that my Fall Wagner has actually created a real attention for me;" [27.12.1888].
On January 2, 1889 - the day before his mental breakdown in Turin - he informs his publisher: "Events have completely overtaken the little paper Nietzsche contra Wagner." This statement is his last word on it.
An unsuspected Parsifal
On January 3, 1889, Nietzsche is taking his usual walk in the streets of Turin. Near Piazza Carlo Alberto, he bumps into a coachman who brutally whips his old horse. Overcome with compassion, Nietzsche falls around the horse's neck and collapses, weeping. The philosopher with the hammer abandons the fight. After his dramatic collapse, he is carted off to an insane asylum in Jena, close to the maternal home. He steps into the clinic with the allure of a nobleman, thanks the bystanders for the splendid reception and says that his wife, Cosima Wagner, brought him here. Usually he is quiet and sits sulking behind his giant gag, sometimes followed by lamentations and violent tantrums. With the shabby headgear of the institute on his head, he calls himself Emperor and the Duke of Cumberland. Breaking windows and complaining of headaches, he calls the supervisor Bismarck. In calmer moments, he plays a piece of piano or crawls sobbing in a corner. "I am dead because I am stupid, I am stupid because I am dead" he constantly repeats. His endless babbling sometimes lasts an entire night. After 14 months, he is officially declared incurable and spends the last 10 years of his life in total mental obscurity under the care of his mother and his sister Elisabeth.
The skeptic Montinari
In 1958 Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari decide to launch a new translation of Nietzsche's works and estate. Montinari delves into the archives in Weimar and soon finds that the editions published up to that point have been manipulated and that a new critical edition is imminent. Colli sees the project primarily as an homage to Nietzsche. Montinari puts science above cult, claims to be keen on truth and is more critical from the outset. In his private notes of August 1963 we read: "N is for me a symbol of spiritual disorder (...) N is neither a poetic genius nor a philosopher nor a moralist nor a psychologist. N is a disease. (...) N is a problem not yet solved (...) A new interpretation is needed; biographical micrology with the tacit or explicit aim of freeing us from N is of use only insofar as it frees us from the N of the apologists, the fashionable philosophers, etc. But as a symptom, even as a disease, N has not yet been described (...)".
Disagreements soon arise between the two. From letters and notes, one can follow how Montinari's image of Nietzsche changes. Colli reproaches him for an excess of scholarship. Montinari, however, is not deterred. The results of his research on Nietzsche's adaptations from the works of others arouse his distrust against the cultic bibliography. It - so he thinks in 1966- did not want to make use of these valuable sources, in order not to diminish Nietzsche. On the other hand, he does not want to leave the field to Wagner's followers. Probably Colli would have been shocked if he had read what his disillusioned friend secretly noted, for example, on May 29, 1967: "N's life is not heroic (...) A squeamish aesthete (...) The word 'life' in N's mouth is ridiculous." (Montinari, "Nietzsche Lesen")
Montinari puts science above cult, even at the price of a certain distancing from his teacher, to whom he remains deeply attached as a friend despite all factual divergences. But he still avoids expressing such thoughts publicly. Secretly, in contrast to Colli, Montinari defends a book by the Nietzsche critic Podach in 1979 as "a courageous act against those who uncritically adhere to an N-cult". At the same time, he finds even more approving words for the very critical but always objective Josef Hofmiller, whom he calls "one of the best Nietzsche experts and critics" ever.
Under the influence of Montinari, Colli's Nietzsche image is gradually adjusted. When he states in 1964 that after 1876, Nietzsche aimed at the "moral destruction of Wagner", the context indicates that this is meant rather benevolently, as if Wagner deserved what he got. Ten years later, he is ready to write about Nietzsche: "His weaknesses must be exposed with cruelty, without leniency, for that is how he has dealt with others"(Colli, “Nach Nietzsche” ). That’s how he dealt with Wagner. Montinari keeps his criticisms to himself. After Colli's death in 1979, he reveals a little more of it: "It is illicit, almost indecent, to be a Nietzschean".
But also Montinari turns the facts upside down when he asserts: "Any psychologizing, psychiatrizing, back-and-forth doctoring interpretation of Nietsche's break with Wagner misses the point, since it always relies only on biographical, i.e., highly uncertain, arguments." How indispensable psychology is, especially in the case of Nietzsche, is already shown by the fact that many of Nietzsche's accusations against Wagner can be explained as projections and also some other of his behavioral anomalies prove to be typical neurotic mechanisms. When Montinari alludes to the Dr.Eiser episode with the "doctoring interpretation", he fails to realize what Wagner's suspicion of onanism and the destruction of the relationship of trust between Nietzsche and his physician had to cause. Whoever deals with this problem, therefore, certainly does not miss the core of the matter - on the contrary, he hits a nerve. And as the discoverer of the letter in which Nietzsche mentions Wagner's reversion to Christianity as the reason for the " deadly insult," Montinari, in his eureka euphoria, overlooked the inconsistencies of this reasoning.
In all outbursts of vindictive polemics, very personal biographical factors were at play. Only a genius of mystification and rationalization like Nietzsche could manage to have his break with Wagner crowned with the glamor and glory of a supposedly heroic philosophical deed. To negate Nietzsche's actual, personal motives belongs to the etiquette of a venerable species of Nietzsche scholars who consider it degrading to descend from philosophical clouds into the parterre of the human or even - horribile dictu - the all-too-human.
Albert Camus lamented that one will never be able to right the wrong done to Nietzsche. One will be even less able to right the wrong that Nietzsche did to Wagner.