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The Shadow of Heidegger

Once, always obese, always sweating like something fetid, Kruger told me: “We must push on with Nietzsche. Luckily, the indications are clear. We should start with master morality from Beyond Good and Evil and conclude with The Antichrist”. I’ll be brief: what came of this? What your father, Martin, also, mainly, taught. Master morality is that of the aristocrats. In ancient Greece, they, who foretokened us, defined themselves as the true, saying: “We truthful ones”. Also, albeit with more pleasure and respect, I can recite Nietzsche from memory. (On the margin: you’ll have noticed, I take it as a given, the incredible crudeness, the infinite clumsiness of Rosenberg’s prose. Was that the prose of National Socialism?) I cite the great madman of Turin: “The noble type of man regards himself as a determiner of values; he does not require to be approved of; he passes the judgment: ‘What is injurious to me is injurious in itself’; he knows that it is he himself only who confers honor on things; he is a creator of values”.

Let us ask: why did Rosenberg’s office indicate we should jump from here to the first pages of The Antichrist? I forgot something, son: Kruger had been explicit: “From The Antichrist only the first pages. Most of all, Müller, they suggested the second paragraph. You’ll know what to do”. I knew. The second paragraph of that late text of Nietzsche, written already between the definitive shadows of madness, says: “What is good? — Whatever augments the feeling of power, the will to power, power itself, in man. What is bad? — Whatever springs from weakness.” And then this: “The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.” I will not make, for the moment, any comment. It’s enough that you know what you already know: that, that which Rosenberg’s office dictated, your father taught, for years, in Freiburg.

I’m using the 1907, Helen Zimmern translation of Beyond Good and Evil (the quote is from P. 260), and H.L. Mencken’s translation of The Anti-Christ, 1917.

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  ¶ 4:28 AM