The Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche begins with Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the philosopher’s sister, who took control of her brother’s estate to edit and publish his work. Her husband “Bernard Förster was a ‘prominent leader of the German anti-Semitic movement’ whose racial and anti-Semitic views were received ‘second hand from Wagner.’” Elisabeth ran the Nietzsche Archive, established in 1894, and geared the institution, which depended on Nazi support, to tying her brother’s work to her own ideology. She invited “Hitler and Albert Speer to the archive to plan the building of a Friedrich Nietzsche Memorial Hall,” and the Führer, who visited the archive 7 times, even attended her funeral. She selected or suppressed passages from her brother’s writings according to whether they supported her proto-Nazi political views. For example, she “withheld his work Ecce Homo from publication for years as it had a great deal in it that would derail her attempts to frame him in her image.”
She forged letters supposedly to suggest that her brother was “communicating with her on a monthly basis,” and she collaborated with an editor who selected those of his notes that could be read according to her own anti-Semitic and nationalist views and published them in the volume The Will to Power in 1901. The materiel in that volume was indeed written by Nietzsche himself, but edited by Heinrich Köselitz (Peter Gast) with Elisabeth’s “collaboration.” The Will to Power had some influence on Nazi intellectuals as the movement gestated within the decaying Weimar Republic, and was especially important to Martin Heidegger; it was, in fact, “a book that Heidegger helped make respectable.” There is indeed some controversy about the degree and character of Förster-Nietzsche's true influence,[1] but there is no question about its direction or its success.
Durng her own lifetime, it was perhaps less by actually editing his work as by selling it that Elisabeth herself helped to push her brother’s work into the Nazis’ hands. She had a natural talent for promotion and publicity. That the archive got financial support from the Nazis shows that they saw some value, some source of legitimacy, a foundation for their own thought in Nietzsche, despite the fact that he would have despised them. The archive became a vehicle for Nazi propaganda, lending prestige to Hitler’s vision.
Nietzsche, before his mental collapse, was well aware of what Elizabeth was doing with his work. In a letter to his sister, he wrote: “It is a matter of honor to me to be absolutely clear and unequivocal regarding anti-Semitism, namely opposed, as I am in my writings… I have been persecuted [pursued; verfolgt?] in recent times with letters and Anti-Semitic Correspondence sheets; my disgust with this party … is as outspoken as possible, but the relation to Förster, as well as the after-effect of my former anti-Semitic publisher Schmeitzner, always bring the adherents of this disagreeable party back to the idea that I must after all belong to them…” The point here is that antisemitism is such an essential component of Nazism that when it’s excluded from Nietzsche’s political views (following a more complete reading of his work and development than Elisabeth would have encouraged), we find that Nietzsche’s position is simply incompatible with that ideology.
The fact is that Nietzsche would have despised and opposed the Nazis, but from a right-wing, aristocratic position, rather than a left-wing position. For Nietzsche’s political position, if we were to insist on mapping his politics onto a modern ideology (and despite his florid rhetoric and powerful emotion, is that of a deeply conservative, even reactionary thinker. The extreme right’s misuse of the philosopher, then, starts from this point, and guides subsequent misreadings. But a more accurate nterpretation of Nietzsche shows today’s conservative a way to oppose and resist the extreme right. Real conservatives have a special responsibility, to their parties and to the right in general, to refuse the racism, the violence, and the philistinism of the extremist. The fact is that the aristocratic, principled Irwin Rommel was closer to Nietzsche’s ideal of an Übermensch than the raving Hitler. That should be kept in mind as the struggle for the soul of the right comes into view as an important element of political culture.
There are several problems with interpreting the Will to Power volume, given both the historical conditions of its publication and its own particular literary characteristics as a collection of notes. Besides the issue of excluding aphorisms in which Nietzsche attacks anti-semitism, there's a question about whether the philosopher intended that those noted be published at all: “‘many’ of the ‘693 fragments’ that Nietzsche’s sister put into the posthumous Will to Power ‘had in fact been consigned to Nietzsche’s wastepaper basket in Sils, from which, for unknown reasons, Durisch retrieved them’…it appears a version of the standard narrative is correct: much of what we have in the book known as The Will to Power-including its famous concluding section about will to power (as Montinari[2] specifically documented)-represent work Nietzsche had rejected.” But even without his sister’s shady dealings, the fact is that Nietzsche’s notes are, like any such notes, are even more open to interpretation than his published writings (the word “Nachlass” means “literary remains”) and so perhaps more vulnerable to ideological appropriation.
Of course, none of this means that the volume should be ignored;[3] on the contrary, it’s essential to understanding the origins of Nietzsche’s relationship to the extreme right.[4] It all just means that the protocols for interpreting the Will to Power as published in by Nietzsche’s sister, and those for interpreting the whole Nachlass itself, and those again for interpreting the works Nietzsche himself published during his lifetime, are all different. The fact is that the Will to Power did indeed influence the extreme right is ultimately borne out, for example, by its importance for Heidegger, who gave four lectures on Nietzsche addressing the issue of nihilism (1936-40). Heidegger regarded that book as Nietzsche’s magnum opus,[1] following Elisabeth’s sales pitch, and relied upon it for his approach to Nietzsche’s metaphysics.
A serious interpretation of Will to Power, then, requires at least two things: first, a comparison with the complete Nachlass from which it’s drawn (to determine the character of the editorial exclusions from within their context), and second, a history of its use by Heidegger and other intellectuals of the extreme right. We shall see that Heidegger read Nietzsche to gain an understanding of the nihilism that threatened the West without seeing, as Camus so clearly did, that Nazism is itself a kind of nihilism…and that he, Heidegger, because he was a Nazi, was himself a nihilist.
[1]. “Although
Elisabeth Förster called The Will to Power Nietzsche's unedited magnum
opus, in light of Nietzsche's collapse, his intentions for the material he
had not by that time put to use in The Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist are simply
unknowable.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Will_to_Power_(manuscript)
[1]. “It is true that
Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, was the first editor of The
Will to Power, and that she and her proto-Nazi acquaintances offered
interpretations of them that stressed their affinities with National Socialist
views…This, however, should not disqualify the content of Nietzsche’s notes
either. Nazi intellectuals interpreted and quoted extensively from every single
book Nietzsche published, but we shouldn’t simply dismiss Nietzsche’s published
writings for that reason. Instead we read Nietzsche ourselves and make our own
judgments about how accurate or inaccurate the Nazi interpretations are.” http://www.stephenhicks.org/2015/05/22/on-the-legitimacy-of-nietzsches-the-will-to-power/
[2]. In fact, it has been argued on the basis of parallel
phrases and concepts to have been an influence on Hitler’s Mein Kampf. http://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/classes/133p/133p04papers/MKalishNietzNazi046.htm
[3]. Mazzino Montinari,
the philologist who prepared “the first complete and chronological edition of
Nietzsche's writings,” called The Will to Power a ‘historic forgery.’” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Will_to_Power_(manuscript)
[4]. See Robert C. Holub, for example, who claims that
“if we
look closely at the evidence and Forster- Nietzsche’s editorial practices, we
find that she consistently included letters and passages that demonstrated
Nietzsche’s intense opposition to the anti-Semitism of his era and to
conservative Wilhelmine politics.” https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/niet.2014.43.issue-1/nietzstu-2014-0114/nietzstu-2014-0114.xml
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