APPENDIX
Variants from Nietzsche’s Drafts
1
Part of a discarded draft for section 3 of “Why I Am So Clever” (Podach, Friedrich Nietzsches Werke.):
Emerson with his essays has been a good friend and cheered me up even in black periods: he contains so much skepsis, so many “possibilities” that even virtue achieves esprit in his writings. A unique case! Even as a boy I enjoyed listening to him. Tristram Shandy also belongs to my earliest favorites; how I experienced Sterne may be seen from a very pensive passage in Human, All-Too-Human [Part II, section 113]. Perhaps it was for related reasons that I preferred Lichtenberg1 among German books, while the “idealist” Schiller was more than I could swallow even when I was thirteen.—I don’t want to forget Abbé Galiani,2 this most profound buffoon that ever lived.
Of all books, one of my strongest impressions is that exuberant Proven?al, Petronius, who composed the last Satura Menippea.3 Such sovereign freedom from “morality,” from “seriousness,” from his own sublime taste; such subtlety in his mixture of vulgar and “educated” Latin; such indomitable good spirits that leap with grace and malice over all anomalies of the ancient “soul” —I could not name any book that makes an equally liberating impression on me: the effect is Dionysian. In cases in which I find it necessary to recuperate quickly from a base impression—for example, because for the sake of my critique of Christianity I had to breathe all too long the swampy air of the apostle Paul—a few pages of Petronius suffice me as a heroic remedy, and immediately I am well again.
2
Part of a discarded draft for section 3 of “Why I Write Such Good Books” (Podach, Friedrich Nietzsches Werke.):
My writings are difficult; I hope this is not considered an objection? To understand the most abbreviated language ever spoken by a philosopher—and also the one poorest in formulas, most alive, most artistic—one must follow the opposite procedure of that generally required by philosophical literature. Usually, one must condense, or upset one’s digestion; I have to be diluted, liquefied, mixed with water, else one upsets one’s digestion.
Silence is as much of an instinct with me as is garrulity with our dear philosophers. I am brief; my readers themselves must become long and comprehensive in order to bring up and together all that I have thought, and thought deep down.
On the other hand, there are prerequisites for “understanding” here, which very few can satisfy: one must be able to see a problem in its proper place—that is, in the context of the other problems that belong with it; and for this one must have at one’s finger tips the topography of various nooks and the difficult areas of whole sciences and above all of philosophy.
Finally, I speak only of what I have lived through, not merely of what I have thought through; the opposition of thinking and life is lacking in my case. My “theory” grows from my “practice”—oh, from a practice that is not by any means harmless or unproblematic!
3
In his postscript to the first edition, 1908, Raoul Richter said: “A page that, according to information received from Frau F?rster-Nietzsche, was mailed to Paraguay, with a notation regarding its insertion in Ecce Homo, survives in a copy and contains invective against his brother-in-law and friends, but has been excluded from publication here as something not belonging to the authentic Nietzsche. This is presumably one of those violent outpourings of which several have been found in the F?rster papers, some of them long destroyed, with uninhibited attacks on Bismarck, the Kaiser, and others. The fact alone that an addition to Ecce Homo was sent to South America [where the sister and brother-in-law were then living], instead of being sent to the publisher in Leipzig, shows that this is presumably a page that belongs to the first days of the collapse. Possibly, a similar but no longer extant note sent to the publisher was also intended for Ecce.” Podach’s criticism of Richter for not publishing this note (Friedrich Nietzsches Werke.) seems highly unreasonable; but the text (p. 314) deserves inclusion in this Appendix. Nietzsche’s notation read: “To be inserted in the chapter ‘The Case of Wagner,’ section 4, after the words: ‘Except for my association with a few artists, above all with Richard Wagner, I have not spent one good hour with a German’” (ibid.). The text itself reads:
Shall I here divulge my “German” experiences?—F?rster: long legs, blue eyes, blond (straw head!), a “racial German” who with poison and gall attacks everything that guarantees spirit and future: Judaism, vivisection, etc.—but for his sake my sister left those nearest her1 and plunged into a world full of dangers and evil accidents.
K?selitz:2 Saxon, weak, at times awkward, immovable, an embodiment of the law of gravity—but his music is of the first rank and runs on light feet.
Overbeck3 dried up, become sour, subject to his wife, hands me, like Mime,4 the poisoned draft of doubt and mistrust of myself—but he shows how he is full of good will toward me and worried about me and calls himself my “indulgent friend.”
Look at them—these are three German types! Canaille!
And if the most profound spirit of all millennia appeared among Germans
4
All of the paragraphs in this section come from three discarded drafts for the attack on the Germans in the chapter “The Case of Wagner.” (a) and (b) constitute the beginning and end of the same draft (Podach, Friedrich Nietzsches Werke); (c) comes from another attempt (ibid.); (d) from the last (ibid.).
(a)
And from what side did all great obstructions, all calamities in my life emanate? Always from Germans. The damnable German anti-Semitism, this poisonous boil of névrose nationale, has intruded into my existence almost ruinously during that decisive time when not my destiny but the destiny of humanity was at issue. And I owe it to the same element that my Zarathustra entered this world as indecent literature—its publisher being an anti-Semite. In vain do I look for some sign of tact, of délicatesse, in relation to me: from Jews, yes; never yet from Germans.
(b)
The Germans are by far the worst experience of my life; for sixteen years now one has left me in the lurch, not only concerning my philosophy but also in regard to my honor. What respect can I have for the Germans when even my friends cannot discriminate between me and a liar like Richard Wagner? In one extreme case, one even straddles the fence between me and anti-Semitic canaille.— And this at a moment when an indescribable responsibility weighs on me—1
(C)
It seems to be that association with Germans even corrupts one’s character. I lose all mistrust; I feel how the fungus of neighbor-love spreads in me—it has even happened, to my profound humiliation, that I have become good-natured. Is it possible to sink any lower?—For with me, malice belongs to happiness—I am no good when I am not malicious2—I find no small justification of existence in provoking tremendous stupidities against me.
(d)
I am solitude become man.3—That no word ever reached me, forced me to reach myself.—I should not be possible without a countertype of race, without Germans, without these Germans, without Bismarck, without 1848, without “Wars of Liberation,” without Kant, even without Luther.—The great crimes committed against culture by the Germans are justified in a higher economy of culture.—I want nothing differently, not backward either—I was not permitted to want anything differently.—Amor fati.—Even Christianity becomes necessary: only the highest form, the most dangerous, the one that was most seductive in its No to life, provokes its highest affirmation—me.—What in the end are these two millennia? Our most instructive experiment, a vivisection of life itself.—Merely two millennia!—
5
For a time, Nietzsche thought of concluding Ecce Homo with two sections that are included in a table of contents reproduced photographically by Podach (Friedrich Nietzsches Werke, plate XIV); but then he wrote on a separate sheet (ibid.): “The section Declaration of War is to be omitted—Also The Hammer Speaks.” The latter he moved to the end of Twilight (Portable Nietzsche); the former is lost, except for the following paragraph on a sheet with the notation: “At the end, after the Declaration of War” (ibid.).
Final Consideration
If we could dispense with wars, so much the better. I can imagine more profitable uses for the twelve billion now paid annually for the armed peace we have in Europe; there are other means of winning respect for physiology than field hospitals.—Good; very good even: since the old God is abolished, I am prepared to rule the world—
1Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799), professor of physics at G?ttingen, was perhaps the greatest German aphorist and satirist of his century.
2A writer (1728–1787) often mentioned by Nietzsche. See my note (6) in Beyond Good and Evil, section 26, above.
3The relevant information has been put most succinctly by William Arrow-smith, in his Introduction to his own translation of The Satyricon of Petronius (Ann Arbor, Mich., University of Michigan Press, 1959): “Formally … the Satyricon … belongs to that genre we call Menippean satire, the curious blending of prose with verse and philosophy with realism invented by the Cynic philosopher Menippus of Gadara [third century B.C.] and continued by his Roman disciple, Varro [116-27 B.C.].” The identity and dates of Petronius have been disputed, but he probably committed suicide when Nero was Emperor. Cf. Beyond, section 28, above.
1Ihre “N?chsten”: The word used in the Bible for neighbor.
2Heinrich K?selitz was the real name of Peter Gast.
3Franz Overbeck was professor of church history at Basel, but an unbeliever. For accounts of F?rster, Gast, and Overbeck see Kaufmann’s Nietzsche, Chapter 1, sections I and III, or—for a much fuller account, in German—Podach’s Gestalten um Nietzsche (figures around Nietzsche; Weimar, Lichtenstein, 1932).
4In Wagner’s Ring.
1The passage ends like the one cited in the final footnote for that chapter, above. The “extreme case” is presumably that of Nietzsche’s sister.
2Ich tauge Nichts, wenn ich nicht boshaft bin. “Malice”: Bosheit.
3Ich bin die Einsamkeit als Mensch.