3 Myths About Friedrich Nietzsche, Blown Up

The First Myth: Nietzsche the Misogynist

“When you go to women, do not forget your whip” is a popular Nietzsche quotation from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. It’s a misquotation, actually. In fact, he wrote “do not forget the whip” — all the difference resides in that one little word.

Zarathustra was published in 1883. The previous year he had fallen in love with Lou Salomé, the femme fatale who broke his heart. Freud and Rilke were also bedazzled by Lou — but that’s another story. In 1882, both Nietzsche and his friend Paul Rée were in love with Lou, and both proposed marriage. The three of them went to a photographer’s studio in Lucerne, where they posed for a photograph. The two men stand like carriage horses between the traces of a farm cart. Behind them, in the cart, sits Lou, looking pretty pleased with herself and wielding a whip.

Who is wielding the whip? This is not a picture of the subjugation of women: it’s the battle of the sexes.

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Nietzsche had one sister, Elisabeth, a couple of years younger than him. Throughout their youth, he encouraged Elisabeth to educate herself. She resisted, but Nietzsche persisted as an advocate of women’s education. Among his closest enduring friendships was a small circle of early Swiss and German feminists; they included Meta von Salis, the very first woman to gain a PhD from a Swiss University. At time when women were denied education, Nietzsche encouraged them to intellectual endeavor, treating them as beings with equal potential.

The Second Myth: Nietzsche the Humorless

I had no idea how funny Nietzsche was until I came across a letter he wrote. Nietzsche was twenty-four and he was invited to a party in Leipzig to meet the composer Richard Wagner. Wagner was a world-wide celebrity and Nietzsche was in awe of him, so he ordered himself a new suit to wear. Come the evening of the party, snow was falling. The tailor arrived with the suit. Nietzsche put it on. It fit perfectly. The tailor wanted to be paid. Nietzsche didn’t have the money. The tailor sprang on him and wrestled him out of the suit, leaving him in his underwear. “Oh well,” he thought, “my old black velvet will have to be good enough for Richard,” and he bounded out through the snowstorm, arriving late for the party, where he and Wagner bonded over Schopenhauer. It was the start of a long and beautiful friendship.

Good heavens, I thought when I read that letter; he tells funny stories against himself. This is a surprise. And that was when I knew I really wanted to write the book.

The Third myth: Nietzsche the Nazi

Three things Nietzsche hated were the Big State, nationalism, and anti-Semitism. Nietzsche’s life coincided with the years that Bismarck was forging the great European superpower that was the German Reich. Nietzsche hated the narrow nationalism of the Reich. He liked to say he was a bad German but a good European. “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, that is the end of German philosophy,” was his opinion.

Nietzsche did express some horrible sentiments about Jews during the six years between 1868 and 1874, when he was close to Wagner and heavily influenced by the composer’s fanatical anti-Semitism. But both before and after the Wagner years, he greatly valued the Jewish race and its contribution to European culture. One of the last things he wrote was; “I will have all anti-Semites shot.”

When Nietzsche died in 1900, his sister Elisabeth took control of his papers. Elisabeth lived on until 1935, tampering with his letters, shaping his words to her own nationalist and anti-Semitic convictions — even  putting out a whole book in his name, The Will to Power. Elisabeth adored both Mussolini and Hitler, and it was mutual. She turned the Nietzsche archive into the propaganda center for the emerging National Socialist (Nazi) party, though one of the propagandists, Ernst Krieck, accurately observed that apart from the fact that Nietzsche was not a socialist, nor a nationalist, and opposed to racial thinking, he might have been a leading National Socialist.