Happy birthday, Friedrich Nietzsche was born 150 years ago this week. But why should we celebrate the birth of the philosopher who encouraged German militarism? Because he didn't, argues R J Hollingdale

• Published in: The Guardian (London)
• Main Author: Hollingdale, R J
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Manchester (UK) Guardian News & Media Limited 12.10.1994
• ISSN: 0261-3077

For most of his life [Friedrich Nietzsche] had no reputation to speak of: then in the 1890s he acquired one rather quickly, so that by the time of his death in 1900 he was famous and beginning to be influential. There was his influence as a presenter of new ideas: Freud is an exemplar of the kind of thinker to whom Nietzsche appealed in this sense. Freud afterwards said he had not read Nietzsche because the insights he presented coincided too closely with the discoveries of psychoanalysis: yet The Interpretation Of Dreams, published in 1900 and written while Nietzsche was still alive, contains phrases which seem to be derived directly from him. Politically, Nietzsche's actual influence which, given his overwhelming emphasis on the need for radical change, was exercised entirely on the left, became confused with the so-called social Darwinism which increasingly dominated the right in Germany during the decade before 1914: Darwin's "survival of the fittest" and Nietzsche's "will to power", both misunderstood in equal measure, were held between them to have created "German militarism". These multiple misapprehensions made it possible for Nietzsche to be credited with having caused the first world war. At the same time there existed a "Nietzsche movement" in England, strongly Jewish in composition and dedicated to publishing English translations of his works and expounding them in publications of its own. Here Nietzsche appears as an outspoken "freethinker" and "world-betterer" of the kind exemplified at home by Bernard Shaw: being a 19th-century socialist, Shaw himself came to appreciate Nietzsche's radicalism, and coined the neologism "superman" as a translation of Ubermensch (Man And Superman, begun 1901). But advocacy of any aspect of Nietzsche was hardly possible in England after 1914, and the "movement" ran into the sand.