If Nietzsche is part of polite conversation in the English-speaking world today, it is thanks to one man: Walter Kaufmann. A German-Jewish émigré who arrived in the US in 1939, after graduating from Williams College he interrupted his doctoral studies at Harvard to enlist in the US Army Air Force and served as an interrogator for Military Intelligence during the war. In Berlin he chanced upon an edition of Nietzsche’s collected works and was immediately – like so many before and after him – captivated. Having discharged his duty, he returned to Harvard resolved to write his PhD on Nietzsche. Within a year he had completed his dissertation on “Nietzsche’s Theory of Values” and started teaching philosophy at Princeton University, which he would continue to do for the next thirty-three years. Three years later, in 1950, before he even turned 30, he published his first book: Nietzsche: Philosopher, psychologist, antichrist. We would never read Nietzsche the same way again.
It is hard to overestimate the challenges the young Kaufmann faced. The Nazis made a conscious attempt to enlist Nietzsche as one of their intellectual forefathers: Alfred Baeumler, head of the Institute for Political Pedagogy in Berlin, wrote a book in 1931 titled Nietzsche, der Philosoph und Politiker, in which he tried to link Nietzsche’s theory of the state with Nazi state theory. On reading the book, Thomas Mann declared it a “Hitler prophecy”.
In fact the collection of Nietzsche’s works Kaufmann picked up in Berlin was the Musarion edition, compiled by the Nazi brothers Richard and Max Oehler (younger cousins of Nietzsche himself) and the propagandist Friedrich Würzbach. Despite later being thrown out by the Nazi regime for being “half-Jewish”, Würzbach was one of the loudest proponents of the “biological-racial” reading of Nietzsche. Together with Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the Oehler brothers founded the Nietzsche-Archiv in Weimar, and subsequently turned it into a Nazi propaganda machine: Hitler was a regular visitor in the 1930s. They helped propagate the view that Nietzsche was planning a magnum opus at the end of his life entitled The Will to Power, using a fraudulent collection of late notes Nietzsche’s sister had put together. In the 1926 afterword to the Musarion edition, Würzbach directly linked Nietzsche’s ideas to Nazi race theories. It was towards these figures that Kaufmann directed much of his ire.
