Word: schlechta
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Last week the talk of literary Germany was a Darmstadt professor's painstakingly documented debunking of that myth. The crude myth of the racist Nietzsche, argued Professor Karl Schlechta in his new edition of the seer's works, was the consciously perpetrated fraud of his sister, guardian and sole literary executrix, the late Frau Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche...
Finally gaining access to the Nietzsche papers after the death of this jealous keeper in 1935, Professor Schlechta has worked ever since over the last writings. His definitive editing downgrades The Will to Power to what he found it to be, a series of notebook jottings in no way coordinated or assembled and never intended for publication in such schematic form or under such a title. Stripping the notes of Elisabeth's gratuitously added chapter headings and subtitles, he lists them as they were written, along with thousands of other jottings that Elisabeth saw fit to omit because they...
Everybody's Ancestor. Schlechta was able to prove what scholars have long suspected, that Elisabeth suppressed letters in which Nietzsche spoke ill of her and forged others to prove her authority as her brother's only trusted interpreter. Nietzsche wrote many affectionate letters to his mother; Elisabeth dropped ink blots on the word "Mother" and published the letters as if addressed to herself. Schlechta also spotted other frauds with the help of a pack of notebooks that Elisabeth had hidden under attic eaves (Nietzsche had a habit of drafting letters to friends in his notebooks before sending them...
...Western Germany the impact of Schlechta's findings was instant. Said Hamburg's newspaper Die Welt: "A new Nietzsche dates from this edition." In Schlechta's interpretation, Nietzsche's "will to power" emerges not (or not alone) as man's will to mastery over other men, but as his will to a sort of excellence or virtue in his own inner being. Far from upholding Deutschland-über-Alles traditions of Germanic superiority, this Nietzsche is the elite-minded aristocrat who wrote scornfully of his countrymen: "The Germans are responsible for the neurosis called nationalism...
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