Edvard Munch: Nietzsche
The letter below was commissioned as part of an initiative this year to mark 175 years since the writer and philosopher, classicist and composer Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Röcken, in the German province of Saxony. The editors, Elmar Schenkel and Fayçal Hamouda asked ‘friends and enemies, admirers, therapists, sceptics, artists, writers and critics’ from every continent to contribute ‘poetic statements, political judgements, biographical observations, fictions and confessions’ to their volume which appeared, late in 2019, as 101 Briefe an Friedrich Nietzsche. This is the letter as I wrote it in English to a man who changed my life as a writer when I published Nietzsche in Turin in 1996.
The original cover of my 1996 book on Nietzsche. The aim was to get away from the stereotyped image of the moustachioed madman and show him as a more sympathetic figure. The old image crept back into later and foreign editions, alas.
Suffolk, England, May 15, 2019
Dear Friend,
I’ve been walking with you along this wild coast. Glaciers once flattened the lowlands here, as they did the gravelly uplands high above Sils Maria, where you used to walk. I joined you there many years ago and we talked, though you would have preferred to be alone.
You once said that man is an animal whose nature is unfinished. Who knows then what is to come for humanity? Your point exactly. It’s a frightening question for those of us looking back from the twenty-first century, and forwards, but I think you meant it joyfully: as much an invitation as an observation. Also you were being provocative. One of your chosen roles was to provoke a society, and a world, in which the vitality of Christianity had stagnated, and no one had the spiritual vision to respond to Darwin and say yes, we have evolved, but still we have a hand in our destiny. We can live well. Of course you called your last book Ecce Homo. Today, from my vantage point, this title reminds me of Primo Levi’s If This is a Man. Your errant Übermensch has wandered far in the century and more since you died. Today he stalks an abused planet. But, in your way you had hope. Post-Christian hope. That’s right. That’s what we need.
Der Mensch ist etwas, was überwunden werden muß. Many of us feel in middle life that we have tried, but no one else can see what we overcame. We’ve come so far along the path that the beginning is out of sight to all others. And yet what we have made ourselves, in an effort of self-overcoming, is what we are. We had hopes, and some of them paid off.
You helped me become what I am. I’m a writer who works with texts in the German language. A traveller. An inventor of my path. But let’s just say for the moment a writer. (I’m thinking how evasive you were yourself in Ecce Homo, as to who you were. You were of everything the greatest exemplar, but then always already moving on.) Everywhere I go today language has been simplified. Vocabularies have shrunk. Grammar has no muscle. People forever speak borrowed lines. The force of style is lost. Irony skipped over. Here I’m not going to ask you for guidance over what to do with the great sadness I feel. Rainer Maria Rilke, one of your descendants, another latecomer, knew best when he told a young poet: still, still, do not feel contempt. We have a great poem in English, written in your lifetime, by Matthew Arnold, that speaks of the flow tide of a great culture receding. Is that part of what we must go through to emerge stronger?
You felt contempt. You felt you had the powerful remnants of an entire complaisant church to clear away, so that humanity might take a new path into the future. Your message was liberation. Look what humanity can become. Look at how we could live on this planet, if we had the energy and the courage. Yes, yes. That’s right. But look at what we did become, in the meantime.
You were also able to laugh, at and with all of us. Your laughter is still good. In an age when people look for leaders and prophets – any age, that is – you were also right to undo your words as you went along. Like Penelope weaving, and unweaving, waiting for Odysseus to come home.
And you loved beauty.
By the way I’ve never understood what you meant by ‘eternal return’ if we’re supposed to be overcoming our weaknesses and looking to the future. Do you mean to suggest some vibrant, dialectical relation between our sense of futility and our willingness to try? That would be cruel.
Perhaps it was just an aspect of your anti-Christianity, that message of eternal non-delivery. Do you know there’s actually a famous academic who tried to work out what you meant mathematically? I agree. Such an approach to you is absurd.
I’m afraid you confirmed me as an outsider. That way I could understand your joys and fears. Still that was years ago, and fate and health and love have been kinder to me than they were to you. Give me time, Lou! You cried, when you had your one chance. I need time to get used to being with another human being again. I always remember your forlorn plea, that you might still take a wife, and how your jealous sister worked against you.
How dangerous you have been, and how inimitable! When we read you we have to remember how all that talk of self-overcoming and renewed strength could serve massive evil, even if in solitary individuals it could quietly strengthen their resolve to be this person, and not that; and to try to achieve their goals, and not lose heart.
Here on the wild North Sea coast, with the savage unfeeling grey waves churning beside me, the wet pebbles gleaming beneath my feet, and the brine-washed wrecks of trees creating fantastic antler-like forms against the blue sky, I like very much a new-old idea of you I read the other day. I mean new because it was freshly voiced; old because I had long ago taken from you an idea of personal ecology. It was the idea that we must save ourselves, and then the planet will be saved, and what was meant was we really must decide, with your help, the kind of animal we want to be.
Walk on, dear friend. Give each of us the encouragement we need.
Lesley
Lesley Chamberlain 