Which shouldn’t be news to me I guess, but it had never occurred to me, even though as a philosopher Nietzsche seemed to be something of a human quote machine who could turn out memorable phrases. Remember Gustav Landauer, the German Anarchist theorist and grandfather of the famous director and improv comic pioneer Mike Nichols, brutally killed in the post WWI revolutionary activity in Germany? He was said to be influenced by Nietzsche too.īut this fall, while reading a blog I follow,** I learned another thing: that Nietzsche was also a poet.

I vaguely knew that one of my childhood heroes George Bernard Shaw had admired him, but I had no idea how many leftist and anarchist figures rated Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s sister was his literary executor,* and she was a Nazi fan-girl who did a great deal to forge that linkage and since the Nazis were nationalists, the available idea that there was a notable German cultural figure whose contradictory writings could dab some intellectual cologne onto their bully-boy stink was useful.

In the past few years it’s become accepted knowledge that the Nazi connection was to a large degree accidental. Oh, I knew one more thing about him, something that discouraged all other curiosity: the Nazis liked him, saw him as an intellectual forerunner of their decidedly non-intellectual movement. As a person educated in the mid-20 th century this is what I knew about Fredrich Nietzsche: he was a philosopher who was all the rage in the late 19 th and first half of the 20 th century and he had this thing about achieving a more perfected human condition.

Hitler kuckucksuhr