Thread by @Edourdooo

» Germany’s royal family backed the Nazis, says historian | World | The Times thetimes.co.uk/article/german…

Over the past three decades the former German royal family’s complex but frequently cosy relationship with the Nazis has become one of the most fiercely contested battlegrounds in modern historiography.

The kaiser’s descendants, the Hohenzollern family, are wrangling with the German authorities over the rights to their old palaces and vast collection of artworks and treasures around Berlin, which were confiscated by the Soviet occupiers at the end of the Second World War.

At the heart of the argument is the ambivalent figure of the crown prince Wilhelm of Prussia, the kaiser’s son. If he is found to have made a “significant contribution” to Hitler’s rise to power, the family’s claim on their former estates will be void.

It is a sensitive question of how modern Germany understands its past: how the Second Reich bled into the Third, how the ideals of Weimar degenerated into dictatorship, and how the moral responsibility for some of the worst crimes of the 20th century is to be apportioned.

A new book, Die Hohenzollern und die Nazis, suggests that every single member of the dynasty, up to and including the kaiser, was at least to some degree opposed to the fledgling republic. Many of them actively colluded in its downfall.

He obsessed over the “Jewish world hegemony” and the rise of Mussolini, whose partnership with the Italian monarchy he came to regard as a prototype for the future of Germany.

“I can’t do it without the Nazis,” Wilhelm said after Hitler became chancellor in 1933.

“The press, Jews and gnats are a plague of which humanity must rid itself one way or another,” he wrote to his old American friend Poultney Bigelow in 1927. He added in English: “I believe the best would be gas?”

In January 1933, on the eve of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, one of Wilhelm’s aides wrote to a high-ranking Nazi official: “By the way, His Majesty is self-evidently still absolutely disposed to approve of the nationalist ideas of Nazism.”

Yet the kaiser also nurtured an aristocratic disdain for Hitler. His letters, and the memoirs of Sigurd von Ilsemann, his right-hand man, display an unrelenting and scarcely concealed contempt for Hitler, whom he regarded as a “Bolshevist” and an upstart.

His fourth son, Prince August Wilhelm, made contact with the Nazis as early as 1926 and joined the party and its paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung or SA, four years later. In 1933 he entered the Reichstag as a Nazi MP.

Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia, 45, the current head of the house of Hohenzollern, told The Times that Malinowski’s book had helped to further the debate and put it on a more factual footing.

Georg Friedrich said the book had succeeded in “making this politicized controversy more objective and at the same time highlighting the need for further research in this area”.

Behind the scenes the crown prince and his family also lobbied their extensive network of contacts in the British and American establishments on behalf of the new regime.

In May 1940 Wilhelm Friedrich, one of the crown prince’s sons, died of the wounds he had sustained in the battle for Valenciennes, near the Belgian border. Four weeks later the crown prince sent a telegram congratulating Hitler on his “ingenious leadership”.

When the first world war began in 1914, Nietzsche's works were often credited for what one English bookseller termed the "Euro-Nietzschean War,"referring both to the war's outbreak and to the stunning brutality with which it was being fought.
newyorker.com/magazine/2002/…

After his death, Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth, gathered his unpublished writings and letters and pleaded with Adolf Hitler to publish Nietzsche anthologies.

He did, after editing them to suit his purposes.
baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-19…

Nietzsche found fault with democracy because he thought it empowered the weak over the strong. Likewise, he felt Christianity was born of weakness and bred weakness.

Hitler wouldn't have needed to read anything that Nietzsche wrote in order to assert a version of the "Nietzschean" ideas that were claimed by virtually every extreme of German political culture in the decades after the First World War.

“Nietzsche, leaving aside controversial comments about a ‘whip’, was in contact with the leading feminists of his time, and even proposed to Lou Salomé, one of the most avant-gardist women of her time.”
irishtimes.com/culture/how-fr…

Nietzsche's name became a focus for the expression of anti-German sentiment in writings by British opinion-formers and propagandists at the time of the First World War.
jstor.org/stable/3737817

Nietzsche knew that just as fireworks mesmerize audiences, patriotic rhetoric and talk of national identity herd the masses into a passive unthinking that can become dangerous.
theparisreview.org/blog/2018/07/0…

Among German leaders, Merkel is a triple anomaly: a woman (divorced, remarried, no children), a scientist (quantum chemistry), and an Ossi (a product of East Germany).
newyorker.com/magazine/2014/…

There is no evidence of anti-Jewish sentiment in Nietzsche’s home and milieu as a youth. He first assimilated negative stereotypes about Jewish merchants from his peers at the University of Leipzig in 1865.
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…

In Tribschen, Switzerland, Richard and Cosima Wagner introduced Nietzsche to a proto-anti-Semitic ideology before the term was coined and the political movement was founded in 1879.

In 1850, Richard Wagner had anonymously published Das Judenthum in der Musik, which condemned Jews as unattractive, unpleasant, unoriginal, parasitic, and exploitative.

In the late 1870s and early 1880s, Nietzsche developed intense relationships with several ethnic Jews, all of them atheists, and made explicitly positive pronouncements about Jews.

Nietzsche’s extended sojourn in Italy with the writers Paul Rée and Lou Salomé ended disastrously as a result of Andreas-Salomé choosing Rée over Nietzsche, which helps explain Nietzsche’s few private negative references to Rée as being Jewish.

Nietzsche was influenced by the books of a former student of his, scientist and author Joseph Paneth.

He declared the Viennese student and writer Siegfried Lipiner to be “a genius”, and asked him if he had “any connection to Jews”.

Nietzsche’s attacks on “slave morality” were however primarily against Christianity, and that his critiques of biblical Judaism were not related to contemporary Jews.

The history of society, Nietzsche believes, is the conflict between these two outlooks: the herd attempts to impose its values universally, but the noble master transcends their “mediocrity.”

In a topical entry from 1884, he condemns the emancipatory movements that were transforming Western societies in the 19th century.
independent.co.uk/news/long_read…

Nietzsche blames the modern demand for democratization on the rhetoric of the Enlightenment, and especially on the “seductive” concept of universal human goodness propounded by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

When he turns to the emancipation of slaves, however, Nietzsche mentions another name: “Mistress Stowe”. He is referring to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of the famous anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

By the time Nietzsche jotted down his anti-emancipatory musings, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had run through no fewer than 50 editions in Germany and prompted countless reviews – almost without exception positive – in German journals and newspapers.

Like George Fitzhugh, the South’s preeminent pro-slavery theorist, Nietzsche frequently invoked Ancient Greece to argue that slavery belonged to “the essence of a culture”.

In stark contrast to most German philhellenists, including Richard Wagner, Nietzsche believed that slavery was the sine qua non of the cultural glory that was Greece.

His critique of liberalism here reiterates that of Fitzhugh, who had argued that the free-market economy of the North by no means provided its workers with a more dignified or humane existence than the Southern plantation.

Nietzsche, too, sees new forms of dependence and servitude lurking behind the facade of “free labor”. The modern industrial worker has become a mere cog within a “mechanical operation”.

If Nietzsche’s reference to Beecher Stowe highlights the transatlantic context of his ideas, it also underscores their fiercely anti-modern political dimensions.

Postwar attempts to 'de-nazify' Nietzsche have obscured the historical and intellectual links between Nietzschean philosophy and National Socialist politics behind generic claims of misinterpretation.
jstor.org/stable/30036502

After the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, Nazi propa­ganda minister Joseph Goeb­bels de­clared, “We shall once more justify the words of the phil­os­opher: ‘That which does not kill me makes me stronger.’”
wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/summ…

Liberal bourgeois ­existence — ­the very ideas of Christian morality, democracy, and ­rationality —­ filled Nietzsche with contempt. God is dead, he declared, and mankind must reinvent itself in a new image of greatness.

Alfred Baeumler (1887–1968) a professor at the ­Friedrich-­Wilhelms-­Univer­sität Berlin, embraced the Nazi cause around 1930 and was granted an hour-­long audience with Hitler himself in 1931, the same year he published his influential Nietz­sche: The Philosopher and Politician.

Baeumler also edited Nietzsche’s works and wrote for the general public; he was also “a close personal and pro­fes­sional ally of Alfred ­Rosenberg —­ the ­self­proclaimed ‘chief ideologist of National Socialism.’”

For Nietzsche, the way toward a new human future lay through the ancient Greeks, pioneered by the Übermensch, or super­man, a heroic figure who through great struggle would transcend the banalities of everyday experience.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s later philosophical writings have rarely been examined in the context of the political culture that marks late 19th-century Germany. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00…

Nietzsche’s understanding of European civil society was squarely rooted in the 19th-century culture of the nation state, while his philosophical reflections on a future Europe remained highly speculative.

Against the background of failed revolutions, the subsequent demise of German liberalism and, finally, the creation of a German Empire as the outcome of Prussian-led wars, the development of Nietzsche’s political vision should not be reduced to a merely theoretical exercise.

For Nietzsche, German nationalism has a tendency to be self-refuting or at least self-contradictory.

Nietzsche argued that “those who preach hatred against the French” tended to forget that their own intellectual roots, including their symbolism of freedom and liberation, were primarily French.