The Will to Madness

By Alan Ryan
Published: January 24, 1999

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Nietzsche and Wagner

A Lesson in Subjugation.

By Joachim Kohler.

Translated by Ronald Taylor.

A nyone who knows anything about Friedrich Nietzsche knows two things. The first is that as a young man he fervently admired Richard Wagner's music dramas, and then turned against both Wagner and the Christian religiosity of works like ''Parsifal.'' The other is that at 44 he was stricken with a dementia caused by syphilis, was rescued from a dingy boardinghouse in Turin by his devoted friend Franz Overbeck, taken to asylums in Switzerland and Germany, and later incarcerated in a red-brick villa in Weimar. There his sister, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, received her anti-Semitic friends and allowed them to view the dying sage, a fate from which death released him in August 1900. Thirty years after, the most repulsive of Nietzsche's many dubious admirers visited; Herr Hitler was given one of Elisabeth's husband's anti-Semitic treatises and her brother's sword stick.

How does Nietzsche's passion for, and passionate rejection of, Richard Wagner and all his works connect with his madness, and how do these connect with the attraction his work held for generations of violent anti-Semitic reactionaries? It is not clear that Joachim Kohler's engaging and vivid book, in a fluid translation by Ronald Taylor, can quite answer that question, but it sheds some light on it. For Nietzsche's madness -- or rather, the route to his madness -- took a peculiar form. In the months before he became all but speechless, Nietzsche dramatized his increasing insanity in terms of one of his favorite myths, the story of Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur.

The myth itself is clear only in outline -- all versions say that Theseus arrives in Crete, kills Ariadne's half brother the Minotaur, finds his way out of the Labyrinth with the aid of Ariadne's ball of twine, escapes with Ariadne to Naxos and there abandons her. What happens next to Ariadne varies from one version of the tale to another. In one, Dionysus has her killed because of her betrayal of her brother; in another, the god becomes her bridegroom and mystically unites the human and the divine; in Homer, Odysseus encounters her at the gates of Hades, dead.

Among the last coherent or near-coherent letters that Nietzsche wrote were those to Cosima Wagner, by then the widow of the great composer, in which Nietzsche addressed her as ''Princess Ariadne''; he declared the author of the letters to be none other than the god Dionysus. It is with these extraordinary letters and the poems of the ''Dithyrambs of Dionysus'' that Kohler, also the author of a full-scale biography of Nietzsche, begins ''Nietzsche and Wagner.'' As Nietzsche became steadily less sane, Kohler writes, so he recklessly identified with different selves ''and, like Dionysus, his role model, exchanged one persona for another at will. At one moment he saw himself as Shakespeare or Caesar, at the next as King of Italy or as Wagner, a mortal enemy he pursued with all the savagery he had at his command. And these figures all revealed themselves to him as incarnations of the one god, the god Dionysus, with whom he knew himself to be identical.''

That, however, prompts the question of why Nietzsche chose to dramatize his growing detachment from reality in such terms. Cosima Wagner was one of the 19th century's least likable heroines, proverbial for her gawky appearance and her infinite selfishness, and a far cry from the beautiful and self-sacrificing Princess Ariadne. Kohler's answer is that the villain of the piece is not she but Wagner. Richard Wagner was indeed the ''Old Minotaur'' that Nietzsche called him; he lured Nietzsche into a dysfunctional household of such labyrinthine complexity that it is little wonder that Nietzsche became increasingly wild and erratic.

''Nietzsche and Wagner'' might be described as Nietzsche for beginners -- that is, without philosophy -- though it is hardly Nietzsche without tears. The bare-bones account of Nietzsche's life begins not so much with his birth in 1844 as with the death of his father five years later. Carl Nietzsche was a Lutheran pastor who died of ''softening of the brain,'' which sounds very like a dementia caused by the syphilitic infection that killed his son. Responding to his mother's urgings, Nietzsche became a child prodigy, and he also began to suffer from the nightmares and headaches that plagued him all his life.

What brought him to the state of ardent discipleship in which he met Wagner in 1868 is obscure. He had known about Wagner from his teens, but had disliked the music even while he admired the mythic themes of operas like ''Tristan und Isolde'' and tried himself to write an opera based on Nordic legends. It is clearer what he admired once he had become intoxicated: Wagner promised to re-create for the Germans the cultural climate in which the classical Greek world had created the tragedies of Aeschylus. It was this that ''The Birth of Tragedy'' spelled out in 1872 to its astonished readers.

Politically, it was a view with some alarming consequences, of which Wagner's rabid anti-Semitism was the most obvious. Kohler thinks that Nietzsche was as bad as Wagner in this regard. Both despaired of, and despised, the comfortable bourgeois society in which they lived; both harbored astounding visions of its destruction in torrents of blood and its replacement by a society in which godlike heroes treated the masses with a kindly contempt. As to why the age seemed so indifferent to these archaic heroic ideals, the answer was that a Jewish spirit of commercial moneymaking had rotted German culture.

The trouble was that Wagner did not particularly wish Nietzsche to set himself up as the philosophical spokesman on Wagnerian themes. Nor did Cosima care for either the person of Nietzsche or the intellectual ambition that drove him so painfully. She had sacrificed herself to Wagner, and she wanted Nietzsche to sacrifice himself to both of them -- a role in which he might be expected to shop for Wagner's underwear or to write attacks on the critics as Wagner and she decided. It was bound to end in tears, and it did.

Indeed, there were tears throughout, and a final rupture by 1878, five years before Wagner's death. The end of the friendship was provoked by Nietzsche on the literary front and Wagner and Cosima on the personal. In 1876, Nietzsche published ''Richard Wagner in Bayreuth,'' a book that heaped praise on Wagner while simultaneously describing him as the seductive destroyer of all who came within his power, a Minotaur within a labyrinth. Most readers thought the praise more than made up for the eccentric and not entirely intelligible criticism; Wagner did not. Wagner and Cosima decided that Nietzsche's unhealthy and febrile views were caused by masturbation and the influence on him of Jewish friends, notably the scholar Paul Ree. This astonishing nonsense went on being repeated until the 1920's in the Wagnerian newsletter in Bayreuth.

Thereafter, it was open warfare. Nietzsche passed up no chance to mock Wagner's sentimental return to the Christian faith, and Cosima tried to pretend that Nietzsche was dead. Nietzsche was the weaker party, ever more sick in mind and body, and unable to avoid hoping that Cosima would rescue him by turning against her husband and his memory. It was useless. As the Wagner cult became more intense after the Master's death, Cosima found her role as its high priestess. Nietzsche was at best an inconvenience, at worst a threat. Ariadne would neither deliver Theseus from the Minotaur nor accept this second Dionysus alongside her departed Dionysian lover. Intolerable as Cosima was, it is hard to see what she could in fact have done for Nietzsche; still, one flinches at the last words of this book: to his guardians at the German asylum, Nietzsche declared, ''It was my wife Cosima Wagner who brought me here.''