Ulrich Von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff - Life - Conflict With Nietzsche and Wagner

Conflict With Nietzsche and Wagner

Before he even gained a professorial title, Wilamowitz was a main protagonist in a scholarly dispute about Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy that attracted much attention. In 1872-73, he published two unusually aggressive polemics (German: "Zukunftsphilologie", i.e. "Philology of the future"), which strongly attacked Nietzsche (then Professor at the University of Basel) and Professor Erwin Rohde (University of Kiel). Richard Wagner, whose views on art had influenced Nietzsche and Rohde, reacted by publishing an open letter and Rohde wrote a damning response. The issue at stake was the deprecation of Euripides, on whom Nietzsche blamed the destruction of Greek tragedy. Wilamowitz saw the methods of his adversaries as an attack on the basic tenets of scientific thought, unmasking them as enemies of the scientific method. His polemic was considered as Classical philology's reply to Nietzsche's challenge.

At the age of 80 when Wilamowitz wrote his memoirs, he saw the conflict with Nietzsche less passionately, but did not retract the essential points of his critique. He stated that he had not fully realised at the time that Nietzsche was not interested in scientific understanding but rather in Wagner's musical drama, but also that he was nevertheless right to take position against Nietzsche's "rape of historical facts and all historical method."