Arthur Drews - On Wagner and Nietzsche

On Wagner and Nietzsche

During Drews's life, Germany was going through turbulent times, politically and culturally. Friedrich Nietzsche had become a prominent cultural icon while Richard Wagner was a highly controversial personality.

Nietzsche was a strong critic of Christianity and its morality glorifying weakness and death. He had started as a friend and admirer of Wagner, but soon became a disgruntled critic, turning against his previous friend. He reproached Wagner for his conversion to anti-semitic Christianity, his glorification of medieval sagas and spiritual chastity, as the sign of a decadent, dying culture. Wagner's "unending melody" only dramatizes theatrical posing, and is hostile to the affirmation of vital Dionysian life forces. Nietzsche claimed that Wagner's art was not Germanic, but close to Italy's Roman Catholicism. Nietzsche became passionately involved in his critique of Wagner's ideas, detailed in Nietzche contra Wagner.

Drews was a staunch supporter of Wagner, and wrote many books and articles on Wagner's religious and nationalistic ideas, which are still considered by some scholars to be items of modern scholarship on the subject. Drews embarked on a critique of Nietzsche, though Nietzsche also was a lifelong critic of Christianity and Christian-based morality. Drews reproached Nietzsche for being an apostle of unbridled individualism — a stance which put Drews in an awkward position in the German establishment. Drews's criticisms of Nietzsche were never well received by German academics nor by German society as a whole, where Nietzsche had become a national figure, and they worked against Drews's chances in ever obtaining a professorship

• In 1904, Drews gave a lecture in Münich on the philosophy of Nietzsche, Nietzsches Philosophie, critical of the German iconic thinker.

  is not aiming at bypassing morality as such, only the external morality which imposes its commandments to the individual, and results in the decay and submission of the Self. He would like to counter this old morality enemy of the Self with a new morality springing from the individual will and in conformity with his nature.

• Drews continued with his philosophical critique of Nietzsche in Nietzsche als Antipode Wagners, 1919 .
• His 1931 book on Wagner came out with a supplement on Nietzsche and Wagner, for which Bernhard Hoffers asserted that many of Drews's views later borrowed by the standard scholarship on Wagner without giving him credit.
• Drews delivered another public critique of Nietzsche (his last one) in his article Nietzsche als Philosoph des Nationalsozialismus? in the journal Nordische Stimmen No. 4 (1934: 172-79). There Drews again attacked Nietzsche on philosophical grounds, in direct opposition to the Nazi effort to enlist Nietzsche in its propaganda, and unconcerned about potential consequences. Wolfang Müller-Lauter, in Experiences with Nietzsche, quotes Drews:

  One finds in Nietzsche neither national sympathy nor social awareness, . Nietzsche is, on the contrary, and particularly after his break with Richard Wagner, an enemy of everything German; he supports the creation of a “good European,” and goes so far as to accord the Jews a leading role in the dissolution of all nations. Finally, he is an individualist, with no notion of “the National Socialist credo: ‘collective over individual utility’...After all this, it must seem unbelievable that Nietzsche has been honored as the Philosopher of National Socialism, … for he preaches in all things the opposite of National Socialism”, setting aside a few scattered utterances. The fact that such honors have repeatedly been bestowed on him has as its main reason, that most people who talk about Nietzsche tend only to pick the ‘raisins' from the cake of his philosophy and, because of his aphoristic style, lack any clear understanding of the way his entire thought coheres.