[This is Section 29 of Stephen R.C. Hicks’s Nietzsche and the Nazis.]
29. On contemporary Germans: the world’s hope or contemptible?
While the Nazis put the German-Aryan racial type first, Nietzsche is almost never complimentary about his fellow Germans. In Nietzsche’s view, Germany has slipped into flabbiness and whininess. Germany once was something to be awed and feared, but Germany in the nineteenth century has become a nation of religious revivalism, socialism, and movements towards democracy and equality.
Whatever special endowments the Germans once possessed they have lost. Nietzsche makes this clear when speaking about the Germany of the nineteenth-century: “between the old Germanic tribes and us Germans there exists hardly a conceptual relationship, let alone one of blood.”[90] So rather than being proud of their ancient history and accomplishments, Nietzsche believes Germans of his day should feel ashamed by comparison.
At the same time, German intellectual and cultural life is prominent the world over—and Nietzsche deplores that fact. Contemporary Germany is a center of softness and slow decay, so Nietzsche believes that Germany’s weaknesses are infecting the rest of the world. As he puts it in The Will to Power, “Aryan influence has corrupted all the world.”[91]
So rather than celebrating contemporary Germany and its power, as the Nazis would do, Nietzsche is disgusted by contemporary Germany.
This leads us to a third major point of difference.
References: [90] GM 1:11. [91] WP 142; 145.