Part 10
He allows the Germans no honour as philosophers: Leibniz and Kant were "the two greatest clogs upon the intellectual integrity of Europe." Just when a perfectly scientific attitude of mind had been attained, they managed to find byways back to "the old ideal." And no less passionately does he deny to the Germans all honour as musicians: "A German _cannot_ know what music is. The men who pass as German musicians are foreigners, Slavs, Croats, Italians, Dutchmen or Jews. I am Pole enough to give up all other music for Chopin--except Wagner's _Siegfried-Idyll_, some things of Liszt, and the Italians Rossini and Pietro Gasti" (by this last name he appears to mean his favourite disciple, Köselitz, who wrote under the pseudonym of Peter Gast).
He abhors the Germans as "idealists." All idealism is falsehood in the face of necessity. He finds a pernicious idealism in Henrik Ibsen too, "that typical old maid," as well, as in others whose object it is to poison the clean conscience, the natural spirit, of sexual love. And he gives us a clause of his moral code, in which, under the head of Vice, he combats every kind of opposition to Nature, or if fine words are preferred, every kind of idealism. The clause runs: "Preaching of chastity is a public incitement to unnatural practices. All, depreciation of the sexual life, all sullying of it with the word 'impure,' is a crime against Life itself--is the real sin against the holy Spirit of Life."
Finally he attacks what he calls the "licentiousness" of the Germans in historical matters. German historians, he declares, have lost all eye for the values of culture; in fact, they have put this power of vision under the ban of the Empire. They claim that a man must in the first place be a German, must belong to the race. If he does, he is in a position to determine values or their absence: the Germans are thus the "moral order of the universe" in history; compared with the power of the Roman Empire they are the champions of liberty; compared with the eighteenth century they are the restorers of morality and of the Categorical Imperative. "History is actually written on Imperial German and Antisemitic lines--and Herr von Treitschke is not ashamed of himself."
The Germans have on their conscience every crime against culture committed in the last four centuries. As Nietzsche in his later years was never tired of asserting, they deprived the Renaissance of its meaning, they wrecked it by the Reformation; that is, by Luther, an impossible monk who, owing to his impossibility, attacked the Church and in so doing restored it. The Catholics would have every reason to honour Luther's name.
And when, upon the bridge between two centuries of decadence, a _force majeure_ of genius and will revealed itself, strong enough to weld Europe into political and economic unity, the Germans finally, with their "Wars of Liberation," robbed Europe of the meaning of Napoleon's existence, a prodigy of meaning. Thus they have upon their conscience all that followed, nationalism, the _névrose nationale_ from which Europe is suffering, and the perpetuation of the system of little states, of petty politics.
Last of all, the Germans have upon their conscience their attitude to himself, their indifference, their lack of recognition, the silence in which they buried his life's work. The Germans are bad company. And although his autobiography ends with a poem in which he affects a scorn of fame, "that coin in which the whole world pays, but which he receives with gloved hands and tramples underfoot with loathing "--yet his failure to win renown in Germany during his lifetime contributed powerfully to foster his antipathy.
The exaltation that marks the whole tone of the work, the unrestrained self-esteem which animates it and is ominous of the near approach of madness, have not deprived _Ecce Homo_ of its character of surpassing greatness.