Thoughts Out of Season, Part I (David Strauss; Richard Wagner in Bayreuth)
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~63,400 words · 301 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). Thoughts Out of Season, Part I (David Strauss; Richard Wagner in Bayreuth). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/thoughts-out-of-season-part-i-david-strauss-richard-wagner-in-bayreuth
- MLANietzsche. "Thoughts Out of Season, Part I (David Strauss; Richard Wagner in Bayreuth)." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/thoughts-out-of-season-part-i-david-strauss-richard-wagner-in-bayreuth.
- ChicagoNietzsche. Thoughts Out of Season, Part I (David Strauss; Richard Wagner in Bayreuth). SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/thoughts-out-of-season-part-i-david-strauss-richard-wagner-in-bayreuth.
What it is about
The first volume of the Untimely Meditations: against David Strauss, and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.
Context and history
The attack on Strauss is Nietzsche the polemicist at his purest: he disputes not the theology but the prose, and the portrait of the 'cultural philistine' — the educated bourgeois who mistakes what he likes for what is good — still stings. **Note:** Richard Wagner in Bayreuth also appears as a separate work. It is not a duplicate: the volume and the single essay are different editions and both stay. English translation from the complete edition edited by Oscar Levy (1909-1913), the one in the public domain. It is over a century old and it shows. The original is GERMAN, and citation should follow the original: the catalogue holds two of them, Also sprach Zarathustra and Der Wille zur Macht; for the rest, only the translation is here.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Public opinion in Germany seems strictly to forbid any allusion to the evil and dangerous consequences of a war, more particularly when the war in question has been a victorious one. Those writers, therefore, command a more ready attention who, regarding this public opinion as final, proceed to vie with each other in their jubilant praise of the war, and of the powerful influences it has brought to bear upon morality, culture, and art. Yet it must be confessed that a great victory is a great danger. Human nature bears a triumph less easily than a defeat; indeed, it might even be urged that it is simpler to gain a victory of this sort than to turn it to such account that it may not ultimately prove a serious rout. But of all evil results due to the last contest with France, the most deplorable, perhaps, is that widespread and even universal error of public opinion and of all who think publicly, that German culture was also victorious in the struggle, and that it should now, therefore, be decked with garlands, as a fit recognition of such extraordinary events and successes. This error is in the highest degree pernicious: not because it is an error,--for there are illusions which are both salutary and blessed,--but because it threatens to convert our victory into a signal defeat. A defeat?--I should say rather, into the uprooting of the "German Mind" for the benefit of the "German Empire." Even supposing that the fight had been between the two cultures, the standard for the value of the victor would still be a very relative one, and, in any case, would certainly not justify such exaggerated triumph or self-glorification. For, in the first place, it would be necessary to ascertain the worth of the conquered culture. This might be very little; in which case, even if the victory had involved the most glorious display of arms, it would still offer no warrant for inordinate rapture. Even so, however, there