Zarathustra's Secret [Hardcover]

Joachim Kohler (Author), Ronald Taylor (Translator), Joachirn Köhler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2002

Over a century after his death in 1900, Nietzsche remains a seminal figure in the history of European intellectual life. Celebrated as a liberator by some, maligned as a pernicious influence by others, he was the subject of controversy during his lifetime, pursuing a hedonistic individualism and espousing concepts such as the Superman and the Will to Power until he died, after a decade of institutionalized insanity. In this biography, Joachim Kohler seeks to understand Nietzsche's philosophy through a reconstruction of his inner life. Through a reinterpretation of his letters, diaries and writings, Kohler shows that Nietzsche's suppressed homosexuality, generating a hatred of Christianity and conventional morality, was a central influence on his work, and argues that his philosophical position was fundamentally compromised by the concealment of his forbidden sexual desire. Throughout his life, as the author demonstrates, the unhappy genius was also plagued by terrible nightmares, stemming from his much-loved father's death, which led to a profoundly disturbed conscience and an intense loathing of metaphysics. Seeking to disguise the truth of his innermost torments, Nietzsche contrived the persona of Zarathustra. The story of the great Persian philosopher, argues Kohler, reveals Nietzsche's own suppression and dionysiac liberation, and presents the culmination of his secret yearnings in the new myth of the Superman who, in his naked beauty, resembled the gods of classical Greece.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Author and journalist Kohler has carefully charted the history of philosophy, music and Nazism in well-received translated works like Nietzsche and Wagner: A Lesson in Subjugation and Wagner's Hitler: The Prophet and His Disciple. Now Yale offers this abridged version of a book first published in Germany a dozen years ago, minus an analysis of Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra. Kohler's main assertion is that Nietzsche was gay, or wanted to be and didn't dare to act on it, and was especially tormented as a result. To this end, Kohler recounts a number of unproven assertions, such as that Nietzsche contracted the syphilis that drove him mad in "a male brothel in Genoa." Such speculations can be taken too far, such as when Kohler states confidently that the young Nietzsche enjoyed Lord Byron's poetry because of "Byron's perversions." Perhaps this book's abridgment affected its symmetry, but it lacks the shapely form and persuasive arguments of Nietzsche and Wagner. The clear translation brings passages of neo-Nietzschean ornate writing to life: "Throughout the nineteenth century and far into the twentieth the exiles of Sodom sought a new home in the `warm south.' Nietzsche joined them...." Since no tell-all exists, the book's whole argument consists of approximations and near-misses.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

With unabashed frankness, Kohler has written a very engaging psychosexual investigation into the tragic personal life of iconoclastic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (l844-l900), from the untimely death of his father to his mental collapse because of tertiary syphilis. The author focuses on the great thinker's tormented conscience owing to repressed homosexuality, analyzing his books, poems, letters, visions, diaries, and dreams (frequently nightmares) in order to find symbolic references to his sexual yearnings for the male gender. As a result, Nietzsche's complex but unsuccessful relationships with friends and pupils are shown to have homosexual significance. Kohler uses these findings to shed new light on Nietzsche's intense interests in Byron, Wagner, Holderlin, Schopenhauer, Flaubert, and especially Greek antiquity. There is also a brief examination of both his provocative claim that "God is dead" and his conception of material reality as the eternal recurrence of this same universe. This important and boldly unique book supplements all those strictly philosophical studies of Friedrich Nietzsche that have excluded his sexuality. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries. H. James Birx, Canisius Coll., Buffalo
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (June 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300092784
• ISBN-13: 978-0300092783
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #671,312 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #18 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( N ) > Nietzche, Friedrich

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22 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Was Nietzsche Gay?, May 29, 2002

By 

Edward Garea "Edward Garea" (Branchville, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Zarathustra's Secret (Hardcover)

At first sight, it would seem to the reader that Nietzsche's biographers have finally run out of things to say. We've had the French Nietzsche, the Positivist Nietzsche, The Existential Nietzsche, the Postmodern Nietzsche, ad nauseum. And now the Gay Nietzsche? But hild on here; not so fast. While I may not agree with many of Kohler's arguments, he has still managed to write one hell of an entertaining book without insulting my intelligence in the process.

When I first began reading this tome, I thought to myself that this may well be another of those works in which anyone in history who was anyone was, of course, gay. But then I remembered Siegfried Mandel's "Nietzsche and the Jews," in which Mandel made many of the same assertations. Kohler, however, wants to pursue the issue of possible homosexuality as the centerpiece of his biography, instead of leaving in on the sidelines as Mandel does.

It is a difficult task, as Nietzsche was one of the most open philosophers in terms of private life, but one who had his life heavily edited by his manipulative sister after madess rendered him helpless. Anything that went against the ideal she had made for her brother was rewritten to have its meaning changed, or was simply discarded it to the dustbin. Because of this huge gap in out knowledge, Kohler can only rely on information rescued from the scrap-heap, and to this addes a great deal of speculation. Granted, some of it is learned speculation, and some of it appears dead on target, but it is speculation, nonetheless and must always be viewed with the proverbial grain of salt.

Ther author is also aided greatly in this effort by reference to the definitive three-volume biography of Nietzsche by Curt Paul Janz. Published in Munich in 1978, it appears never to have been translated into English and is, alas, now out-of-print in Germany. Much of Kohler's biographical information comes from this book, which helps explain why it blows away all English biographies in terms of depth. I have learned many more facts about Nietzsche's life from this book than I have from, say, the biography of Ronald Heyman, which itself adheres to the familiar paradigm about the life of Nietzsche.

Does Kohler prove his point? Sadly for him, no. Most of his evidence is purely circumstantial and some second-hand. But he gives the reader enough good information for many evenings of argument until those documents that will prove the argument one way of another are found. As that day is not very likely to come, at least not soon, the speculations in this book should serve to entertain and provide ammo for countless future arguments. And sometimes there is no greater intellectual fun to be had.

1.0 out of 5 stars Much more Cheaply Populist than you Think, January 23, 2012

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Sator (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Zarathustra's Secret (Hardcover)

Most of the reviews coming from perplexed academics, who have predictably said "who cares if he was gay or not - what's that got to do with things?" have totally missed the point of this more populist writer. Koeher was actually hoping for the suggestion that Nietzsche might be gay would be horrifying, shocking and scandalous - as though we lived in Victorian times.

This book goes hand in hand with Koehler writings on Wagner in which he runs rough shod over inconvenient facts such as that Wagner condemned Gobineau's racist ideology (that formed the basis of the Nazi racist theories) as being a "completely immoral world-view", as well as the fact that Wagner supported parliamentary democracy and equal rights for all people and races. In its place, Koehler merely repeats over and over 'Wagner is a Nazi - Wagner is a Nazi - Wagner is a Nazi' until in his eyes, it becomes The Eternal Truth. He literally claims that Wagner caused WWII and the holocaust because Wagner is the prophet of whom Hitler was but an obedient disciple who realised his Master's ideology.

It is simply predictable that Koehler should then move on to Nietzsche and try to "undermine" him by saying "Nietzsche is gay - Nietzsche is gay - Nietzsche is gay" until that too becomes The Eternal Truth. The main aim is try to scandalise you with the thought that the Nazis adopted as one of their "prophets", a gay man, whose homosexuality pervades his writing and thought. The fundamentally homophobic thinking that underlines this is that a gay writer's ideas can only understood on the basis of his homosexuality, a consequence of childhood experiences. The implication is that if a writer is gay, everything he writes can and should only be analysed on the basis of this, and this alone: a gay man can not be taken seriously as a writer in his own right. Worse still, he falsely assumes that gay men are necessarily misogynist, and that misogyny is typical of gay men. He will not even contemplate the fact that gay men often form good Platonic friendships with women and that misogyny is more typical of heterosexual men who regard women as little more than petty instruments of their sexual self-gratification. As usual with Koehler, all of this begs the question as to whether Nietzsche was even gay at all - something far from the foregone conclusion that he assumes it is.

Expect the next instalment of this series to push the line that Nietzsche also caused WWII together with Wagner, along with the assertion that "Nietzsche is a gay Nazi" repeated ad nauseam until Koehler is satisfied that he has fully succeeded in ramming this Eternal Truth down your throat.

4 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Borderlands of nightmare, February 20, 2003

By 

John C. Landon "nemonemini" (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Zarathustra's Secret (Hardcover)

Charged with some degree of speculation, this work is nonetheless a significant perspective on Nietzsche that any student of the subject ought to consider. Isn't the author's point, despite a near animus toward his subject, rather clear from the data examined? We need not finalize opinion to be grateful for an examination of a man who lived the discovery of the unconscious, without jargon or theories. You can be genuinely confused by Nietzsche, and the strange riddle of his philosophy deserves a bit of demystification. This was a dangerous subject that routinely confuses all discussion of social equality, 'good and evil', to say nothing of the complex history of Zarathustra, from a starting point that misconceived the nature of Greek tragedy.
With Nietzsche style triumphs over the stark danger of intoxicated encounter with the fringe-border world of the noumenal,and the fragments of the explosion are strewn across a modern philosophical wasteland. I think the author unsufficiently consider this point, the wreckage of a true genius on the shoals of psychological confusions and ambiguity. It takes more than genius to resolve the philosophical heritage Nietzsche encounters, and the result shows the burnout of a facile Schopenhaurian rockstar type, which almost makes the man more interesting. In any case, this was a compelling, somewhat chilling account, that made Nietzsche interesting in a new way. One need not agree with Freud's theories, which their own such legacy, to suddenly see why his efforts to 'lance the wound' of the Victorian psyche made such sense for its time. Fascinating work, if a bit cold for Nietzsche fan clubs.