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Zarathustra's Secret

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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.

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.

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.