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This is an intro the Nietzsche Renaissance in West Germany, an undeniably vital cultural phenomenon of the eighties. Its advent had a certain apocalyptic suddenness. In 1976 Die Welt ran a headline: &dquo;The French love Nietzsche,&dquo;, as if this were some exotic Gallic perversion, but a scant three years later the Frankfurter Rundschau attested a new vogue for Nietzsche in West Germany, and this was taken up and re-proclaimed until the Spiegel of June 8th 1981 bestowed with its cover story and twenty-eight page essay -a compendium of sense and nonsense from sources old and recent -the final cachet of an event of public coa~cer~a.' I The general drift of the Spiegel beat-up was to raise old spectres and clothe them anew. That it should devote two columns to listing commonalities between Nietzsche and Hitler, just as its cover superimposed their heads, re-enacts the central argument of Ernst Sandvoss' book of 1968, to which most reviewers objected then for precisely this crude montage-technique. It also takes us back to what Nietzsche's sister is supposed to have said to Hitler when he visited her in Weimar, and indeed to Luk~cs' view that Nietzsche &dquo;anticipated, in as concrete terms as were possible, Hitler's Fascism.&dquo;2 Before looking at some of the historical factors which have combined to produce the present vogue, I should like to generalise some of the perennial problems of Nietzsche reception. For the sake of convenience, shall group these conundrums under three headings: vulgarisation; the integrity of the literary object; responsibility and authority.Vulgarisation seems endemic in Nietzsche reception from the outset. I believe this is because the greatest vulgariser of Nietzsche is Nietzsche himself. Heinrich Mann, writing in 1945, pointed to a common tendency

Nietzsche is to Hegel what a bird breaking its shell is to a bird contentedly absorbing the substance within. Georges Bataille, 1938. I Georges Bataille's essay The Psychological Structure of Fascism dates from the year 1933. It is a densely written and perspicacious attempt to render commensurable the phenomenon that had emerged and triumphed in Italy and Germany by proposing in little more than twenty pages a comprehensive explanatory model. My discussion sets out to place it in its philosophical, rather than its political context, stressing its dependence on the vulgarized Nietzscheanism of the twenties and thirties, whilst not losing sight of the tensions within ~at~,ille's thought which this creates.Bataille's essay embodies the fascination which political power at its crudest and most charismatic can exert over sophisticated thinkers and also something of the helplessness of philosophical abstraction before such realities as the rise of Mussolini and ~~xtler. A problem inherent in my analysis is that it is much easier to demonstrate the philosophical lineage of Bataille's essay than to specify what derives directly from the political situation in France particularly, and Europe generally, at the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties. The fact remains, however, that Bataille chose to translate his dilemmas into an idiom that, combines concepts from Freudian psychology with others taken from both the Hegelian and Nietzschean traditions of philosophy. While Bataille's method can reveal much of the phenomenon of Fascism, it also tends t,o mask or simplify certain political realities, for the text itself ---~ at NORTH DAKOTA STATE UNIV LIB on June 24, 2015 the.sagepub.com Downloaded from

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