The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, often wrongly associated with Nazi ideology due to his sister’s later manipulations, was in fact a vocal critic of antisemitism and German nationalism during his lifetime. Nietzsche’s writings and personal letters reveal a thinker deeply opposed to the xenophobic currents of 19th-century Europe, even calling antisemitism a “stupidity” and dismissing nationalist fervor as a “disease.” This stance put him at odds with many contemporaries, including his former friend Richard Wagner, whose antisemitic rants Nietzsche eventually deemed “unbearable.”
Nietzsche’s disdain for antisemitism was both philosophical and personal. In works like Beyond Good and Evil (1886), he mocked the “moralistic hysteria” of anti-Jewish sentiment, praising Jewish intellectuals as “the strongest, toughest, and purest race now living in Europe.” His correspondence was even blunter: in an 1887 letter, he raged against his sister Elisabeth for marrying Bernhard Förster, a prominent antisemitic agitator, writing, “I am having a violent attack of rage… these accursed anti-Semite deformities shall not sully my ideal!” Förster later co-founded a failed Aryan colony in Paraguay, a venture Nietzsche dismissed as “pure idiocy.”
The irony, of course, is that after Nietzsche’s mental collapse in 1889, Elisabeth took control of his unpublished works and selectively edited them to align with her own antisemitic and nationalist views. She even hosted Adolf Hitler at the Nietzsche Archive in 1934, presenting her brother as a proto-Nazi thinker—a distortion Nietzsche himself would have loathed. Scholars now agree that Elisabeth’s edits, particularly in The Will to Power, were instrumental in warping his legacy. The Nazis’ later cherry-picking of phrases like “will to power” or “Übermensch” (overman) ignored Nietzsche’s explicit rejection of herd mentality and racial hierarchies.
Nietzsche’s critiques of German nationalism were equally scathing. He ridiculed the “beer-swilling patriotism” of his countrymen, writing that “Germany is a great nation only because its people have so much beer and so little sense.” His ideal of the “good European” championed cultural exchange over tribalistic pride, a stance that made him a contrarian in an era of rising jingoism. Even his famed concept of the Übermensch was less about Aryan supremacy than individual self-overcoming—a call to transcend societal norms, not enforce them.
The humor here is darkly historical. Nietzsche spent his career attacking the very ideologies later forced onto his corpse by opportunistic bigots. Imagine his ghost facepalming as Hitler quotes him at rallies. The philosopher who wrote, “Madness is rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, nations, it is the rule,” would likely have found the 20th century’s horrors tragically predictable.
Today, Nietzsche’s reputation is slowly being rehabilitated. Modern editions of his works strip away Elisabeth’s edits, revealing a thinker more aligned with existential freedom than fascist dogma. His warnings against tribalism and blind obedience feel eerily prescient in an age of populist movements. So, while the myth of “Nietzsche the Nazi” persists in pop culture, the truth is sharper: he’d have probably written a blistering takedown of the Third Reich—if he hadn’t already died of syphilis. Some legacies, it seems, are doomed to be misunderstood. But at least Nietzsche got the last laugh: his mustache is iconic, while Hitler’s remains a punchline.
