Professor Ken Gemes
Nietzsche, Jews, and Germans: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Summary
Professor Ken Gemes explores the intersection of Nietsche, the Jews, and the Germans and explains why this was such a destructive combination of forces.
Professor Ken Gemes
Ken Gemes received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 1990. He came to Birkbeck in 2000 having taught for ten years at Yale University. Ken’s interests range from technical issues concerning logical content and confirmation to Nietzsche’s account of how philosophy is merely the last manifestation of the ascetic ideal.
Well, I’m speaking as a Nietzsche scholar, and Nietzsche talks about antisemites where the reference was, as I say, from Wilhelm Marr, and that was specifically referring to the Jews. I think you have to see it because … the Muslims weren’t on the radar of Germans in the 19th century, because the Muslims were not seen as people living amongst us, a strange people living amongst us. But the Jews were seen very much, in Germans, as these strangers living amongst us and, for people like Wilhelm Marr and others, as a threat. Muslims were a bit off the radar.
That is a very good question. One of his biggest interlocutors, actually, one of the philosophers who argued that compassion was the basis of morality, is a chap called Paul Ree, and he actually had a bit of a struggle with Paul Ree over a notorious female intellectual called Lou Salome, who actually preferred Ree to Nietzsche. So some people have stories to be told here. He also had some young… Pleneth? Plenetha. I’ve got the name wrong. He had a young Jewish follower who he really quite liked. Yeah, Nietzsche knew a few Jews, but I’m not going to say he knew a lot of Jews. But Paul Ree, whose philosophy of compassion he repudiated, was a very close interlocutor of him for a good while, but he was really a secular Jew. A better question would be “did he know any religious Jews?” Nah, I don’t think so.