5 People connecting Nietzsche to Marx

What Nietzsche said about Marx 

 

 

[crickets]

...and this is kinda weird, because, check out all these connections between Marx and Nietzsche:

1. Heinrich Heine

Heinrich Heine was a famous poet in Germany who lived from 1797 to 1856 - he is indeed widely regarded as one of Germany's greatest poets of all time.  He was also an older relative of Karl Marx, and wrote perhaps his most famous poem, a fiery political poem called "The Silesian Weavers," for Marx's newspaper, Vorwärts!.

Nietzsche knew who Heinrich Heine was, and respected him enormously.  It's rare, in Nietzsche's writings, to find him saying anything nice about anyone.  But he had a lot of nice things to say about Heine.  Indeed, in a parenthetical remark in section 21 of the "Skirmishes in a War with the Age" chapter of Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche identifies only four German writers who are, as he puts it, "European events" - and not merely local or national characters: Goethe, Hegel, Schopenhauer - and Heine.  This shouldn't come as a surprise.  Not only was Heine a great poet in his own right, enormously popular, and greatly daring and influential in his style, but also several of his poems were adapted into music by composers Nietzsche revered such as Schumann and Schubert.

In fact, in Ecce Homo, he writes:

It was Heinrich Heine who gave me the most perfect idea of what a lyrical poet could be. In vain do I search through all the kingdoms of antiquity or of modern times for anything to resemble his sweet and passionate music. He possessed that divine wickedness, without which perfection itself becomes unthinkable to me,—I estimate the value of men, of races, according to the extent to which they are unable to conceive of a god who has not a dash of the satyr in him. And with what mastery he wields his native tongue! One day it will be said of Heine and me that we were by far the greatest artists of the German language that have ever existed, and that we left all the efforts that mere Germans made in this language an incalculable distance behind us.

So is it plausible that Nietzsche was totally unaware of Heine's friend and relative, Karl Marx?  Perhaps - they were, after all, fairly distant relations.  If I have this right, I believe that Marx and Heine were third cousins, once removed.  They were, however, good friends.

2. Giacomo Meyerbeer

Giacomo Meyerbeer was an established composer, whose works were very popular and critically acclaimed in his day.  He had been the student of Carl Friedrich Zelter, who was a close friend of Goethe, and Meyerbeer's family (his birthname was Beer) was also friends with the Humboldt brothers.  He was quite commercially successful, and helped launch the career of several other composers - especially a certain young protege of his by the name of Richard Wagner.  On the basis of Meyerbeer's recommendation, Wagner was able to stage some of his earlier operas, and of course went on to perpetual fame.  The influence of Meyerbeer on his young protege was enormous and widely recognized; Hans von Bülow once caustically remarked that Wagner's Rienzi was "Meyerbeer's best opera".  

But all of that changed in 1850, when Wagner, enraged by Meyerbeer's popularity and his own relative obscurity, published his notorious pamphlet, "Jewishness in Music."  This hateful anti-Semitic screed, though it did not mention Meyerbeer by name, was clearly directed at his mentor, who happened to be Jewish.  The pamphlet was successful - Wagner suddenly became the toast of young, vicious anti-Semites in Europe, and Meyerbeer became hated and forgotten.  It was a major event in the opera world, and a foreshadowing of the rise of the Nazis almost a century later.  It also led to a famous split between Wagner and Nietzsche.

I have long suspected that Nietzsche's fascination with, and love of, Bizet's Carmen might be at least in part a sense that in Carmen he saw a revival of something like Meyerbeerian opera.  Bizet, like Meyerbeer, could be seen as the "pop" side of opera.  (And Bizet once described Meyerbeer as an "overwhelming, dramatic genius" - clearly, he was an important influence.)  Watching an opera by Meyerbeer or by Bizet, one has a feeling of fresh air.  They weren't afraid to be dramatic, exciting, melodic, entertaining, (using all sorts of stage effects, like trap doors and so on) dare I say - fun?, even occasionally silly, and sometimes scandalously sexy.  Their songs are delightfully and inescapably catchy.  This kind of opera is a far cry from Wagner, with his long, dreary, ponderous, ominous, "philosophical," dark, intense, brooding, and always oh so serious high art.  There is a distinct avoidance of and revulsion toward sexuality in Wager's work.  Women, to the extent they exist, are either chaste, honorable warriors, who pursue with determined duty a sexless love, or, if they exhibit any sexuality at all, they become either self-destructive tragedies like Isolde or horrifying monsters like Kundry.  (That is, there is a revulsion towards sex in the text of Wagner's operas.  The music, on the other hand, is nothing but sex.)  Nietzsche turned away from the cold, northern European Christian pessimism of Wagner to the hot, sunny, sexy Mediterranean.

But there's another aspect to Meyerbeer's story: in addition to his career in the opera, he was also the chief financier of Vorwärts!, the German-language newspaper of Paris, famous for being the most radical journal of the time, at which were employed Heinrich Heine, Mikhail Bakunin, Friedrich Engels, and a certain young writer and editor by the name of Karl Marx.

3. Bruno Bauer

Nietzsche once referred to Bruno Bauer as his "entire public" - i.e., that Bauer was the only one who read his philosophy, or at least read it well, and so Nietzsche wrote for Bauer and Bauer alone.  Thus Bauer is of incalculable importance for understanding Nietzsche.  One cannot hope to understand Nietzsche's works without knowing that this elderly philosopher, 35 years Nietzsche's senior, was his audience.

But long before Nietzsche made this famous declaration, Bauer had another young protege: a man by the name of Karl Marx. 

4. Max Stirner 

Johann Kaspar Schmidt is better known by his pen-name, Max Stirner.  He is best known for his book, "Die Einzige und Sein Eigentum," which has been translated various ways, perhaps most famously as "The Ego and Its Own."  He was one of the philosophers known as "Die Freien," (the free) who hung out at a bar called Hippel's in Berlin, where he would debate with some of his friends - which included Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Bruno Bauer and Arnold Ruge.  Later, he wrote for the Rheinische Zeitung (Rhineland News) which Marx was then editing.  Engels suggested to Marx that Stirner's philosophical ideas might form a philosophical basis for their political movement, an idea Marx angrily rejected.  When they wrote The German Ideology, a huge portion, written mostly by Marx, was devoted to rejecting Stirner's philosophy.

Later, after Marx broke with Bauer, Bauer became impressed with Stirner and started promoting his ideas.  It is widely believed that Stirner's philosophy became a major influence on Nietzsche, and I have to say that I'm one of those who is convinced, though admittedly the evidence is rather thin.  (There's an entire Wikipedia page on this topic.)  There are circumstantial connections: Nietzsche was friends with Hermann Mushacke, whose father, Eduard Mushacke, was friends with Stirner. Hans von Bülow, the first husband of Cosima Wagner, was friends with both Stirner and Nietzsche.  Nietzsche's friend, Franz Overbeck, also claimed that Nietzsche had given a copy of Stirner's book, with his warm recommendation, to his student, Adolf Baumgartner. 

5. Mikhail Bakunin 

Bakunin, widely regarded as one of the founders of the anarchist movement, famously had a brief, uneasy friendship with Karl Marx before the two fell out, leading to a major split in the First International at the Hague Congress in 1872.  Before that, however, he had become friends with Wagner, and the two of them fought alongside one another in the Dresden Uprising of 1849.  Of course, Nietzsche was only 5 years old at the time.

But given all of the (admittedly, somewhat tangential) connections between Marx and Nietzsche, it seems impossible that Nietzsche would never have even heard of Marx.  So why did he never once mention Marx in all of his writings?  His silence may say more than his words could.