Beyond Good and Evil: Nietzsche and the Great War

It was not the front, but the journey to the front that was the worst: ‘There was some shit in people’s pants, I tell you.’ Two years into the war, Otto Dix had seen it all. In 1914 he had signed up enthusiastically to the field artillery. Back then, people had assumed that victory would be swift in coming, but that hope had been disappointed. A great gash of trenches had come to score the western front. Neither side could force a decisive breakthrough. Now, on the slopes above the river Somme, the British and the French armies were making a concerted effort to smash a hole through the labyrinth of German trenches. All summer the battle had been raging. Dix, approaching the Somme, had been deafened by artillery fire of a volume he had never imagined possible and seen the western horizon lit as though by lightning. Everywhere was ruin: mud and blasted trees and rubble. In his dreams Dix was always crawling through shattered houses and doorways that barely permitted him to pass. Once he had arrived at his post, though, his fear left him. Stationed with a heavy machine-gun battery, he felt mingled excitement and calm. He even found time to paint. Back in Dresden, the famously beautiful city in Saxony where he had been an art student, Dix had experimented with a range of styles. Only 23 when war broke out, and from an impoverished background, the sense of urgency he felt as a painter was that of a man determined to make a name for himself. By night, as Dix huddled beside a carbide lamp with his oils or his pens, flares over no-man’s land would light up corpses grotesquely twisted on barbed-wire entanglements. Then, every morning, dawn would illumine a cratered landscape of death. On 1 July, the opening day of the battle, almost 20,000 British soldiers had been mown down as they sought in vain to take the enemy trenches and another 40,000 left wounded. A fortnight later, every yard of the German lines had been pounded by shells. New ways of killing were being developed. On 15 September, monstrous machines called, by their British inventors, ‘tanks’ grumbled and ground their way for the first time across the battlefield. By the end of the month, flying machines were dropping bombs on the trenches below. Only in late November did the fighting grind to a halt. By that stage, casualties numbered a million. To Dix, hunkered behind his machine gun, the world was transformed. ‘Humanity’, he wrote, ‘changes in demonic fashion.’ On the side of the angels There were plenty, though, who thought themselves on the side of the angels. Back in Saxony, a year before the outbreak of war, a vast monument had been unveiled to mark the centenary of a bloody victory over Napoleon. The centrepiece of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal was a colossal statue of St Michael, winged and armed with a fiery sword. That Germany’s struggle against its foes mirrored the cosmic war of angel against demon was a conviction that reached to the top. The Kaiser, as the war dragged on and a naval blockade of Germany began to bite, grew ever more convinced that the British were in league with the devil. Patriotic Britons, for their part, had been saying much the same about Germany. Bishops joined with newspaper editors in hammering the message home. The Germans had succumbed to ‘a brutal and ruthless military paganism’. They had returned to the worship of Woden. In Germany, The Times announced, ‘Christianity is beginning to be regarded as a worn-out creed.’ The relief of St Michael on the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, Liepzig, Christian Behrens, c.1905. © Deutsche Fotothek. It was easier, perhaps, for armchair warriors to believe this than for soldiers on the front. Behind the British lines at the Somme, in the small town of Albert, there stood a basilica topped by a golden statue of the Virgin and Child. A year previously, the spire had been hit by a shell. The statue had been left hanging precariously, as though by a miracle. Rumours began to spread in both the German and British trenches that whichever side brought it down was destined to lose the war. Yet many, when they looked up at the Virgin, were inspired to dwell not on the calculus of victory and defeat but on the suffering of both sides in the battle. ‘The figure once stood triumphant on the cathedral tower’, wrote one British soldier; ‘now it is bowed as by the last extremity of grief.’ The Virgin, too, had known what it was to mourn a son. Amid the misery and suffering that had become the common experience across the whole of Europe, the image of Christ tortured to death on a cross took on for many a new potency. Both sides sought to turn this to their advantage. In Germany, pastors compared the blockade enforced by the Royal Navy to the nails with which Christ had been fixed to the cross; in Britain, stories of German soldiers crucifying a Canadian prisoner had long been a staple of propaganda. Even so, in the trenches themselves, where soldiers – if they did not find themselves trapped on barbed wire, or riddled by machine gun-fire, or disembowelled by an exploding shell – would live day after day in the valley of the shadow of death, the Crucifixion had a more haunting resonance. Christ was their fellow-sufferer. On the battlefield of the Somme, soldiers would note in wonder their survival amid all the devastation of wayside crucifixes – chipped and pockmarked with bullets though they were. Even Protestants, even atheists, were capable of being moved. Christ was imagined sharing in a jest passed along the trenches, standing beside soldiers in their pain and weakness. ‘We have no doubts, we know that You are here.’ A kind of Golgotha Dix, too, in his dugout, had Christ’s sufferings on his mind. Raised a Lutheran, he had brought a Bible with him to the Somme. In the course of his service on the front, he had seen enough artillery attacks to recognise in their invariable aftermath a kind of Golgotha. With his artist’s eye, he could glimpse in the spectacle of a soldier impaled on a shard of metal something of the Crucifixion. Yet Dix, to a degree that would have confirmed British propagandists in all their darkest suspicions of the German character, scorned to see Christ’s suffering as having served any purpose. To imagine that it might have done so was to cling to the values of a slave. ‘To be crucified, to experience the deepest abyss of life’: this was its own reward. Dix, volunteering in 1914, had done so out of a desire to know the ultimate extremes of life and death: to feel what it was to stick a bayonet in an enemy’s guts and to twist it around; to have a comrade fall over suddenly, a bullet square between his eyes; ‘the hunger, the fleas, the mud’. Only in the intoxication of such experiences could a man be more than a man: an Übermensch. To be free was to be great; and to be great was to be terrible. It was not the Bible which had brought Dix to this conviction. Alongside him in his dugout he had a second book. So stirred was he by its philosophy that in 1912, while still an art student in Dresden, he had made a life-size plaster bust of its author. Not just his first sculpture, it had also been his first work to be bought by a gallery. Discerning critics, inspecting the bust’s drooping moustache, its thrusting neck, its gaze shadowed by bristling eyebrows, had proclaimed it the very image of Friedrich Nietzsche. God is dead ‘Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction? – for even gods putrefy! God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.’ To read these words beside the Somme, amid a landscape turned to mud and ash, littered with the mangled bodies of men, was to shiver before the possibility that there might not be, after all, any redemption in sacrifice. Nietzsche had written them back in 1882: the parable of a madman who one bright morning lit a lantern and ran to the market-place, where no one among his listeners would believe his news that God had bled to death beneath their knives. Little in Nietzsche’s upbringing seemed to have prefigured such blasphemy. The son of a Lutheran pastor, his background had been one of pious provincialism. Precocious and brilliant, he had obtained a professorship at the age of 24; but then, only a decade later, had resigned it to become a shabbily genteel bum. Setting the seal on the sense of a squandered career, he had suffered a mental breakdown. For the last 11 years of his life, he had been confined to a succession of clinics. Few, when he died in 1900, had read the books written in an escalating frenzy of production. Posthumously his fame had grown with startling rapidity. By 1914, when Dix marched to war with his writings in his knapsack, Nietzsche’s name had become one of the most controversial in Europe. Condemned by many as the most dangerous thinker who had ever lived, there were others who hailed him as a prophet. There were many who considered him both. The retreating tide