ght for the day: Stefan Zweig on Nietzsche or America? // (Steven Hayward)

One of the most offensive lines in Allan Bloom’s Closing the American Mind was the assertion that the America of late 1980s was “a Disneyland-style version of the Weimar Republic.” (Though Disney may be complicit in this story).

Bloom’s comment was brought back to my mind as I was reading Stefan Zweig’s 1925 book on Nietzsche. (Appropoof not much, my last conversation in 2019 with Herbert Meyer was about our mutual interest to Zweig. It was shortly before the tragic bike accident that claimed his life. He’s some Zweig’s commentary about Nietzsche’s solitude and desolation that was so important to Nietzsche’s thinking (can anyone imagine Nietzsche participating on a standard academic panel discussion?) ):

This desolation is so horrifying and ghastly, and so truly grotesque because it occurred in an Americanized Germany, a country of approximately seventy million people. It was in the rattling of telegraphs, trains, and cries of tumult at the center a morbidly perurient culture that every year launches forty thousand volumes into this world, that searches around a thousand problems in a hundred universities, and that every day plays tragedies in hundreds

It is both interesting and ironic to use the phrase “Americanized Germany”. Bloom pointed out, following Leo Strauss, that we live in a “Germanized America” today. You can find your own parallels and remedies from here.