Your German literature! I don't know what is the matter with it. I fancy all the brains must go into the General Staff or the administration. The whole life of Germany and all your institutions are spreading the most hideous uniformity, and even authorship is stifled by publishing.
Your obliged and respectful,
GEORGE BRANDES.
6. NIETZSCHE TO BRANDES.
Nice, Feb. 19, 1888.
You have laid me under a most agreeable obligation with your contribution to the idea of "Modernity," for it happens that this winter I am circling round this paramount problem of values, very much from above and in the manner of a bird, and with the best intention of looking down upon the modern world with as unmodern an eye as possible. I admire—let me confess it—the tolerance of your judgment, as much as the moderation of your sentences. How you suffer these "little children" to come unto you! Even Heyse!
On my next visit to Germany I propose to take up the psychological problem of Kierkegaard and at the same time to renew acquaintance with your older literature. It will be of use to me in the best sense of the word—and will serve to restore good humour to my own severity and arrogance of judgment.
My publisher telegraphed to me yesterday that the books had gone to you. I will spare you and myself the story of why they were delayed. Now, my dear Sir, may you put a good face on a bad bargain, I mean on this Nietzsche literature.
I myself cherish the notion of having given the "new Germans" the richest, most actual and most independent books of any they possess; also of being in my own person a capital event in the crisis of the determination of values. But this may be an error; and, what is more, a piece of foolishness—I do not want to have to believe anything [of the sort] about myself.
One or two further remarks: they concern my firstlings (the Juvenilia and Juvenalia).
The pamphlet against Strauss, the wicked merrymaking of a "very free spirit" at the expense of one who thought himself such, led to a terrific scandal; I was already a Professor Ordinarius at the time, therefore in spite of my twenty-seven years a kind of authority and something acknowledged. The most unbiassed view of this affair, in which almost every "notability" took part for or against me, and in which an insane quantity of paper was covered with printer's ink, is to be found in Karl Hillebrand's Zeiten, Völker und Menschen, second volume. The trouble was not that I had jeered at the senile bungling of an eminent critic, but that I had caught German taste in flagranti in compromising tastelessness; for in spite of all party differences of religion and theology it had unanimously admired Strauss's Alten und Neuen Glauben as a masterpiece of freedom and subtlety of thought (even the style!). My pamphlet was the first onslaught on German culture (that "culture" which they imagined to have gained the victory over France). The word "Culture-Philistine," which I then invented, has remained in the language as a survival of the raging turmoil of that polemic.