> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://herr-klamm.ghost.io/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # On Nietzsche on Deutschland - URL: https://herr-klamm.ghost.io/on-nietzsche-on-deutschland/ - Published: 2026-08-22T09:06:28.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-22T10:25:41.000Z - Author: Stephen Bender I Just a few reflections on why I haven't visited that country in almost 30 years. I'm possibly only going back because I'm so bitterly disappointed in this one. I can't believe how terrible this economic-poltical system has become. You can't eat enough to vomit enough. Whatever the words would be to denounce free market capitalism and representative democracy in the harshest possible way would be the words I would wish to, but cannot, conjure. I mean, these abstractions are primarily responsible for hurling the planet towards ecological oblivion. For well over a century now, this legacy has been building. And in the land of the free and home of the brave, the greatest country in the history of the world, well, the people are responsible too. Not paying attention, not giving a fuck: those excuses aren't good enough. They aren't even excuses. No, the political-economic elite, too, can't stop bragging about how great their many feats are. Well, with great wealth comes great responsiblity, motherfuckers. Most of the models predicting climate destabilization have been too conservative – as is the wont of the peer-reviewed scientific method in such matters – and now we've got El Nino coming. The AI revolution, pushed with no democratic oversight, is scheduled to radically increase energy consumption, right in the teeth of these unassailable facts. Maybe the bubble pops tomorrow, fine, it's yet another trillion dollars in valuable wasted resources. And for what? In the hopes of developing a job and purpose destroying profit-maximizing Skynet? It's all so fucking stupid. Speaking of fucking stupid, take the Germans. Please. I don't know what the leadership thinks they're accomplishing. As with the elite in the United States, on another very important matter, they, along with the elites of most of the rest of Europe, are committed to a different crime against humanity. With pride. Perhaps it is a triffling thing, when compared with the evermore likely fate of the planet. It is the standard operating procedure of this repellent human race: genocide. I'm not going to bother to adjudicate the details. Everyone knows what it is and has done what they've done, both as nations and individuals. I've done next to nothing, because I'm an acculturated German with American citizenship. It's not my place. Or, if you prefer, it's not my fight and I get that Israel is what amounts to a traumatized nation reenacting the cruelty that was visited upon the Jews of Europe, reenacting it on the innocent people of Palestine. This is the way of the world. It's only human all too human to stoop so low. Why do today's German elites connive in another genocide? I think for the same reason their grandfathers packed people into mass graves like sardines and shot a million people in the head. And then innovated because the spiritual damage was too great. For the murderers. It was 'the smart play'. They figure today it's savvier, in the long run – when Keynes said 'we're all dead' – to align with United States capitalism and World Zionism. It's not a scare word. It's a self-described organization, after all. Whatevers. What does this have to do with Nietzsche. Well, next to nothing. That's just a tangent. The devil himself said "Who, after all, speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians?" on August 22, 1939\. By then the Einsatzgruppen had completed their training at Pretzsch. The Holocaust's beginning is often mistimed, by most historians. It began with Aktion T4 in the fall of 1939, which Hitler back dated to September 1st. Certainly it started no later than September 1st, 1939, the year of my mother's birth. That is the date of the start of the Intelligenzaktion in Poland. Look it up. The Nazis were very intelligent indeed, to proceed gradually, over the course of years, to boil that frog gradually. Both to deceive their public and their victims. Hitler's Willing Executioners was a stupid book, written by a vulgar propagandist, but the question of the complicity of the German people is a worthwhile enough topic for conjecture. As the with church-going Southerners who would gather for a picnic for a lynching, then take photographs and sell the resultant postcards; or, the GI's in Vietnam with their ear necklaces and atrocity photographic trophies, the word was out once Wehrmacht detachments took part in Einsatzgruppen crimes against humanity. Some little Aryan boys came home spiritually disturbed and the fathers, shell-shocked as they were from World War I, knew motherfucking well what was up. And, in a very German way... said nothing. Unimportant in the pitiful scheme of things, but nevertheless worth mentioning, is that the Nazi swine went to considerable lengths to conceal the escalating genocide. It was the highest Geheimereichsache after all. Hitler never signed a document for a reason. Goering kind of authorized it schriftlich in either August or October of 1941\. Nobody wanted even their fingerprints on the thing in itself. We all know about Wannsee, which was orginally scheduled for early winter of 1941, but, you know, had to be rescheduled due to unforseen difficulties with the Judeo-Bolsheviks at the gates of Moscow. By the way, the German film Die Wannseekonferenz, done back in the 1980's, is a salutory effort to depict this tedious bureaucratic German procedure, held in a modern suburban villa. The American remake was good too, but didn't capture the pettiness and bureaucratese sufficiently. If you can draw some inferences from these facts as it relates to the current public postures of the Israeli government and general public, good for you. I'm not going to bother to spell it out, because that wouldn't be very German of me. It is what it is. What does this have to do with the gist of Nietzsche? Well, not very much, as I mentioned already. Just wanted to get that off my chest. II How do you like this new approach? No pandering songs or pathosy snaps. I did that as an experiment. Y'all can read just the text. I get that. It was more just to make the syrup of ipicac go down smoother. I judge it a failure, if feedback is anything to go by, of which there has been precious little. With one notable exception, there's been next to nothing, actually. An oblique attaboy, here and there. Which is fine. I'm meant to have gone through so much recently, after all. Well, all that family Sturm und Drang has passed now. In the end, it meant and means nothing to me. Nothing that matters, when compared to the systemic problems facing the human race: genocide and auto-genocide. The little genocide and the big genocide. Klein v. Gross Deutschland, as a metphor, if you will. And should it recur, it will be ignored. So, let's see how just ruthless text goes over. Like a lead balloon, more than likely. See how I interpose sentences so that you have to read it again to see what's being referenced? It's an old Fred technique. Leo Strauss and Heidegger pulled similar shit. Just throw in a couple run on sentences and the reader is thoroughly confused. If you're obscure enough, then only a special class can decipher it. And proceed accordingly. I find their writings pretty impenitrable and hence excreble. But I get it. Why come right out and say what human beings really are? Why bother? It would be unproductive. You have to cheer them on, in spite of themselves. Positive reinforcement rather than negative reality. The Frankfurt School people pushed Freudian psychology and Marxist economics. This was an error, even if it amounts today to an engagingly written spasm of jargon. I like it fine, but it is not aging as well as it could have, because both of these two dogmatisms are dubious, if interesting as a matter of intellectual history. Less and less, though, with each passing year. The Austrian economists are pretty awful, but probably not worse. Some of them are decent, like Schumpeter and Szasz (not an economist, but informed by them). Hayak was an appalling fascist sympathizer vis-a-vis Pinochet's Chile. Murray Rothbard put Lew Rockwell and hence Ron Paul up to putting out a racist newsletter, which they sorta kinda apologized for. Mostly they chickenshit denied it, which is typical of humans. It's some of the intellectual undergirding for the Trump regime, as many Paultards went thata way quickly enough. What does any of this have to do with Nietzsche? Nothing, actually. It's just some bullshit I wanted to get off my chest. A palate cleanser, if you will. Bart Simpson, a great American Philosopher said: 'My job is reptitiveness. Repetitiveness is my job'. Or, if you prefer: 'All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy'. III In Beyond Good and Evil #245 Fred, my father's middle name, but the formally used one, performs "a vivisection of the German soul". My aunt could make neither heads nor tails of it. My parents got a good bit of it. I think I can relate to maybe three quarters of it. Some of it is word play, some of it is dated, some of it is spot on. Fred did a lot of jokes. Most people don't realize that. He presented himself as being descended from Polish aristocrats, which wasn't true, but he enjoyed tweaking the Germans. They certainly deserved that. And a bit more. They're such arrogant shits. Maybe that's where I get it from? Takes one to know one. The observation that I enjoy the most is the following. 'Foreigners stand amazed and fascinated before the riddles posed for them by the contradictory nature at the bottom of the German soul (brought into a system by Hegel and finally set to music by Richard Wagner). ‘Good natured and vicious’ – such a conjunction, preposterous in relation to any other people, is unfortunately justified all too often in Germany: let anyone live for a while among Swabians!' I was born and grew up in Swabia. I think he's kidding around with this, but Bavaria is the heart of Germany's darkness and I guess the Swabians had a reputation. I think the Austrians are worse, and not by dint of Hitler's technical birthplace, either. They were disproportionately sent out to Lublin to administer Aktion Reinhard. Never heard a dissenting peep out of Globlotnik and Co. Hitler's people came out of Carinthia, which is the heart of Austria's darkness. So, you know. The kernel of the thing is 'good natured and vicious'. I've been told, a time or two, that I can be 'very cruel'. And this is true. But only when provoked. I'm quite content to be good natured. And the readership here, all six of you, I think have experienced the good natured side, for the overwhelming majority of our collective interactions over the years. It's my default positioning and where my heart lies, in any event. Just to say, Germans are both of these things, especially Bavarians. As for Prussians? I can't speak to them. They're cold and northern. Imperious rule followers. Pedantic and industrious. Kind of a drag to get to know. They look down on Bavarians, and I don't begrudge them that. But, to say it again, they're kind of a drag. And since we're kicking around regional types, the worst of the Prussians are the Silesians. Deep multi-generational contempt for them. Look up Festung Breslau if you want a taste of that bunch. They laid down their arms two days after Berlin surrendered. Wroclaw lies some 300 miles southeast of Berlin. When it comes to military derring do, they're the worst of the bunch. That's right. Wroclaw, motherfuckers. This is getting long-winded and boring. You can read the original text. #245 Beyond Good and Evil. See what you make of it, if you want to bother. Let me know. Nietzsche was afraid of the Germans as David Bowie feared Americans. They can be pretty awful. They hide behind their 'Mephistopheles Art'. The relevant passage is here. 'The ponderousness of the German scholar, his social bad taste, gets along alarmingly well with an inner rope-dancing and easy boldness which has taught all the gods what fear is. Whoever wants a demonstration of the ‘German soul’ for the eyes should merely look into German taste, into German arts and customs: what boorish indifference to ‘taste’! How the noblest stands right next to the meanest! How disorderly and rich this whole psychic household is! The German drags his soul along: whatever he experiences he drags. He digests his events badly, he never gets ‘done’ with them; German profundity is often merely a hard and sluggish ‘digestion.’ And just as all chronic invalids, all dyspeptics, love comfort, the German loves ‘openness’ and ‘Biederkeit’\*: how comfortable it is to be open and ‘bieder’! Perhaps the German of today knows no more dangerous and successful disguise than this confiding, accommodating, cards-on-the-table manner of German honesty: this is his true Mephistopheles-art; with that he can ‘still go far.’ Anymore, I get sick of writing after more than two hours. And it's getting there. So, let me be American and 'bottom line' it. It's always 'time to move on' in this flash-in-the-pan 'civilization'. The French premier Clemenceau had the Americans' number: 'America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilisation'. He said that over 100 years ago. Mencken had similar observations. This thing has been going to pot for a long time, according to those wits anyway, and it's still here floundering around. Well, the Chinese are going to put a stop to all that. And it will be 'a page of glory, never to be written' by American talking heads and then historians. More Fred: 'I meant to say: whatever ‘German profundity’ may be – when we are entirely among ourselves, perhaps we permit ourselves to laugh at it? – we shall do well to hold its semblance and good name in honor of the future, too, and not to trade our old reputation as a people of profundity too cheaply for Prussian ‘pluck’ and Berlin wit and sand. It is clever for a people to make and let itself be considered profound, awkward, good-natured, honest and not clever: it might even be – profound. Finally, one should live up to one's name: it is not for nothing that one is called the 'tuische' Volk, the Täusche-Volk, deceiver people.^ \*forthright ^This is by no means the accepted German etymology of Deutsch'. They are deceiver people, though. As all humans are, to one degree or another. It's very boring. The Germans flagelate themselves for the Holocaust to this day. In public. They're as annoyed at Israel – the general public, not the leaders – as the American public is. Privately. But when it comes to foreign policy – my area of uncontestable expertise, if I do say so myself – the general public has no say. The country is irrelvant. For good reason. They'd put a stop to the reindeer games of the leaders. Whether dressed up in the guise of neoconservatism or humanitarian interventionism or realism – the alleged tripartite contrapodes, which amount to the same wars of aggression and genocide in practice, it's an elite matter and 'to hell with the public' in John D. Rockefeller's formulation. Well, back then, they did manage to pass the Sherman Anti-Trust Act and it did smash Standard Oil into a dozen pieces. So, now, its tentacles are a many headed hydra. Sort of like the Rothchilds and a dozen other power groupings around the world, about which I know little, and care less. Another boring digression. The German elite are embarassing. That's my main beef with them. They have no pride, in the best since of that charged term. You allowed the Americans and Israelis to reduce your history to a 5 year span. Well, fuck you for your pantomime of regret. Stop doing that. It's undignified. And now, it's untenable. Take a page from America's book: move on. Merkel said the purpose of the German state is to protect Israel. Bitch, and to the liberal-minded German middle classes along with her, the bitchez? Suck on this. That formulation isn't Staatraison, it is Staatsverrat.