to such publicity would have been Kant, who was widely discussed in German
magazines of the late 1780s; but the large-scale mass media did not exist yet in
the twentieth-century sense. Sartre was the equivalent in philosophy of the publicity
which elevated into media figures, among scientists, Einstein in the 1920s, and
among writers, Hemingway in the 1940s. Within France, André Malraux had
achieved some of this standing of front-page publicity in the 1930s with his exotic
adventure-cum-writing exploits (Lacouture, 1975).- We see the same thing again with Sartre, whose first major production, Nausea,
takes its surface content from his own situation as a provincial lycée teacher in Le
Havre. - Deussen became a pupil of Zeller, and thus connects Nietzsche indirectly to the
main Hegel network (Figure 13.1). Pforta had been Fichte’s secondary school as
well. A younger schoolmate of Nietzsche, Ulrich Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, who
later became the preeminent classicist of his day (and grandteacher of the herme-
neutic philosopher Gadamer), made his first statement by critiquing Nietzsche’s
Birth of Tragedy of 1872. Pforta was in fact the only Gymnasium which offered
a truly elite curriculum in the 1850s–1870s; it selected most of its students for
scholarships, and more than 30 of its pupils went on to become full professors at
German universities, including Liebmann (originator of Neo-Kantianism) and
Paulsen (Mueller, 1987: 29). Nietzsche was a product of the cutting edge of
education in the German school system. - Although Nietzsche hated the anti-Semitic movement, he is within two links of it
through two different connections: via Wagner to the latter’s son-in-law Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, and via his own sister to his brother-in-law Foerster, who
was an anti-Semite politician. From a network point of view, it is no surprise that
Nietzsche’s philosophy became associated with this movement. - Wagner was in the first wave of those who recognized Schopenhauer in the
mid-1850s, sending him the Ring libretto, as yet musically unscored, with a
dedication. Schopenhauer replied politely but preferred, as a musical traditionalist,
Mozart and Rossini; he suggested that Wagner had more genius as a poet (Safran-
ski, 1989: 347). - The king of Bavaria had inherited in 1864 a palpably weak state in the geopolitics
of the day, soon to be swallowed up in the unified German Empire through the
wars of 1866–1871. His status equalization with Wagner is a case of aristocracy
on the downward track meeting the market star on the upward slope. Wagner on
his side was vituperatively scornful of musicians who let the popular market dictate
their musical style, singling out Meyerbeer for connivance with the cliques and
even bribery associated with his success at the Paris Opéra. Wagner’s anti-Semitism
originated in this rivalry with the commercially more successful Meyerbeer. - Lindenfeld (1980: 115–116). Ehrenfels also was an ardent Wagnerian and a mem-
ber of the Wagner network (thereby linking Kafka indirectly to Nietzsche), and a
friend of Wagner’s son-in-law, the social Darwinist–racist H. S. Chamberlain.
Given the oppressiveness of anti-Semitism in Kafka’s milieu, Ehrenfels showed his
idiosyncrasy by concluding that the solution to racial decadence was free-breeding
sexuality by means of polygamy.
1022 •^ Notes to Pages 768–772