Europe Discovers Nietzsche 329What spiritual substance did the war bring to light? Some claimed it
was a victory of idealism. For a long time, idealism had been stifled by
materialism and utilitarianism. Now it was breaking through, and people
were once again prepared to sacrifice themselves for nonmaterial val-
ues—for nation, fatherland, and honor. Ernst Troeltsch called this
hawkish attitude a return to "faith in the spirit," which was triumphing
over the "worship of money," "hesitant skepticism," "pleasure-seeking,"
and "dull resignation to the laws of nature" (Troeltsch 39). Others,
namely the Nietzschean adherents of Lebettspbilosophie, regarded war as
the release of vital forces that had been in danger of growing numb dur-
ing the long period of peace. They celebrated the natural power of war,
claiming that culture would finally reestablish contact with the elemental.
Otto von Gierke defined war as "the most powerful of all destroyers of
culture and at the same time the most powerful of all conveyers of cul-
ture" (Glaser 187).
At the beginning of the war, Nietzsche was already so popular that
150,000 copies of his Zarathustra were printed in a special edition and
handed out to the soldiers at the front along with Goethe's Faust and the
New Testament. The distribution of Nietzsche's book to these fighters
conveyed the impression to the British, Americans, and French that
Nietzsche was a warmonger. A letter by the great novelist Thomas
Hardy typified the British reaction to Nietzsche: "I should think there is
no instance since history began of a country being so demoralized by a
single writer." (Aschheim 130). A London bookseller dubbed the war
the "Euro-Nietzschean War" (Aschheim 128). Nietzsche's American
popularizer, H. L. Mencken, was even arrested and charged with being a
war agent of "the German monster, Nietzsky [sic\" (Aschheim 131).
There are certainly numerous passages in Nietzsche that commend
martial prowess. A famous excerpt from Twilight of the Idols, often quoted
at the time, can serve as one example among many. "The human being
who has become free, and all the more the ^/n/who has become free,
tramples on the despicable type of well-being dreamed of by shop-
keepers, Christians, cows, females, Englishmen, and other democrats.