332 Epilogue
(French) civilization. Culture, he explained, is infused with the tragic
Dionysian spirit of music; civilization, as necessary as it may be, is an
outgrowth of the bright, optimistic arena of practicality. Civilization is
rational, whereas culture transcends rationality and becomes musical,
mystical, visual, and heroic. Bertram cited Nietzsche's contention that
"civilization aims at something different from the aims of culture: per-
haps something opposite" (Bertram 108). What would this "opposite"
be? Civilization is self-preservation and facilitation of life; culture main-
tains a bond with the profound problematic issues of life. In the words
of Nietzsche in his first letter to Richard Wagner, on May 22, 1869: "I
have you and Schopenhauer to thank for having managed to hold fast
to Germanic seriousness, to a deepened reflection on this highly enig-
matic and questionable existence" (Β 3,9).
Bertram devotedly explicated two emblematic passages in Nietzsche.
One stems from a letter to Rohde dated October 8,1869, declaring that
Nietzsche cherished the "ethical air, the Fausrian odor, cross, death, and
grave" (Β 2,322) in both Wagner and Schopenhauer. The other comes
from The Birth of Tragedy; in which Nietzsche chose the symbol of "the
knight with death and devil, as Dürer has drawn him for us, the armored
knight with the stern, cold gaze who can pursue his dreadful path
undaunted by his ghasdy companion, yet hopeless, alone with horse and
hound" (1,131; BT § 20) to characterize Schopenhauer's heroic pes-
simism. Thomas Mann also invoked this image to play off a spirit of
German culture, which was heroic, obsessed with death, romantic, and
at the same time disillusioned, against what he regarded as insipid
Western optimism and its naive ideology of reforming the world. This
emblem of knight, death, and devil would go on to make its mark in an
appalling fashion. The knight would become the racially pure Aryan, and
ultimately Adolf Hider himself. Poems, plays, and paintings on this sub-
ject were commissioned and subsidized by the Nietzsche archives, which
were thoroughly infused with Nazism, but they have litde in common
with the tragic poeticism of Nietzsche, Mann, and Bertram.
To Bertram, Nietzsche was himself a knight with death and devil. He