334 EpilogueEleusinian bond of friendship, and everyone assembles around the cult
of Dionysus, this "future God" who sanctifies Goethe's principle of
"expire and expand," pleasure and passion, agony and ecstasy. Bertram
blended Nietzsche's and Stefan George's religion of art in the following
statement: "The existence of the pinnacle of human achievement and
the eternal efficacy of the forces that have shaped man into man from
the outset depend on an inexplicable force somewhere in the world, an
intellectually productive and soul-uniting force existing and being prac-
ticed and passed along. If this force occurs two or three times in the
name of God somewhere in the world, and again and again—that alone
is what preserves the world" (Bertram 343). This God is Dionysus, who
was conjured up by Nietzsche and who returns with him. By 1938,
Bertram was no longer striking these delicate, elegiac tones and no
longer favoring the thoughts that "come on doves' feet" (4,189; Ζ
Second Part, "Stillest Hour"). Instead, he depicted the knight with death
and devil in the Nazi newspaper Der völkische Beobachtern a homegrown
self-assured peasant figure, a combination of Faustian man, lansquenet,
and mystic. This metamorphosis did not, however, necessarily follow
from Bertram's earlier ambitious book on Nietzsche, which was dedi-
cated not to the ancient Norse berserker who fought with frenzied rage
in batde but to the German Dionysus.
The second influential study of Nietzsche that was published in
Germany between the two world wars was Alfred Baeumler's Nietzsche:
Der Philosoph und Politiker (Nietzsche: The Philosopher and Politician,
1931). The Will to Power; which was compiled from Nietzsche's Nachlass
by his sister and the staff of the Nietzsche archives in Weimar and pub-
lished in 1906, had barely figured in Bertram's book, because Bertram
focused on Nietzsche as a Dionysian. Baeumler, however, who was to
compete with Alfred Rosenberg for the top ideological spot in the
National Socialist Party after 1933, gave particular emphasis to a very
different side of Nietzsche, namely the philosopher of power. In
Baeumler's view, it would be more fitting to ascribe Nietzsche's doc-
trines to a Greek philosopher who really existed than to a god the