Europe Discovers Nietzsche 337bring peace to conflicting parties would wind up becoming a party to
these conflicts itself. After all, he noted, even the Jewish God had waged
jealous batde against the other gods. He, too, distinguished only friends
and foes among both men and deities. In the Gospel of Saint Matthew,
Jesus declares that he has not come to bring peace, but a sword. Only
after swords have done their work can they become plowshares, accord-
ing to the wisdom of Heraclitus.
Baeumler, like Michel Foucault several decades later, regarded
Nietzsche as a philosopher who radically pursued the contingency of
the battling bodies and the contending forces that underlie existence.
Baeumler asserted that we can learn from Nietzsche that there is no
"mankind," but only concrete, defined entities in a state of conflict with
one another. These entities are "a race, a people, a class" (Baeumler 179).
Nietzsche would not have used these terms. Although he would have
concurred that the individual is a concrete entity, he would have been
quick to point out that this individual is a relatively recent product of
history. Since the individual has existed, the complex of power relations
has become still more complicated and confusing. Baeumler's exclusive
application of Nietzsche's will to power to "race," "people," and "class"
set the stage for his own racial and nationalist ideology; he threw in
Nietzsche for good measure. The result is ideological assessment and
falsification. Baeumler wrote that "anyone whose thought is guided by
the body cannot be an individualist" (Baeumler 179). Nietzsche, how-
ever, had already proven that one can, and Michel Foucault would go on
to prove it once again.
Other authors of the "new right" of that period went even further in
linking Nietzsche's philosophy of the will to power and biologism, typ-
ically with the backing of his sister and the Nietzsche archives in
Weimar. Nietzsche's call to put a stop to reproduction by the weak and
infirm was iterated in very crude terms. A widely circulated tract by Karl
Bindung and Alfred Hoch, which argued for the "Release of Unworthy
Life in Order That It Might Be Destroyed" (Aschheim 163), made spe-
cific reference to Nietzsche.