The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner

Translator’s Introduction

This was Nietzsche’s first book. It is far from being his best book, but the Attempt at a Self-Criticism that Nietzsche placed at the beginning of the new edition of 1886 is among the finest things he ever wrote. Perhaps no other great writer has written a comparable preface to one of his own works. Certainly this self-criticism is far superior to most of the criticisms others have directed against The Birth of Tragedy.

Before considering briefly the most famous critique of the book, it may be well to suggest something of its importance. Apart from the fact that this essay has been widely admired and is generally taken for one of Nietzsche’s major works, its significance may be said to be threefold.

First of all, The Birth of Tragedy is, for all its faults, one of the most suggestive and influential studies of tragedy ever written. Perhaps only Aristotle’s Poetics excels it. What other study of tragedy could one place beside it? Only Hegel’s scattered remarks on the subject—many of them to be found only in posthumously published, and very badly edited, lectures. It is arguable that all three philosophers were wrong about the fourteen extant plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles and the nineteen of Euripides. But there is no denying that Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche have vastly enriched the discussion of tragedy—probably more so than anyone else.

Secondly, The Birth of Tragedy does not deal only with tragedy—nor only with tragedy and with Wagner: it also deals with the relation of art to science, with the whole phenomenon of Greek civilization, and with the modern age. On all these subjects Nietzsche has much to say that is interesting, and a good deal that is exceptionally brilliant and penetrating.

Finally, some of the distressing faults of the essay are inseparable from its third claim to importance. Nietzsche was probably Germany’s greatest prose stylist as well as one of the most profound and influential modern philosophers. But much of The Birth of Tragedy is badly overwritten and murky, as Nietzsche himself pointed out in section 3 of his Attempt at a Self-Criticism; and occasionally a more extreme contrast to his later style—both literary and philosophical—would be difficult to imagine. To appreciate fully his later accomplishment, one should know his beginnings. Indeed, it is one of Nietzsche’s central points in the book that we cannot do justice to the achievement of the Greeks and the triumph of those powers of restraint that he calls Apollinian unless we first behold the unrestrained Dionysian energies that the Greeks managed to harness. Similarly, his own later style, so remarkable for its lucidity and aphoristic brevity, seems doubly impressive when we compare it with the prose he himself found so embarrassing by 1886—prose that at times, particularly in the last ten sections, reads like a parody of Wagner.

It is partly, though not only, on account of this third point that the book should not be read by itself, without knowledge of Nietzsche’s later writings. And no other essay forms as perfect a pair with it as the exceedingly brief and malicious Case of Wagner, here offered in the same volume.

One corollary of what has just been said must be noted expressly. Confronted with the occasionally hyperromantic and turgid prose of The Birth of Tragedy, it is tempting for the translator to tone down what offends his own taste and to make the style leaner and drier. But I have made a point of resisting this temptation. To the extent to which one gives in to it, one makes nonsense of parts of Nietzsche’s brilliant Attempt at a Self-Criticism, and one deprives those interested in Nietzsche’s development of the opportunity to see for themselves to what extent Nietzsche changed. A faithful translator should strive to let Rilke sound like Rilke, Heidegger like Heidegger, The Case of Wagner like Der Fall Wagner—and The Birth of Tragedy like Die Geburt der Tragödie.

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The first edition of The Birth of Tragedy was published in 1872, when Nietzsche was twenty-seven. It was immediately attacked by a young philologist, Ulrich Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, in an unbridled polemical pamphlet entitled Zukunftsphilologie!¹ Wagner’s music was then called music of the future, and Wilamowitz tried to expose Nietzsche’s philology of the future—a philology devoid of Greek quotations and footnotes.

Actually, there was much more to the attack than this. Nietzsche had been called to a chair at the University of Basel in Switzerland in 1869, and promoted to a full professorship of classical philology the following year—at the age of twenty-five. His doctoral degree had been conferred by the University of Leipzig without his having written a dissertation, on the basis of the call to Basel. That call, in turn, had been based on a superlative recommendation by Professor Ritschl, who had published articles by Nietzsche in the philological journal he edited and who had informed Basel that Nietzsche is the first from whom I have ever accepted any contribution at all while he was still a student. The tenor of Ritschl’s estimate of Nietzsche is perhaps best summed up in his sentence: He will simply be able to do anything he wants to do.² Nietzsche’s appointment to a chair at twenty-four was a sensation in professional circles, and it was to be expected that in his first book he would try to show the world of classical philology that his meteoric rise had been justified. Instead—he published The Birth of Tragedy, the kind of volume that could not be expected to appeal to the guild at any time, least of all to German professors in the new Empire, founded the year before.

Wilamowitz (1848–1931) was four years Nietzsche’s junior, had just received his doctorate but not yet the title of professor—and the attack on Nietzsche was his first book. He did try to establish the range and solidity of his scholarship by cataloguing Nietzsche’s faults—and he saw nothing good at all in The Birth. His attack culminated in a charge of ignorance and lack of love of truth (p. 32).

Nietzsche’s friend Erwin Rohde replied, still in 1872, in a pamphlet he called Afterphilologie³ to signify a perversion of philology. Luther had liked the prefix After, which refers literally to the human posterior; Kant, too, had used it in his book on religion (1793); and Schopenhauer had spoken of Afterphilosophie when he attacked the philosophy of the universities. Rohde tried to show how many of the mistakes Wilamowitz claimed to have found in The Birth involved errors on his part. But Rohde also called Wilamowitz repeatedly our Dr. phil. (our Ph.D.)—Rohde himself had just received the title of professor, though he was not yet a full professor—and the pasquinader;⁴ and the level of his polemic was no higher than that of the attack he sought to meet. Two quotations may show this:

I have emphasized this example because it may serve you as a sample at the outset of the manner in which throughout this pasquinade ignorance, the art of eager slander, and speculative reliance on the blind prejudices of the general reader are woven together into an attractive whole (p. 10).

… really no more similar than an ape is to Heracles—indeed, even less; about as similar as our Dr. phil. von Wilamowitz is to the type of the ‘Socratic man’ whom our friend [Nietzsche] designates as the ‘noblest opponent’ of an artistic culture, although our Dr. phil. rather amusingly supposes that the designation fits him and the likes of him (p. 12).

This last passage is important because it also illustrates Nietzsche’s high esteem of the Socratic man. Afterphilologie, to be sure, was written by Rohde, not Nietzsche; but the two men were very close friends at that time, and the point of Rohde’s pamphlet was to expose misinterpretations of The Birth of Tragedy.

In 1873 Wilamowitz replied once more with a sequel to his Zukunftsphilologie.⁵ The tenor of his reply may be gleaned from a remark near the end: I should waste my time and energy on the inanities and wretchednesses of a couple of rotted brains? (p. 23). Later, both Wilamowitz and Rohde made great reputations as classical philologists and never reprinted these early essays—presumably because they felt embarrassed by them.

Rohde, incidentally, had published a review of The Birth of Tragedy in the Norddeutsche allgemeine Zeitung, Sunday, May 26, 1872, before Wilamowitz’s pamphlet appeared. And in 1882 he published a very critical and hostile review of Wilamowitz’s Antigonos von Karystos (1881) in the Litterarische Centralblatt. Both of these reviews were reprinted in his Kleine Schriften (2 vols., 1901).

Nietzsche never referred to Wilamowitz in any of his works and went his own way without letting resentment eat into his soul. There are a few references to Wilamowitz in Nietzsche’s letters of 1872 and 1873; but the most revealing passage is found in a letter to Rohde, March 19, 1874:

"To refute Dräseke’s⁶ contribution to the question of Wagner, of belly-shaking memory, Herr Bruno Meier⁷ has written a lengthy and weighty treatise in which I am solemnly denounced as an ‘enemy of our culture,’ besides being represented as a wily deceiver among those who are deceived. He sent me his treatise personally, even furnishing his home address; I will send him the two essays of Wilamops. That’s surely Christian beneficence toward one’s enemies. For the delight of this dear Meier over Wilamops will surpass all words."

To explain Nietzsche’s nickname for Wilamowitz: Mops is the German word for a pug, but the term was actually used to refer to a person with a disgruntled facial expression before it was transferred to the dog; it designates the quintessence of the comic, stupid, coarse, unfriendly, and inelegant. Mopsig means boring; sich mopsen, to be bored. Mops seems to be related etymologically to the English mope.

Nietzsche took Wilamowitz’s attack very lightly; yet it has been claimed that Wilamowitz finished Nietzsche as a philologist, and even that Nietzsche retired in 1879, after only ten years as a professor, because the students stayed away as a result of Wilamowitz’s polemics. In fact, the size of enrollments had nothing to do with Nietzsche’s decision.

It may be of some interest to indicate what he taught and to note how few students he had all along. During his first year he gave the following courses (the number of students is indicated in each case in parentheses): Aeschylus’ Choephori (6), Greek Lyric Poets (7), Latin Grammar (8). The next year: Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex (11), Metrics (5), Hesiod’s Erga (11). The third year: Introduction to the Study of Philology (9), Introduction to the Study of Plato’s Dialogues (6), Introduction to Latin Epigraphy (9). In the summer of 1872, after the publication of The Birth, Nietzsche lectured on Pre-Platonic Philosophers (10) and Aeschylus Choephori (7); but that winter he had only two students in his Greek and Roman Rhetoric, and neither was a philologist. This drop in the number of students was surely due to Wilamowitz’s first polemic. By the next summer, however, his lectures on the Pre-Platonic Philosophers drew eleven students; in 1876 the same course drew ten, and his lectures On Plato’s Life and Doctrines nineteen. In 1878, finally, just before his retirement, he had more students than ever, though certainly not many: Hesiod’s Works and Days (13), Plato’s Apology of Socrates (6), Greek Lyrical Poets (13), Introduction to the Study of Plato (8). These data may give some idea of Nietzsche’s career as a professor of classical philology, which was not exhausted by The Birth of Tragedy.

About the book opinions still differ, as they do about all of Nietzsche’s works. F. M. Cornford, one of the leading British classicists of the first half of the twentieth century, known to generations of students for his translations of many Platonic dialogues and his remarkable commentaries, said in From Religion to Philosophy (1912) that The Birth was a work of profound imaginative insight, which left the scholarship of a generation toiling in the rear.

For all that, Wilamowitz had a point, though he was completely blind to Nietzsche’s merits. Some of the philology of the future aped the manifest defects of Nietzsche’s book without partaking of his genius—and, by a remarkable irony of fate, Nietzsche himself was to suffer a great deal, posthumously, from pseudo-scholars who substituted effusive prose for precision and correctness.

On the whole, however, the general estimate of posterity has been much closer to Cornford’s view, and he himself and Jane Harrison have done a good deal to sustain Nietzsche’s central intuitions.

In 1965 Professor Gerald F. Else followed up his monumental analysis of Aristotle’s Poetics (1957) with a short study of The Origin and Early Form of Greek Tragedy⁸ in which he argues that Aristotle, Nietzsche, Gilbert Murray, and the Cambridge school have all been importantly wrong about the origin of tragedy. He shows his usual mastery of the whole literature, and in his notes at the end of the volume he gives abundant references to recent literature on the subject. Those wondering about the current status of some of the problems raised by Nietzsche may be referred to Else’s work. But it is noteworthy that, in spite of his radical disagreement with Nietzsche, Else should say, "The Birth of Tragedy is a great book, by whatever standard one cares to measure it (p. 10). And he adds: The Birth of Tragedy has cast a spell on almost everybody who has dealt with the subject since 1871."

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What is of lasting importance is not the contrast of the Apollinian⁹ and Dionysian as such: that smacks of Schopenhauer’s contrast of the world as representation and the world as will; and playing off two concepts against each other like that is rarely very fruitful, though it has been a popular pastime among German scholars.

When The Birth appeared, the prevalent conception of the Greeks was still that pioneered by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) and adopted by Goethe (1749–1832): edle Einfalt, stille Grösse, noble simplicity, calm grandeur. Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), utterly unable as a critic to maintain the level of his poem Dover Beach, had only recently led this view to the absurd with his famous formulation: sweetness and light.¹⁰ Nietzsche used Apollo as a symbol for this aspect of Greek culture which found superb expression in classical Greek temples and sculptures: the genius of restraint, measure, and harmony. Far from depreciating what he called the Apollinian, he argued that one could not appreciate it sufficiently until one became aware of another side of Greek culture that was barbarous by comparison and found expression in the Dionysian festivals. Surely, The Bacchae of Euripides shows us passions that are worlds removed from the Greece of Winckelmann, Goethe, and Arnold; and Nietzsche claimed that the same boundless and cruel longing to exceed all norms is also occasionally encountered in the Iliad¹¹ and in subsequent Greek poetry—and the birth of tragedy cannot be understood apart from it.

A careful reading of The Birth shows that Nietzsche, far from glorifying the Dionysian, argues that the achievements of the Greeks generally, and their tragedies in particular, cannot be understood adequately so long as we do not realize what potentially destructive forces had to be harnessed to make them possible. On this central point Nietzsche was surely right. If one wants a single well-written book which abounds in quotations and references that document this dark side of ancient Greece, there is probably none better than E. R. Dodds’s superb study of The Greeks and the Irrational,¹² which also abounds in references to other recent literature on this subject.

The Birth of Tragedy reaches its first great climax in section 7, which is of interest also in connection with French existentialism. Then the book moves on to suggestions about the death of tragedy. For over forty years the ridiculous claims of Richard Oehler, in Friedrich Nietzsche und die Vorsokratiker (1904),¹³ were repeated by one interpreter after another—even after Oehler had thoroughly discredited himself with one of the most unscrupulous books ever to have come from a writer with some scholarly pretensions, Friedrich Nietzsche und die Deutsche Zukunft (1935),¹⁴ an attempt to identify Nietzsche with the aspirations of the Nazis, who had come to power in 1933. In the interim, Oehler had compiled two huge indices for the two most complete editions of Nietzsche’s works, the latter index (for the so-called Musarion edition) comprising two and a half volumes. This did not prevent him—on the contrary, it enabled him to stud his book of 1935 with utterly misleading quotations that seem to say the opposite of what Nietzsche actually says on the pages from which they are taken. At best the earlier volume shows that Oehler’s stunning lack of intellectual integrity was fused with a limited intelligence and an appalling inability to understand Nietzsche. But this man was one of the pillars of the Nietzsche Archive, established by the philosopher’s sister, and one of the editors of the works.¹⁵

Neither Oehler nor his early book would deserve mention here if that book had not been used and echoed uncritically by A. H. J. Knight in the only English full-length study of Nietzsche’s relation to the Greeks,¹⁶ and if Knight had not been relied on uncritically by Ernest Newman, Crane Brinton, and Erich Podach.¹⁷ To catalogue Oehler’s mistakes here would be pointless; but two of them have been repeated so often that it seems necessary to repudiate them specifically.

First, the young Oehler claimed that the early Nietzsche was completely under the influence of Schopenhauer, and a pessimist (p. 28). In fact, however, Nietzsche’s very first book, The Birth, constitutes a declaration of independence from Schopenhauer: while Nietzsche admires him for honestly facing up to the terrors of existence, Nietzsche himself celebrates Greek tragedy as a superior alternative to Schopenhauer’s Buddhistic negation of the will. From tragedy Nietzsche learns that one can affirm life as sublime, beautiful, and joyous in spite of all suffering and cruelty.

Second, Oehler understood The Birth as a manifesto against Socrates and Socratism. In fact, Nietzsche is no more against (or for) Socrates than he is against (or for) Apollo or Dionysus. His whole way of thinking is far removed from such crudities. And Nietzsche was as right as most of his interpreters, following Oehler, have been wrong when he said in 1888, in Ecce Homo, in the first section of his own analysis of The Birth: It smells offensively Hegelian, and the cadaverous perfume of Schopenhauer sticks only to a few formulas.

Socrates is introduced in The Birth with the reverence befitting a god, the equal of Apollo and Dionysus. Of course, Nietzsche’s critical powers do not spare even gods, and he finds Socrates deeply problematic. He always approached Socrates in this manner, stressing now his admiration, now his objections, and sometimes, as here, both at once.¹⁸ Indeed, the two sections (14 and 15) in which the discussion of the death of tragedy reaches its climax—the second great highpoint of the book—suggest that but for Socrates Greek culture might have perished altogether; also that the influence of Socrates necessitates ever again the regeneration of art; and finally even that we need an artistic Socrates.

Apollo and Dionysus reached a synthesis in tragedy; this synthesis was negated by Socrates; and now another synthesis is wanted, an artistic Socrates. Could Plato be meant? On the contrary. Those who feel that Nietzsche is unfair to Socrates and that Socratism is not opposed to tragedy should reconsider Plato’s resolve, in the Republic, to tolerate no tragic poets in his ideal city, as well as the older Plato’s remarks on tragedy in The Laws. The artistic Socrates is Nietzsche himself. He looks forward to a philosophy that admits the tragic aspect of life, as the Greek poets did, but does not sacrifice the critical intellect; a philosophy that denies Socrates’ optimistic faith that knowledge and virtue and happiness are, as it were, Siamese triplets; a philosophy as sharply critical as Socrates’ but able and willing to avail itself of the visions and resources of art.

For all that, one need not accept Nietzsche’s view of the death of tragedy, though it has been served up to us again and again in the twentieth century. This is not the place to offer sustained criticisms of his theses; but to stimulate reflection I suggest that Nietzsche is blatantly unfair not to Socrates but to Euripides—and that the death of tragedy was far better explained by Goethe, when he said to Eckermann, May 1, 1825:

Man is simple. And however rich, manifold, and unfathomable he may be, yet the circle of his states is soon run through. If the circumstances had been like those among us poor Germans where Lessing wrote two or three, I myself three or four, and Schiller five or six passable plays, there would have been room for a fourth, fifth, and sixth tragic poet. But among the Greeks with their abundant production, where each of the three great ones had written over one hundred, or close to one hundred, plays, and the tragic subjects of Homer and the heroic tradition had in some cases been treated three or four times—in view of such an abundance, I say, one may suppose that subject matter and contents had gradually been exhausted and poets writing after the three great ones did not really know what next. And when you stop to think about it, why should they? Wasn’t it really enough for a while?… After all, these few grandiose views that have come down to us are of such dimension and significance that we poor Europeans have been occupying ourselves with them for centuries and will yet have food and work enough for a few more centuries.

Unfortunately, The Birth of Tragedy does not end with Section 15, as an early draft did and as the book clearly ought to. Another ten sections follow that weaken the whole book immeasurably.

Sections 1 through 6 are introductory and inferior stylistically. The heart of the book is found in Sections 7 through 15, which deal with the birth and death of tragedy. This is by far the best part of the book and can probably be understood fairly well by itself. Sections 16–25 are less worthy of Nietzsche than anything else of comparable length he ever published—and he himself soon felt this. The book as a whole, though it has a touch of genius, is