Part 8 — Peoples and Countries

Part 8 opens with Wagner. The overture to the Meistersinger is, Nietzsche says, "a piece of magnificent, gorgeous, heavy, latter-day art" — and he means "latter-day" with all its weight. It presupposes two centuries of German music as still living, as something the listener carries. It is brilliant and belated at once. The analysis of Wagner here is affectionate in a way the later books are not; Nietzsche is still, in 1886, ambivalent about the man he once admired most. But the cultural diagnosis is already complete: Wagner is Germany's greatest artist and Germany's greatest symptom simultaneously.

Section 242 is the most important in the part. The democratic movement across Europe is producing two simultaneous phenomena: a vast herd of "useful, herd-able, short-willed" Europeans — adaptable, serviceable, efficient, and incapable of commanding themselves or others — and, as its countermovement, the exceptional individual who becomes stronger in reaction against the leveling. This is the dialectic of modernity Nietzsche keeps returning to: the forces that weaken the many are, paradoxically, the same forces that strengthen the few who resist them. Whether Europe will produce more of the former or the latter is the open question.

The sections on Germany are the book's most personal and most nationally specific. Nietzsche is contemptuous of German nationalism (he had been contemptuous since the Franco-Prussian war of 1871) and of the German tendency to confuse cultural depth with political weight. The "good European" who appears throughout Part 8 is Nietzsche's counter-ideal: someone whose culture is broader than any single national tradition, who belongs to the European inheritance as a whole. The figures he names — Goethe, Beethoven — are German but not only German. This is what he means by "good European": not a cosmopolitan without roots but a person rooted in something larger than a nation.