Page 54 - GALIET BEAUTY´S LURE: WAR Helen of Troy and Margareta of Germany IV

to loving the beauty of wisdom, and knowledge, until seeing “a wondrous thing,” the Form of Beauty itself.”98 No, instead, its aesthetic extremism leads not to the glorious classical virtues of justice, wisdom, temperance, and courage by contemplating true beauty, but to a repudiated barbarism in the abyss of despotism and war. It leads to Nietzsche’s theatre of Dionysus, and worse, to a grotesque phantasmagoria, to its irrational festival of cruelty, an ecstatic heedless orgy of whim, will and woe.99
Paris’ and Hitler’s reckless desire to keep and possess Helen’s and Margareta’s terrible sublime, by whatever savage means, leads to the fulfillment of Nietzche’s whim, will, and woe: the rebirth of tragedy. Humanity, thus, descends to what Nietzsche dismisses: that tragedy can also be sordid and give origin not to the superhuman, but to the infrahuman. Wagner’s tragedies, just as Sophoclean and Aeschylean ones, reinforce beauty and superiority of race, nationhood, morality and identity. These influenced Hitler’s aesthetic ideology.100 Nietzche’s notion of tragedy, in this sense, is completely nineteenth century: it is shrouded in an optimism masked in creative pessimism. It is true that it is necessary to unmask superficial optimism and see existence in its natural, tragic horror, but an Apollonian German Spirit turned Dionysian is
98 Plato. Symposium. 209e-212c.
99 In German these words signify Wahn, Wille, Wehe. Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy posits these are the mothers of tragedy, and that by means of these, humans descend to the Dionysian. Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Ed. Edmund Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Chapter 20.
100 Shirer, William. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A History of Nazi Germany. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960. 3-28.
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