Age of Anxiety

Europe after 1894 Europeans continued to believe they lived in an area of material and human progress. However, for many this progress included a struggle: ◦ Antagonisms between European countries because of imperialism ◦ Women’s suffrage- leader Emmeline Pankhurst in England ◦ (earliest memory father pitied that she wasn’t born a man, led marches to Buckingham palace, women were bruised and jailed) ◦ Cultural Uncertainty

Cultural Uncertainty Philosophers, artists, and writers were creating expressions that questioned traditional values and incited a crisis of confidence

Friedrich Nietzsche ( ) German intellectual whose radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth lead to a movement called Nihilism

Nietzsche’s Belief’s Reason played a little role in human life because it was at the mercy of irrational life forces ◦ Blamed Christianity ◦ “slave morality” of Christianity had destroyed the human impulse for life and had crushed the human will ◦ “God is dead.” Europeans had killed God and it was no longer possible to believe in some cosmic order. ◦ Eliminate God, and hence Christian morality, make a higher kind of being called Übermensch or“superman.”  Superior intellectual freed from ordinary thinking of the masses. Übermensch acts to create new values within the moral vacuum of nihilism Rejected political democracy, social reform, and universal suffrage  Why?

Misinterpretations of Nietzsche Nietzsche's works remain controversial. Common misinterpretations of Nietzsche include: the notion that he rejected religious spirituality in its entirety ◦ Nietzsche's concept that "God is dead" applies to the doctrines of Christendom, though not to all other faiths: he claimed that Buddhism is a successful religion that he compliments for fostering critical thought that he was anti-Semitic ◦ Nietzsche attacked the principles of Judaism, Nietzsche was not anti- Semitic: in his work On the Genealogy of Morality, he explicitly condemns anti-Semitism that he was entirely opposed to Christian beliefs ◦ He did not attack the teachings and examples of Jesus, but claimed that the Christian faith as practiced was not a proper representation of Jesus' teachings, as it forced people merely to believe in the way of Jesus but not to act as Jesus did that he was an early Nazi ◦ German and Italian fascists selectively adopted some of Nietzsche’s material, which was largely due to his sister’s misintreptration of his work

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche Sister of Friedrich Nietzsche. The siblings were close but grew apart when Elizabeth married a fanatical anti-Semitic agitator. In 1889, Nietzsche suffered a mental collapse that was attributed to syphilis. He was left in care of widowed sister who had recently returned from “Nueva Germania” in Paraguay. She became the promoter of his works. She took great liberties with his material which were misinterpreted to support fascist and anti-Semitic ideology