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Comment by Zuider | Hacker News Reader

Hitler was also a voracious reader with a private library of some 2000 books. Surprisingly, Schopenhauer appears to have been Hitler's favorite reading rather than those books of Nietzsche which proclaim the right of the amoral Superman to impose his will on all, or the repulsive racist theories of Alfred Rosenberg and Houston Stuart Chamberlain which surface in Mein Kamph.

Maybe it was Schopenhauer's notion of the noumenal will being the prime mover that gave Hitler the notion that anything could be achieved if only it was willed strongly enough, hence the title of the infamous Nazi propaganda movie, Triumph Of The Will. Hitler was found to have developed a system of annotating passages with a system of colored pencils. Presumably there was a lot of angry red.

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Nietzsche was staunchly against nationalism, socialism, and Prussian militarism. Pretty much the anti-Hitler.

Nietzsche was also contemptuous of anti-Semitism. Like Machiavelli, his ideas and motivations were misunderstood and reduced to caricatures in the popular mind. It did not help that Elizabeth Nietzsche, his sister who survived him, was a fanatical supporter of Hitler, who edited his books to make them appear supportive of National Socialist ideology. For this reason, the older editions of Nietzsche's works available free online from such sites as Project Gutenberg are worthless.

He is one of those frequently quoted, rarely read, often misunderstood - and this association is unfortunate, unfair, and not accidental.

Sometimes I find this very depressing. Nietzsche's the rare philosopher who wrote very clearly. He spent his life struggling to be absolutely clear and make himself understood. But the vast majority of secondary literature is just completely wrong, sometimes to the point of almost being libelous - I have Bertrand Russel's section on him in a History of Western Philosophy in mind as an example.

The end result is that most people have no idea what Nietzsche thought and believed, but he gets held up as an example of something he spent his life fighting.

In Poland, there was a relatively famous historian of philosophy recommended to people interested in philosophy, Władysław Tatarkiewicz and his three tomes of Historia filozofii.

His chapter on Nietzsche was also just disastrous, while reading this, I had wondered whether he even knew who Nietzsche was.

So it's not just one time thing.

I remember reading that chapter - though I wish I had forgotten it. It made me look at Russell in a negative way.

Funny because Nietzsche eventually worked himself into such a state of opposition to prevailing German thought that he claimed to be descended from Polish nobles

He rails against Nihilism, but is the poster boy for being a nihilist.

Ironic.

Nietzsche's quest was to discover how to lead the good life despite the implications of nihilism.

https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1626069-4chan

I just can't help but share this meme from 4chan about Nietzche here.

If you stare too long into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you

His sister modified his works and tried to make it famous in Nazi Germany. This is the reason for the association.

I wonder if those books were just for show, or for merely confirming/justifying his pre-existing beliefs. Hitler apparently loved to hold after-dinner "discussions"(mostly soliloquies), and by all reports his viewpoints on the topics that he himself was obsessed with were extremely banal and unsophisticated.

Hitler does appear to have actually read the books as evidenced by the passages marked by coloring pencil. There is not any ready evidence that he gleaned any deep wisdom or moral edification from his reading, and it is far more likely, given his temperament, that he only read to reinforce his prejudices, and that he would become furiously impatient with anything he did not readily understand.

Given that, it is one of history's great disappointments that Martin Heidegger never met his hero. One could imagine Der Fueherer's face twitching in increasing rage as Heidegger effused about the great leader's seminal position in the hierarchy of being-in-the-world, leading in short order to a defenestration.

I'm far from a fan of Hitler, but I wonder why it's possible to talk about Stalin as an inspiring figure when the number of people he has killed is comparable (if not greater) than Hitler's victims (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excess_mortality_in_the_Soviet...)? Ok, they were mostly "his own" people, but arguably that makes it even worse, not better?

I remember reading somewhere (Speer's autobiography?) that Hitler had a photographic memory for books. He could recall whole sections of books and knew on what pages of a book these pages were.

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