“Silberblick.” Bright moment, lucky chance. A sunny day in Weimar, November 1991. Hedwig, 38, waits solemnly for me in the town square still known as Karl Marx Platz (formerly Adolf Hitler Platz). A spirited, voluble woman, Hedwig has been eager to show me the cultural splendors of her hometown—the Goethehaus, the Schillerhaus, the Liszthaus, all lining the Frauenplan in the center of old Weimar. But today she is reluctant; today, warm morning rays beaming down upon us, Hedwig seems reserved as we stride along the Schillerstrasse toward the outskirts of town. Today our destination is Humboldtstrasse 36, the Villa Silberblick, home of the Nietzsche Archive, which opened in May to the public for the first time since 1945. Hedwig hands me a May issue of Die Zeit. “The Banished One Is Back!” blazons the headline: The reopening of the Archives has been the cultural event of the year in Weimar. As we walk, I muse on the significance of the return to eastern German life of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900): the author of notorious neologisms and catch phrases such as the Will to Power, the Übermensch (Superman), the Antichrist, master and slave morality, the blond beast, the free spirit, the last man, eternal recurrence, “God is dead,” “Live dangerously!” “Become hard!” “philosophize with a hammer,” and “beyond good and evil”; the writer who inspired thinkers such as Heidegger, artists such as Thomas Mann, and men of action such as Mussolini; the philosopher exalted by the Nazis and reviled by the communists. No discussion of eastern German education “after the Wall”—and the ongoing political re-education of eastern Germans—would be complete without reference to the return of the writer regarded as the most important educator in Germany during the first half of this century. Indeed, Nietzsche als Erzieher (Nietzsche as Educator) was the title of a popular book in Wilhelmine Germany written by Walter Hammer, a leader of the Wandervögel (birds of passage) youth movement.
