Peter Viereck on Friedrich Nietzsche

“In Nietzsche and [Jakob] Burckhardt the German language had its last great voices of the old Goethean individualism amid the triumphant Bismarck era of statism and mechanized material power. . . . Nietzsche remains unequaled in anticipating out ever-increasing need today for the full, unmechanized personality.”

“The two leitmotifs of the present writer's Metapolitics: From the Romantics to Hitler, 1941, were the rival outlooks of Nietzsche, Wagner: Nietzsche as the voice warning Germany against nationalism, anti-Semitism, herd-collectivism; Wagner as the voice teaching Hitler his Aryan racism, anti-parliamentary leadership-cult, anti-aristocratic cult of the collective "folk." . . . Nietzsche's was the only voice in the 1880's to say that Richard Wagner's folk-romanticism and anti-Semitism would make his German nationalist disciples "the destroyers of both German and European culture."”