Abstract:
In an attempt to understand the dilemma between the "values of the German civilization and the destructive forces within the same people that created them," the Austrian-born Brazilian literary critic Otto Maria Carpeaux refutes three theories held then and deems Nietzsche, the "Crucified Dionysus," as the one who experienced and anticipated the contradictory forces of the German spirit. After ananalys is of them is understandings about Nietzsche's reception both in Germanyand in Europe at large upto 1942, the author draws upon the thesis that the German thinker would be simultaneously a poet, a philosopher and a prophet, which could only be possible within a "homo religious," one who would experience the conflict arising from the old Norse barbarousness and that of the new Germanbourgeois class. Gifted with a "Heraclitically structured" intellect, such as that of Hegel, Nietzsche, however, in his position as the "prophet of Europe an nihilism," would have discovered not only "the Heraclitic structure of the German spirit," but, above all, "the path to self-destruction of this spirit." That is, he would have anticipated "the path of nationalism and socialism up to their fusion into National-Socialism."
Keywords:
Nietzsche; germanspirit; conflict; nihilism; nazism