On The Birth of Tragedy - Friedrich Georg Jünger

Part One

Nietzsche was right when he called The Birth of Tragedy a 'centaur', right insofar as he united disparate figures in this book. The peculiar magic of the writing is clouded, but the careful reader will easily see what is out of place. The Kantian and Schopenhauerian systems fail to deal adequately with the questions they raise, and so too Wagner's music, yet Nietzsche achieves his goal. He manages to make the Dionysian clear and distinguish it from its Apollonian counterpart. It was a discovery from which he would continue to profit, and rightly so, because in it there was much more than his contemporary readers could see. It opened up a world that seemed long lost, a world that no one could have dreamed of. A new way of thinking, a new knowledge of the Greeks is expressed here quite definitely.

It is such a powerful and compelling approach that it must have influenced the whole relation to the Greeks. It is a book with a new outlook, a book that teaches a new way of seeing. The enthusiasm is unquestionable. From this unscientific enthusiasm, at first rejected, benefits may be derived for a long time – and not only for science. The written form is also centauric because it abolishes boundaries, because its disparate ideas cannot fit into any discipline, because there is a struggle between art and science which did not end with Nietzsche himself. Clearly there is a tug-of-war between conflicting tendencies. To compare his influence with other writings, it is enough to remember Winkelmann's first book, Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Bildhauerkunst "Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Sculpture".

This book appeared in 1754, and it was immediately followed by two works in which Winkelmann collected and refuted objections to it. The difference in approach is obvious. Winkelmann and Lessing approached the Greeks through sculpture; they embarked on the path of Apollonian artistry that Goethe and Schiller had followed. On this path are Winkelmann's Monumenti inediti and Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, and Lessing's Laocoon. The other path leads through Klopstock and Hölderlin, and that is where Nietzsche comes in. Hölderlin was the only one who knew about the Dionysian; this knowledge runs so deep in his later hymns that none of his contemporaries took part in it. He remained so lost. The young Nietzsche, who loved Hölderlin, did not know the later hymns; he had to find his own way. There is nothing accidental in this discovery. It is no coincidence that two men of such high status turn to the same questions. We will see how decisive these questions were and how they express the dilemma: can man rise from the ashes, or must he succumb to a mechanised world of his own making?