Contemporary reaction to BT was divided, but on the whole it was overwhelmingly negative - a mixture of condemnation and indifference (Howald 1920, 22-30; Grunder 1969; Silk and Stern 1981, 90-107; Calder 1983). To Nietzsche’s surprise, the initial blow came in May 1872 from a fellow Schulpforte alumnus and potential ally. Wilamowitz was twenty-three years old at the time and ready for action. Unlike Nietzsche, he had earned his Berlin doctorate the hard way, by writing a dissertation. Irked by what he saw as Nietzsche’s preferential treatment by the Leipzig faculty and his disdain for historical truth and scholarly method, two of the ‘‘untouchable’’ and ‘‘sacred’’ values fostered at Schulpforte, he wasted no time and responded with a vitriolic pamphlet that tore BT to shreds, castigated its author for his lack of competence and frivolous manipulation of the truth, and catalogued a host of factual errors with merciless glee (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1872, published less than five months after BT). Furthermore, he rejected as un-Hellenic Nietzsche’s vision of an archaic Greek culture awash in Dionysiac ecstasy, mysticism, and irrationalism. And finally, he ridiculed Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for Wagner’s music and sarcastically parodied the anti-Wagnerian slogan ‘‘Zukunftsmusik’’ (‘‘music of the future’’) in the title of his pamphlet, Zukunftsphilologie! (‘‘philology of the future’’). Led by Erwin Rohde, a scholar whom Wilamowitz later learned to admire, Nietzsche’s friends came to his rescue, only to elicit another barrage of criticism from Wilamowitz (Rohde 1872, Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1873).
Within a matter of months, BT became a cause celebre as well as a source of acute embarrassment. Ritschl, once Nietzsche’s staunchest supporter, dismissed it as a youthful ‘‘flight of fancy,’’ and Hermann Usener (1834-1904), who thought highly of Nietzsche’s early work in Greek doxography, regarded BT as ‘‘sheer nonsense’’ and pronounced its author ‘‘dead in the eyes of scholarship’’ (in Benders and Oettermann 2000, 199 and 282). The acrimony of the debate took its toll on Nietzsche; it alienated him even further from classics as an academic discipline and effectively prevented him from writing another book on the Greeks. On the positive side, ‘‘it accelerated in Nietzsche the process of obtaining clarity about himself’’ (Landfester 1994, 521). The most immediate victim of the controversy over BT was the book itself, not its author. In 1886, Nietzsche republished his ‘‘impossible book’’ with the new subtitle ‘‘Hellenism and Pessimism’’ and prefaced it with ‘‘An Attempt at a Self-Criticism’’ in which he distanced himself from the tone and tenor of BT with disarming self-irony and with a host of unanswered, and largely unanswerable, questions. Nietzsche’s second thoughts did nothing to improve the fortune of his book. For more than a century after its publication, BT was ostracized by the mainstream of the classical profession, which was loath to acknowledge its existence.
From a strictly historicist perspective, that is in terms of attested historical fact, Wilamowitz was for the most part right in his criticism of Nietzsche. As far as the history of tragedy is concerned, a more mature Wilamowitz set the record straight once and for all in his monumental Introduction to Greek Tragedy (= Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1959, vol. 1), in which BT is nowhere mentioned and the meaning of tragedy and the tragic is not addressed. Half a century after the confrontation with Nietzsche, Wilamowitz looked back to the episode, admitting that his juvenile attack had been misguided (Mansfeld 1986). Still, he saw ‘‘no reason for remorse’’ and even took credit for making Nietzsche abandon philology and embrace philosophy (Wilamowitz-Moellendorff 1928, 129-30). In 1928, the vast majority of classicists still rallied around Wilamowitz, but in hindsight, telltale signs of a gradual paradigm shift toward Nietzsche and a more dynamic and differentiated view of Greek culture and its ambivalences were already visible or soon to appear inside and outside the profession.
Shortly after Nietzsche’s death in 1900, avant-garde German writers, artists, and intellectuals in search of a ‘‘new life’’ rediscovered Nietzsche’s Dionysus with the help of BT and initiated a Dionysian renaissance that culminated in Walter F. Otto’s Dionysos of 1933 (Vogel 1966, 247-80; Cancik 1986; Landfester 1994, 521-26). In England it was Jane Harrison who became a convert to Nietzsche and his idea of the polarity of Apollo and Dionysus as a cultural force (Henrichs 1984, 229-34). An eminent interpreter of Dionysus in her own right, she declared herself a ‘‘disciple’’ of Nietzsche and acknowledged her debt to him in two groundbreaking and influential books (Harrison 1903, 1912; Schlesier 1994, 123-92).
During and after Wilamowitz’s lifetime several of his own pupils, most prominently Paul Friedlander and Karl Reinhardt, did not disguise their admiration for Nietzsche, and their work shows how much they were influenced by him (Lloyd-Jones 1979 and 1983, 247-49; Calder 1983; Henrichs 1995). Yet the same Reinhardt could still declare in 1942 that ‘‘the history of philology has no place for Nietzsche.’’ He should have known better. In a collection of essays on the status of classical studies during the Weimar Republic (Flashar 1995), the names of Wilamo-witz, Nietzsche, and Werner Jaeger stand out and are mentioned more often than those of any other classicists.
Fifteen years after Wilamowitz’s death, Thomas Mann expressed surprise that Wilamowitz had ‘‘dared to as much as open his mouth after his attack on Nietzsche’’ and pronounced that ‘‘he was of no account as an intellect’’ (in a letter to Karl Kerenyi dated 15 July 1936; see Calder 1977, 281). In several of his works, Mann adopted the wild and ecstatic images of Dionysus propagated in Nietzsche’s BT and Rohde’s Psyche. Mann’s creative engagement with BT was not an isolated case. For more than a hundred years, Nietzsche’s first book has found a huge and receptive audience among poets, critics, and intellectuals. Apart from Mann, readers of BT intrigued by Nietzsche’s two ‘‘art forms’’ of the Apollinian and Dionysian, his construct of ‘‘madness’’ as a positive cultural force, and his reflections on Greek tragedy include William Butler Yeats, Ruth Benedict, Eugene O’Neill, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, and Peter Szondi, to mention only a few.
The Wilamowitz-Nietzsche struggle, as it has been dubbed, was not merely a row among extremely young and immature scholars (Lenson 1987, 14) but a paradigmatic clash of two giants over seemingly conflicting principles - historical truth and imagination, scholarship and art, or academia and life (Henrichs 1995) - on which neither side could compromise. The issues are still before us, but positions are less hardened today. Wilamowitz may have won the battle, but he lost the war. His pamphlet has been largely ignored, whereas Nietzsche’s BT enjoys unrivaled success today, and current notions of pre-Hellenistic Greek culture are closer in spirit to Nietzsche than they are to Wilamowitz. Depending on one’s criteria, BT can be read in multiple ways - as a paradigm of inspired cultural criticism (the prevalent reading), as a continuation of the author’s philological work that contains the seeds of his later philosophy (Porter 2000a), or as a splendid piece of historical fiction - a ‘‘historical novel’’ (Howald 1920, 19) that has a plot, divine and human protagonists, a victim, and a not so happy ending; in short, all the trappings of a Greek tragedy (Henrichs 2004). Apart from its sublime prose, the very fictionality of BT and the powerful imagination that produced it are, I believe, among its most enduring assets. If BT had been based on hard facts, it would have long since been replaced by more recent attempts to reshuffle the known data. Nietzsche’s daring vision and its impact on generations of readers must be one of the reasons why Richard Rorty chose to include BTin his list of‘‘brilliantly iconoclastic books’’ that inaugurated ‘‘paradigm-shifts in disciplines such as classics, philosophy or comparative literature’’ (Rorty 2004, 4).
World History
