The Tarantulas and the Coming of World War I
Nietzsche’s portrait of the tarantulas—“poisonous spiders” driven by resentment, envy, and a thirst for revenge—describes not only a psychological type but a cultural mood. In his vision, these are people who speak the language of justice while burning with the desire to wound; people whose praise conceals a sting; people who become judges not out of wisdom but out of jealousy. “They are like enthusiasts, yet it is not the heart that fires them—but revenge. And when they become elegant and cold, it is not the spirit but envy that makes them elegant and cold.” They are cold, as in rational, speaking intelligently. But they are not actually concerned with knowledge. The academic life has become a sort of game that they want to win, and they are in it to win, so they become envious of others. The life of the mind easily goes in this direction, and that is what Nietzsche identified in the nineteenth century, and it is what Harry saw, and it is part of what led to WWI. The Europeans spoke as though they were full of life and bringing life to foreign peoples through colonialism, but they it became a struggle for power and prestige between the great powers.
Nietzsche’s image of the tarantulas provides a striking lens through which to view the cultural tensions, inward frustrations, and appetite for “overcoming” that shaped German thought in the years leading to the First World War. Harry viewed himself as divided between two natures: “a human and a wolfish one.” He had loved the intellectual life, but had failed to find objective meaning. Harry explains the problem at one time in terms of the path that German academics in general had taken: “the German intellectual has constantly rebelled against the word and against reason and courted music.” From Kant onward, German philosophers struggled unsuccessfully to overcome skepticism and they looked for meaning and fulfillment in various versions of philosophical idealism and utopian nationalism. As German intellectual life advanced through the 19th and into the 20th century, along with advances in the German economy and industry and culture, the German people were continually discontent.
Harry’s conflict mirrors the same inward crisis Eksteins identifies in German culture before the First World War. The discontent that led the Germans to war was, ironically, evident in Harry the pacifist. In the words of Modris Ekstein, “Germans in the imperial era seemed particularly susceptible to secular idealist notions that ultimate reality was spiritual, and that the material world not only could but ought to be transcended by ideals.” Furthermore, “many Germans by the end of the century came to attribute to their supposed enemies those characteristics which they so wished to surmount in themselves.” They came to see Anglo-French civilization as “based on rationalism, empiricism, and utility; in other words, on externality. This was a world of form, devoid of spiritual values: it was a culture not of honesty and true freedom but of manners and superficiality, and dissimulation.” German Kultur, by contrast, was said to be concerned with ‘inner freedom,’ with authenticity, with truth rather than sham, with essence as opposed to appearance, with totality rather than the norm. German culture was a matter of “overcoming,” a matter of reconciling the “two souls” that resided in Faust's breast. Richard Wagner's contribution to the German perception of Kultur in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was of particular importance. His vision of German opera aimed not only at uniting all the arts but also at elevating his Gesamtkunstwerk, his total art work, to a position where it was the supreme synthesis of and expression of Kultur, a combination of art, history, and contemporary life in total drama, where symbol and myth became the essence of existence. Even politics was subsumed into theatre. Wagner's influence on German consciousness and his role in the emergence of a modern aesthetic as a whole are difficult to exaggerate.”
It was the Magic Flute that was dearer to Harry than anything in the world. He was looking for fullness in music, but was not seeing it in philosophy. With no foundation in basic beliefs, the pursuit of intellectual life in music was a false hope that many Germans had fallen for, along with other falsehoods, and Harry was caught in that same trap.
When war did come in 1914, the German people thought they had finally overcome the divisions within themselves and achieved unity. “In the jubilation of August 1914 Germans genuinely believed that this goal had been achieved, that the condition of war had in fact brought about a condition of peace, of ‘overcoming.’ Conflicts and differences had been set aside, and Germans had finally achieved that unity, spiritual and physical, which Bismarck had tried, but in the end failed, to bring about.”
Nietzsche warned that the tarantulas would preach “in favor of life, but only because they wish to hurt,” and that beneath their moral language lay the will to sting, to judge, to take revenge. In the cultural energies that fed German nationalism before 1914—the envy of other nations, the projection of weaknesses onto the outside world, the longing for purity, unity, and “overcoming”—the poisonous impulse he described can be heard. The tarantulas wanted power in order to wound; and once the nation believed it had found unity in war, their sting helped drive Europe into catastrophe. Nietzsche’s prophetic insight stands: “Out of every one of their complaints sounds revenge; in their praise there is always a sting.”
