HERMANN HESSE: THE GLASS BEAD GAME: A GAME OF UTOPIA

Gottfried Benn's words about Nietzsche, already quoted (‘He has anticipated … everything … why, what else have we done these fifty years but trot out and vulgarise his gigantic thoughts and sufferings?’) make an implicit connection between the thought and the suffering. Benn is speaking the language we recognise from countless other sources as that of his age. What he does not say is that a deep and, I think, unbridgeable division informs all Nietzsche's writings – a division reflected in Nietzsche's bequest to the literature about which and in which Benn is writing, German literature in the first half of the twentieth century.

On one hand there is Nietzsche's constant concern with what I have called the ‘morality of strenuousness’, his proposal of a self-validating, sacrificial moral theology without a god, the ‘dear purchase’ in its purest form. Ancestor of Sartre's and Camus's acte gratuit, it is a validation of modern human life by a supreme existential effort without a purpose separate from the effort. It is a ‘morality’ which follows the pattern of Kafka's laconic observation ‘the verdict doesn't come all at once, the proceedings merge gradually into the verdict’. It accompanies Nietzsche's philosophising throughout his brief career, and is related to his early conception of the Dionysian element in tragedy and in life.

On the other hand there is Nietzsche's proposal for a total reinterpretation of the world, which is to be seen as a dream, a game or a play, a sport of the gods.