>> that was "after words," booktv's signature program in which authors of the latest nonfiction books are interviewed. watch past "after words" programs online at booktv.org. >> host: university of wisconsin professor jennifer ratner-rosenhagen, who was frederick nietzsche? >> guest: he was a 19th century german philosopher who wrote many, many, many, many books on philosophy and all sorts of different forms. and all of them some after riskic, some essayistic, some longer formally teaks, and all of them -- critiques, and all of them had something to do with the challenge of universal truth. so he took as his enemy the notion of universal truth, and pretty much all of his work has something to do with his effort to tear it down, excavate it, look at the history of that idea and to show that anything that we take to be universals like, oh, god -- [laughter] are human creations. but they're not rooted in nature or necessity, they're not mirrors of reality. >> host: he wrote at one time god is dead -- >> guest: and he wrote that god is dead. and this first makes its appearance in his gay science. and in it the gay science -- in it, it's an aphorism, and it's called the madman. and so the aphorism is he's playing with this idea that a madman runs into the town square and says god is dead, god is dead. we have killed him, you and i. and everybody says, oh, he's crazy, oh, he's crazy. and he realizes, oh, my time has not come relate yet. and so there -- come yet. so there he's announcing what is, basically, his intellectual project for the rest of his writing life before he goes insane, and that is the notion that god is dead. what troubled nietzsche was as in particular germans became more modern and more secular, was they continued to go to a church and pray to a god that they didn't really believe in anymore. in other words, he thought that modern thought, modern science, the forces of modernity were undermining the basis of religion, and yet he said people still held onto it. they still clutched onto it because they were too terrified to live without it. and this he found really despicable. and that's what he tries to work out in his philosophy. >> host: where did he teach? how did he come about? was he well known in his time? >> guest: nietzsche -- well, we have to sort of separate the myth from the, from the reality which is that nietzsche did have moments of modest fame. actually, his first book, "the birth of tragedy," had a pretty big reception. but then he did fade into obscurity. he was a professor in basil, so a professor of language, history of language, the genealogy of language. but the academic life wasn't for him. he suffered from a lot of physical ailments, pardon me. so, i mean, historians and philosophers debate why did he have such a tough time in the academy, although some of us in the academy nowadays don't wonder that much. anyway, nietzsche taught in basil with some success, but due to reasons that we can only sort of imperfectly flush out -- was it his health, was it what he said, that he needed to break free -- he breaks free, lives on a pension for the rest of his life and gets to inhabit the image of the free thinker that he so exalts and worships in his own philosophy. so, but nietzsche didn't have a huge readership for most of his productive life, and i say "productive life" because in 1889 he has a nervous collapse and spends the last 11 years of his life in a very declining state. i mean, ends up in a totally vegetative state and dies in 1900. he's discovered -- so how did nietzsche become nietzsche? he's discovers precisely in those months when his health is declining, shortly before this mental collapse. so one of the terrible ironies of friedrich nietzsche's life and the posthumous life of his ideas is it's at the moment when mentally there's a closing of accounts for him, that's the moment when the floodgates open, and he becomes the superstar that he is today. >> host: who discovered him? how was he discovered? >> guest: he was discovered -- this is a little tricky because there's always a quest for priority. poem were reading nietzsche, but i think it's fair to say that the danish critic who himself had a big audience in the late 19th century, he is credited with discovering nietzsche, and i think that's a fair assessment, that he brings the most fame to nietzsche. and they actually do have a brief correspondence in that last year just as madness is closing in on nietzsche, and nietzsche thinking, finally, finally somebody recognizes my genius, and lo and behold, he has a mental collapse in turin, and that's pretty much the end of his productive life. so he's credited largely with kind of getting the word out in northern european circles that nietzsche is one to watch. and that's when nietzsche's reputation, boom, really takes off. of. >> host: who followed him? who liked his work? what kind of people? >> guest: everybody. >> host: everybody? >> guest: everybody. atheists, religionists, the left, the right, women, men, black, white, old people, young people. so nietzsche -- now, that's not immediate because he needs to be translated, yeah? nietzsche's not translated in earnest until the late, 1896, 1897 is the first round of translations, then there's another major effort of translations that happened in the early 20th century. of course, in the late 19th century and early 20th century a lot of educated americans could read german, so people were reading him, you know, in the original. but it really did require the translations for the him to take off. -- for him to take off. henry -- why am i calling him henry? h.l. mencken has a lot to do with nietzsche's superstardom. it's not to say there weren't other people who weren't reading nietzsche, but mencken is the one who writes the first full-length monograph on neat t si in 1908. and that's where we get a full-on city knop sit about nietzsche's life, his struggles with health, about his sexuality. it wouldn't be mencken if there wasn't a little something racy thrown in, and then we get nietzsche's ideas, boom. and this book sold widely and sold well, and it helped do two things. it helped really establish nietzsche's reputation in america, but it did something else which is, of course, it helped mencken become mencken. >> host: so if somebody says i love friedrich nietzsche, i agree with him, what are they saying to you, professor? >> guest: if they're just saying that, not much. because someone, i mean, i use the example of chest-thumping atheists and bible-thumping christians could both make that claim about nietzsche. and that's what's so startling about his reception s that he doesn't track right or left, he doesn't track religious or secular. he tracks -- or, rather, he tracks all over our it seems to me lek chul spectrum. so -- intellectual spectrum. so just the statement i love nietzsche doesn't tell me much of anything other than that's an utterly conventional experience. [laughter] to, you know, find nietzsche so powerful. in fact, i think what's so interesting is how many people will say and have said over the course of the late 19th, 20th century, of course, until our own time how they felt he was speaking to them personally. so one of the things i argue in the book is that neat t si becomes a superstar public philosopher by way of private fears. you have a disturbed look on your face. [laughter] >> host: who wouldn't like him then? >> guest: oh, there are plenty of people. he didn't say nice thing about democracy, about women, about equality. and so if these are things that matter to you, you're going to take issue with him. so let me give you a concrete example of what's to like is and what's not to like about nietzsche -- and, oh, gosh, i can take anyone, but i'll take one of the more spectacular examples, and that is the leopold and loeb trial of 1924. two university of chicago students who think that they are what nietzsche had in mind, and they wanted to prove it to themselves -- >> host: which is beyond? >> guest: the ubermention is like superman. the superman comment has its routes in nietzsche's ubermensch. the two men who come up with it were readers of nietzsche. so that's just a little -- and there's many cases like that. i think the fact that we have the word uber, i think it comes into our language by way of the ubermensch. anyway, we're talking about an example where we have two views that say they have the right nietzsche, and that is leopold and loeb. they read nietzsche, they think that they're the superman he had in mind, and to -- so they want to prove it to themselves, so they kidnap and kill a 14-year-old boy, bobby franks, on the south side of chicago. they get caught. turns out they weren't so uber as they thought. clarence darrow, the famed trial attorney, becomes their defense lawyer, and he's also a reader of nietzsche. but he's not a murderer. in fact, he's quite sure that's not what nietzsche had in mind. and so the interesting thing about the whole lien bold and loeb -- leopold and loeb trial which is trying to save these boys, these young men from being killed themselves is how darrow had to not make -- to both -- the reason why they did this is because nietzsche is toxic and a dangerous thinker, and they mess understood him. -- misunderstood him. and yet nietzsche is an important thinker that we need to have in life, but we need to handle him with care. something like that, the leopold and loeb trial, you see the negotiations where nietzsche is both, you know, public enemy number one as we see with the murder, but we also see clarence darrow saying, no, nietzsche is the thinker that we americans need in order to embrace modern life. >> host: political movements that have co-opted nietzsche. >> guest: oh, so many. [laughter] i think the one that, i mean, really, the whole 20th century is a story of co-opation. i think the one that surprises my readers the most or at least when i get letters from readers or come into contact with readers, it's the hidden origins of black power. so huey p. newton was a reader of friedrich nietzsche. and in nietzsche he discovered a lot of things, but what he understood from nietzsche is he needed nietzsche to tell him that the things that your culture tell you are true and are universal it's, in fact, made up. or it's a product of history, it's a product of chance, it's somewhat arbitrary, but it's not true. and so don't take the voice of a racist culture as the voice of your own inner conscience. and for huey p. newton, this is what nietzsche did for african-americans, is to help them hear that they no longer had to pray to the white man's god, make themselves process strait to -- prostate to a religion -- [inaudible] as something universal, as something timeless. so huey p. newton is really intellectually, if you will, cutting his teeth on nietzsche as he and bobby seale are coming together and formulating the basis of black power. >> host: world war ii. >> guest: the reason why i sigh is there are -- i don't know of any other philosopher in history that's blamed for two world wars. [laughter] but nietzsche was. so you can't just quickly -- world war ii i actually think is the more interesting story here. because all the ways in which nietzsche's reputation is just so terribly damaged. but just quickly, if i may, world war i nietzsche -- when world war i breaks out, and this is so shocking to american observers, it starts to come out, you know, it's nietzsche, it's nietzsche, rumors of german ministers preaching nietzsche from their pulpits, it wasn't hard to listen and hear traces of his philosophy behind the blood and iron imperialism of world war -- germany during world war i. and so nietzsche is yoked to world war i and has a very hard time -- those who want to try to save his reputation and say this wasn't what he intended, this is just the misuse of nietzsche, had a really hard time afterwards. of course, leopold and loeb don't do much for his reputation x. then with the rise of hitler -- not mussolini originally who was a reader and enthusiast of nietzsche, the rise of hitler in particular was the more, i think sort of the more terrifying development. so over the course of the 1930s as we see the specter of naziism and then later as americans started to see mussolini as a greater threat than they initially had, it was not hard to find traces behind nazi philosophy and mussolini's fascism. and solo and behold, nietzsche, yet again, is seen as the author and visionary of what would become world war ii. of course, nietzsche wrote of things that were not so hard to turn into -- or to make him implicated. he wrote of the rise of the blond beast, which people thought, took to be his celebration of the aryan race. his sister actually was a proto-nazi, and in her closing years she welcomed hitler to the nietzsche archive, so there's a linkage to hitler and some very unfortunate pictures of hitler and elizabeth forester with a nietzsche bust at the nietzsche archive. so nietzsche really gets linked to world war ii in the american imagination and the entire nazi ideology that here we have germans wanted an uber race. and we know the language of the subhuman people which was all throughout germany during world war ii, nietzsche was just implicated in all of this. >> host: what's his reputation today, and who's the anti-nietzsche philosopher? who's -- is there such a thing? >> guest: oh, there's plenty. yeah, but i don't think they're as interesting. [laughter] sure. i mean, george santayana is not a thinker that we talk about much today, though we should because he was a towering intellectual, a towering philosopher and poet and novelist in the early 20th century. he thought nietzsche was everything that was wrong with what he called the german mind, that hypertrophied self, yeah? the hyperaggrandized self. he thought what he called the german mind or the german temperament -- and he traces this back to conte and nietzsche becomes the great exemplar -- is an intellectual or a mind that just couldn't deal with the limits. so he actually referred to nietzsche as amateurish and adolescent. so he's pretty dismissive of nietzsche, and that's an example of a thinker who i think is a very robust thinker and a careful thinker. there are plenty others. i actually think an interesting case here is an example, the example of alan blum who, and the reception of his famous book, "the closing of the american mind," you know, a blockbuster book. alan blum says what's wrong with higher education, it's killing the souls of our children. they're getting all of this pluralism, all this multiculturalism, but what they're not getting is great ideas. and they're not getting the challenges of those great ideas. so how higher education is impoverishing our, the souls of our children. and nietzsche is right there all along. he even talks about american intellectual life. and according to blum, he thinks that so much of what is wrong in late 20th century intellectual life is that intellectuals are reading their nietzsche, and kind of what george santayana says, they're tried of uni-- tired of universal truth, they're tires of authority. so he says it's all the counterculture of the 1960s is nursed on nietzschean antiauthoritarianism. and it's one thing to have these kinds of protests in the streets, it's another thing to bring them into the academy and make such a ruckus. so he's very critical of the uses of nietzsche. so i hit the pause button here. if you read how everyone's talking about alan blum's book and they were talking and they were talking and they were talking because, as you know, it was a major, major, major blockbuster, people picked up on it. aha, nietzsche, alan blum blames nietzsche, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. so you would think that alan blum, you know, had a problem with nietzsche. he didn't. he thought nietzsche was a genius. he looed nietzsche. he wrote beautifully about nietzsche, he wrote longingly about nietzsche. he thought nietzsche was a genius. and his problem was that he thought he was in a culture of intellectual pygmies who could not appreciate the genius of nietzsche. and so what he's actually doing in the closing of the american mind, which i think is such an interesting move, he's not really blaming nietzsche for the impoverishment of american intellectual life. the anti-authoritarianism that he finds so despicable. he's blaming, what he says, is readers who aren't up to the task of truly understanding this great gene -- genius. so, again, that's not somebody who's critical of nietzsche per se, although he has a reputation. quite the opposite. what he's trying to do is keep his own private nietzsche, a nietzsche in his own image against what he sees as the slavish, inadequate, impoverished american intellectual life that just can't handle these powerful ideas. >> host: jennifer ratner-rosenhagen, you've written a biography of friedrich nietzsche. are you a fan? >> guest: if i may, i would say that i would -- people call it a biography of friedrich nietzsche, but it's actually a biography of his ideas as they come to life in america. so one of the things i say in the book is that it's not -- this is not actually a book about nietzsche. in fact, some readers have been disappointed. of course, he crops up quite a bit, but the book is not about nietzsche. i'm an american historian. i'm an american author over 19th and 20th century. what i discovered is you can't when you get to the late 19th century through the 20th century, you can't talk about american intellectual life without talking about nietzsche's presence, his curious presence, really, and his influence. so any waist, just a little mod -- anyways, just a little, modest correction here. it's not about nietzsche, it's about us. so every reading of nietzsche i'm not listening whether h.l. mencken or clarence dare row -- darrow or huey p. newton or alan blum are getting him right or wrong. i don't think that's the interesting question for a historian to ask. what i'm trying to do is listen in to what they have to say about nietzsche, to listen to see what that tells us about american intellectual life in that particular moment. so the book is actually not about nietzsche, it's about us. it's about our intellectual life, and it's about our coming to our own ideas about truth, about democracy, about christianity, about god by way of nietzsche. but i'm dodging the question. >> host: has he, in your view, been a positive influence in american political and cultural life? >> guest: you know what? that's incredible, i've never been asked that question. i think he's a necessary influence. because i think he's right. i think there's a lot of grandstanding and machismo, but you clear away some of that gunk, and the ideas, i think, are ideas that we had to come to terms with which is, again, to just repeat what i had said earlier, the notion that so much of what we take to be universally true whether it be god, whether it be democracy, where it would be whatever it is, nietzsche gave us a way of looking at those ideas, those truth claims to see their origins and their genealogy. and nietzsche helped americans to see that so many truth claims are not rooted in reality. they're rooted in power. they're rooted in need. they're rooted in fear. they're rooted in longing. but they're not necessarily rooted in truth. and i think this is necessary. i mean, for any culture, truthfully, but especially american culture because we have from the start been a very pluralistic culture of many languages, of many religions, of many ethnicities, of different races. so part of what it means to be american right from our earliest years here is contested truths. it's a pluralistic sensibility. it's a land of many religions and many beliefs. and we haven't -- we never did a good job of negotiating, or we didn't do a bad job of negotiating this prior to nietzsche, but his ideas become important as we negotiate this moving forward. so in answer to your question, do can i think he's a positive force? yeah. and he's also been a negative force, although he had nothing to do with it because he was long dead. but, and his ideas have been read in all sorts of curious ways. but i think as i said, i think he was a necessary force, and in that regard salutary force because he helped americans to confront fundamental problems that we've had which is problems of liveing in a pluralistic society and doing so in a humane way. and for that i think, well, here i'll just speak as a historian, many people were grateful in the 20th century that they had nietzsche to think with about these issues. >> host: university of wisconsin professor jennifer ratner-rosenhagen teaches history here at the university. here's her book, "american nietzsche: a history of an icon and his ideas." you're watching booktv on c-span2. >> here's a look at some authors recently featured on booktv's "after words," our weekly interview program. gilbert gaul described the rise of big money in college football. roberta kaplan recalled her successful supreme court argument in favor of gay marriage. in coming weeks on "after words," michael marma will report on the factors contributing to america's health and wellness gap. darcy olson will make a critical look at the review period new medications must undergo to receive fda approval. also coming up, karl rove will discuss the importance of william mckinley's 1896 presidential campaign. and this weekend nurse and new york times columnist at least a brown -- teresa brown will talk about the challenges patients face in the health care system. >> i really wanted readers to get a sense of how important nurses are to patient care and to give them a very tactile, do detailed sense of that. and writing a book that was one shift seemed like a great way to do that. >> right. >> it also makes a great story, because you start, you meet these people at the beginning of the day, and then at the end of the day you more or less find out how they did -- >> right. >> but it lets people know what the shift is really like and everything that goes into it. >> "after words" airs on booktv every saturday at 10 p.m. and sunday at 9 p.m. eastern. you can watch all previous "after words" programs on our web site, booktv.org. >> as 2015 comes to a close, many publications are offering their recommendations for the best books of the year. here's a look at some of the books publishers weekly suggests to its readers. yale history professor timothy snyder considers how the holocaust began and warns against overlooking lessons to be learned from the tragedy in "black earth." in "the prize," dale russ cough reports on the $100 million gift by facebook founder mac zuckerberg to the public schools in newark, new jersey. margaret lazarus dean looks at the history of american space flight and what it means for the country to end its space shuttle program in "leaving orbit." in "guantanamo diary," a current detainee at the u.s. facility in guantanamo bay, cuba, talks about his experiences and treatment since his imprisonment in 2002. and john ronson discusses the history and current forms of public shaming. >> on social media, i sometimes feel like that we're like unpaid shaming interns for google and twitter, like they're making good money out of people shamings, and we're getting nothing. in fact, we're getting worse than nothing, we're contributing to a frightened, cold, conservative, conformist society. >> that's a look at some of the books publishers weekly recommends from over the past year. booktv has covered many of these authors, and you can watch the full programs on our web site, booktv.org. >> this is booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers. here's our prime time lineup. at 6:45 p.m. eastern, g. wayne miller gives a history of the automobile. starting at up 30, harvard professor lawrence lessig describes political corruption and the presidential campaign process. then at 9 eastern on "after words," nurse and new york times columnist theresa brown talks about patient care. and at 10, brian kilmeade and don yeager talk about thomas jefferson and the tripoli pirates. we wrap up booktv in prime time with jennifer lawless. she talks about her book, "running from office: why young americans are turned off to politics." that's at 11 p.m. eastern. that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. ..