Nietzsche, or perhaps not?

On the back cover of Bathory’s 1991 album Twilight Of The Gods, we find a quotation signed “Friedrich Nietzsche 1871”. Through releases such as this, Bathory had a major influence on the emergence of the Norwegian black metal scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It is likely that many of those who listened to Bathory and carved out their own place in Norwegian black metal history at the same time also developed an interest in reading the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) through the quote on the back cover of Bathory’s Twilight Of The Gods. But does the quote actually come from Nietzsche? Or have Bathory, with lyricist and creative director Thomas Börje “Quorthon” Forsberg (1966–2004), been pulling our leg for over 30 years?

There are many examples of black metal artists who draw on texts written by Friedrich Nietzsche, whether as a source of inspiration, through direct quotations or intertextual references. In particular, it is Nietzsche’s liberation of humanity from God-given norms, self-development, and the empowerment of individuals to find their own values and choose the life they desire that appeals to black metal. In summary, we can say that black metal identifies with the Übermensch’s intellectual leap away from Christian slave morality. Placing oneself above others by having understood something others have not is an important part of black metal’s ideology.

The Swedish first-generation black metal band Bathory, which formed in 1983, is thus a band that draws on Nietzsche’s writings both as a source of inspiration, through direct quotations and intertextual references.

Friedrich Nietzsche 1871?

I got in touch with José Luis Cano Barrón, who has written the unofficial biography From Hades to Valhalla… BATHORY – The Epic Story from 2024 about the band, to ask his opinion on the Nietzsche quote printed on the cover of Bathory’s 1991 release Twilight Of The Gods, and signed “Friedrich Nietzsche 1871”. Was this quote written by Nietzsche, or was it not? He could neither confirm nor deny this, but he was able to tell me that Forsberg read a great deal of Nietzsche:

I think Q read all the Nietzche stuff, and even knew that his sister reworked much of the Nietzche before and after his death¹

Here, Barrón refers to the fact that Nietzsche’s anti-Semitic sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (1846–1935), rendered her brother’s writings anti-Semitic in the period following Nietzsche’s descent into paralysing madness and subsequent death.

The quotation on the cover of Twilight of the Gods reads as follows, including spelling mistakes and odd punctuation:

O, what harm do we not bring upon ourself in search of the utter freedom in this modern age of madness. Man will need to ask herself:  – “now that we seek to record all our origin, we have also proven that god is not. Who will now tell us so that we will listen, when we have broken the last of the laws of nature when we shouted ”  Freedom. Liberty ”  and held nothing against the elimination of the first “?  One may indeed fear this era, for it is not only the moment of truth and of repentance. For it is also truly……….. The Twilight of the Gods!²

When I first read the quote, I sat there wondering which of Nietzsche’s texts it was taken from. The words and phrasing are in many ways typical of Nietzsche: it is rambling, bombastic, and full of words that stir up emotions. The sentences seem to lash out at us and our present day with condemnation.

The text is written in English and the quotation is therefore dated to 1871, ending with the words “The Twilight of the Gods”. This was what first made me a little suspicious, because the book Nietzsche wrote, entitled Twilight of the Idols, or, How to Philosophize with a Hammer in English, was not actually written until 1888, and published in 1889, 17–18 years later. In German, the book is called Götzen-Dämmerung, oder, Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert, and in Norwegian it is known, amongst other titles, as Avgudenes skumringstid eller hvordan man filosoferer med hammeren.

The term Götzen-Dämmerung is clearly a reference to the fourth and final part of Richard Wagner’s (1813–1883) 1876 opera Der Ring des Nibelungen. This part is titled Götterdämmerung in German and Twilight of the Gods in English.

Götterdämmerung – where Götter means “gods” and Dämmerung means “twilight” – is often translated into Norwegian as Ragnarok, which in Norse mythology is the name for the end of the world, but it is also translated more directly, as in English, as “the twilight of the gods”, that is, their imminent demise – which, in line with the Norwegian translation of Ragnarok, is meant to signify “the fall of the gods”. The Norse ragnarǫkr is a compound word consisting of ragna, from regin, “gods”, and rǫk, “development, fate”.

In his 2007 article “Friedrich Nietzsche and the Shakespeare Authorship Controversy”, Robert Sean Brazil refers to Walter Kaufmann, who, in his 1950 book Nietzsche, Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, published in 1950, claims that Nietzsche was inspired to use the term Götzen/idol by Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626) essay Novum Organum from 1620.³ Here, Bacon lists what he calls The Four Idols, or four widespread prejudices that hinder free scientific inquiry. Wikipedia lists them as follows:

When Nietzsche uses the word Götzen rather than Götter, he wishes to emphasise that what he is writing about is not a god, but a false god, an idol. For Nietzsche, it is therefore a false god, an idol, that falls. And this idol is the God of Christianity.

1. Idols of the Tribe (Idola tribus): This is humans’ tendency to perceive more order and regularity in systems than truly exists, and is due to people following their preconceived ideas about things.
2. Idols of the Cave (Idola specus): This is due to individuals’ personal weaknesses in reasoning due to particular personalities, likes and dislikes.
3. Idols of the Marketplace (Idola fori): This is due to confusion in the use of language and taking some words in science to have a different meaning than their common usage.
4. Idols of the Theatre (Idola theatri): This is the following of academic dogma and not asking questions about the world.⁴

When Nietzsche uses the term Götzen, it is to present Christianity as a prejudice we should rid ourselves of in order to free our minds.

Another thing that made me suspicious of Bathory’s Nietzsche quote was the spelling mistakes and the odd punctuation. The first sentence reads “O, what harm do we not bring upon ourself”, where the last word should have been ourselves. It is doubtful whether Nietzsche, or a translator of Nietzsche, would have written “Man will need to ask herself”! God is written as a noun – “god” – and not as a proper noun (with a capital letter). There are also strange gaps in the punctuation, and a great many full stops after “truly”, something I have not seen occur in Nietzsche’s texts.

To check whether the quotation does in fact appear in Nietzsche’s collected works, I selected a number of key words and phrases, translated them into German, and searched the corpus as presented in the Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe on the Nietzsche Source website (http://www.nietzschesource.org/).

Central to this is the phrase “Twilight of the Gods” at the very end of the quotation. There are 21 passages in 20 different texts in which Nietzsche uses the phrase “Götterdämmerung”. In his letters, he most often uses the phrase in contexts referring to Wagner’s opera Der Ring des Nibelungen, which premiered in 1876, five years after 1871.

In a letter to his fellow philologist Erwin Rohde (1845–1898) dated 23 November 1871, Nietzsche writes of Wagner that “Der zweite Akt der Götterdämmerung ist vor 3 Tagen fertig geworden.” (The second act of Götterdämmerung was completed three days ago.),⁵ which shows that Nietzsche was already familiar with this part of the work by 1871.

In fact, the term “Götterdämmerung” first appears in Nietzsche’s writings as early as 1869, in a fragment, though at that time it was used as a noun to refer to the age of Euripides. Euripides (c. 485 – c. 406 BCE) was the last of the three great tragic poets of ancient Greece, following Aeschylus and Sophocles.

Apart from the letter to Erwin Rohde, the term “Götterdämmerung” appears once more in a text from 1871, namely in the essay Socrates and the Greek Tragedy dated 18 June 1871. Here, Nietzsche comments on the Greek tragedian Aeschylus (c. 525 – c. 456 BCE) and his (presumed) tragedy Prometheus Bound, about the Greek titan Prometheus who defied the gods and gave fire to mankind. Prometheus was punished by Zeus by being chained to two pillars and having his regenerating liver pecked out by Zeus’s eagles.

In the same way, I tried my hand at translating terms such as modern/modern, madness/Wahnsinn/Verrücktheit/Irrsinn/Tollheit, freedom/liberty/freiheit, laws of nature / Naturgesetze, og repentance/Buße/Reue), but to no avail.

I can therefore say with 99 per cent certainty that the quote was not written by Nietzsche, and was therefore most likely written by Forsberg himself.

Analysis of the content of the quotation

What about the content and meaning of the quote – can it be attributed to Nietzsche?

Let us first break the quotation down into its individual sentences, which we will then number for the sake of clarity:

S1	O, what harm do we not bring upon ourself in search of the utter freedom in this modern age of madness.
S2	Man will need to ask herself:  – “now that we seek to record all our origin, we have also proven that god is not.
S3	Who will now tell us so that we will listen, when we have broken the last of the laws of nature when we shouted ”  Freedom. Liberty ”  and held nothing against the elimination of the first “?
S4	One may indeed fear this era, for it is not only the moment of truth and of repentence.
S5	For it is also truly……….. The Twilight of the Gods!

The first sentence (S1) – “O, what harm do we not bring upon ourself in search of the utter freedom in this modern age of madness” – expresses a lament over humanity’s pursuit of absolute freedom, and the fact that a freedom which was meant to liberate us has instead become a source of harm and destruction. The phrase “this modern age of madness” suggests a modern era in which religion and morality have dissolved into a chaotic ideal of freedom.

MORE TO COME SOON

Notes

1. José Luis Cano Barrón, i samtale med undertegnede via Messenger, 12.08.2024. ↩︎
2. Bathory, 1991, Twilight Of The Gods. ↩︎
3. See Brazil, 2007, «Friedrich Nietzsche and the Shakespeare Authorship Controversy». ↩︎
4. Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baconian_method. ↩︎
5. See Nietzsche Source: http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/BVN-1871,170. ↩︎