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Frederick Philip Grove’s
“Rousseau als Erzieher” (1914):
Nietzsche’s influence on
FPG
in Munich & on the Prairies
by Gaby Divay
for the 2008 LCMND Conference
in Winnipeg (hosted by the UM)
Grove’s First Canadian Publication
Frederick Philip Grove’s first Canadian
publication was the essay “Rousseau als
Erzieher”
It was published in four parts from Nov.Dec. 1914 in the German-Canadian
newspaper Der Nordwesten
“Fred Grove”, a teacher in Winkler, was
the author
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“Fred Grove” was Felix Paul Greve
Fred Grove was born Felix Paul Greve in
1879
He had spent a year in Bonn prison for
fraud in 1903/4
He left Berlin in late July 1909 with a
faked suicide [after double-selling his
Swift translation]
He spent three years in the United States
before settling in Manitoba as Grove in
1912
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Grove’s “Rousseau als Erzieher”
Margaret Stobie found the “Rousseau”
essay while preparing her 1973 book on
Grove in the “Twayne World Authors
series”
Also in 1973, D. O. Spettigue published
his discovery that Grove had been Greve
in his FPG: the European Years
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Greve’s First Publication, 1901
Like Stobie’s, Spettigue’s research papers
are part of the UM Archives’ FPG
Collections
Among his many documents by or about
Greve is a 1901 review of Nietzsche’s
Posthumous Works, v. XI +XII, in a
Munich newspaper
This is FPG’s first known publication
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FPG’s First Publications, 1901 & 1914
Neither FPG scholar was aware of the
other’s Nietzsche link to Greve & Grove
And neither one pursued the interesting
implications of their own respective
finding
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Grove’s Canadian Essays
The title of Grove’s rambling “Rousseau
als Erzieher” is a clear reference to
Nietzsche’s 3rd Untimely Meditation
(1874)
ITS title was “Schopenhauer als
Erzieher” (Sch. as Educator)
Grove wrote several more essays with
titles like “Rebels All”, “Civilization”, “Of
Science”, & “Of History”
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Grove’s Canadian Essays
All imitate the loud cultural criticism of
Nietzsche’s Meditations in form & content
They were edited in Henry Makow’s
unpublished Ph.D. thesis in 1982
Makow dates them to ca. 1919
That is four years after “Rousseau” & three years before
Grove’s first book of nature essays Over Prairie Trails in 1922
He fails to appreciate the Nietzsche echoes
resounding in them
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Greve’s German Essays on Oscar Wilde
Grove’s essays resemble Greve’s on Oscar
Wilde & decadence
A major source of inspiration for these was Nietzsche's Geburt
der Tragödie
Axel Knönagel nicely shows how
GREVE’s outlook changed before and
after his prison term in 1903
in his published Thesis, Nietzschean Philosophy in the works of
FPG, 1990
He does, however, not link his astute
observations to GROVE’s Nietzscheinspired texts
The “Rousseau” text & Makow’s essays in the UM Archives
were apparently unknown to him
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Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy
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Grove’s Canadian Aphorisms
Among other Grove manuscripts
reflecting Nietzsche’s influence stand
foremost sixty confessional aphorisms
entitled “The Life of Saint Nishivara”
The title alone identifies them as the
Zarathustra (1883ff) imitation they are
They were published in 1987 in A stranger
to my time: Essays by and about FPG
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Grove’s Canadian Aphorisms
The editor, Paul Hjartarson, does NOT
see the obvious Nietzsche parallels
Nietzsche was famous for his aphoristic
style inspired by moralists like Montaigne
“Saint Nishivara” is, like Zarathustra,
written in aphorisms
Hjartarson also misses the biographical
pointers FPG couched in his text
We shall later return to this fragment
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St. Nishivara Aphorisms
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Grove’s Six German Poems
Many of Grove’s poems also have
Nietzschean overtones
His six German ones emphasize the
“special” individual (FPG), unfettered by
ordinary rules
“Kopfschmerz”, “Das Fieber…”, and
“Apokalypse” are typical for applied
“Jenseits von Gut & Böse / Beyond Good
& Evil” (1886) ethics
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Grove’s English Poems
Grove’s English poem “Ahasuerus”
exploits the motif of Greve’s 1902 poetry
title Wanderungen.
His long “Legends” continue the
narrative vein of “Irrfahrt” & “Sage” in
Greve's 1902 collection
Both draw on Nietzsche’s “Der Wanderer
& sein Schatten” (1880)
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Grove’s English Poems
The epic fragment “Konrad the Builder”
exploits Goethe's Faust motif
It joins Nietzsche's Promethean theme
which FPG also uses on more than one
occasion
Nietzsche was fond of Goethe in general
& Faust in particular
He also championed Flaubert who
became FPG's post-prison model in 1904
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Nietzsche CONCEPTS in both FPGs
Some Nietzschean key concepts found in
both FPGs' poetry & prose are:
Heraclitean CHANGE being the nature
of all things
(Nietzsche, like FPG, was a Classicist educated at Bonn
University. His Thesis was on the Skeptic Diogenes Laertius)
This view fosters RELATIVITY &
propagates SKEPTICISM
Skepticism dominates neo-Kantians like Vaihinger (Philosophy
of AS-IF) & Dilthey
Relativity is evident in physicists like Einstein, Mach,
Schrodinger, Planck, & Heisenberg
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Nietzsche CONCEPTS in both FPGs
DECADENCE
Nietzsche saw his times in sad decline, especially, when
compared to Antiquity
ETERNAL RETURN
This belief attributed to Heraclitus fosters a cyclical worldview, & also dominates artistic form: poetry cycles (Stefan
George) & musical ones (Richard Wagner)
LIFE …
has priority over Art, the noblest art being the Art of Living
Greve reverses O. Wilde’s Art/Life poles in prison in favour of
Life
THE TRAGIC (in Geburt der Tragödie)
Nietzsche’s views of rivaling “Dionysian” & “Apollonian”
forces are embraced by many, incl. FPG, & Thomas Mann
(who sees them at work in Grove's Two Generations in 1939)
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Nietzsche TOPICS in both FPGs
Some of Nietzsche’s pet topics commonly
found in both FPGs poetry & prose are:
The “GENIUS” being above the law
Faust & Prometheus are typical figures
MASKS & LYING as approved tools of
dissimulation
These themes are prominent in O. Wilde
Dual SLAVE & MASTER standards
An elitist CONTEMPT for the “Herd” or
the Masses"
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Nietzsche TOPICS in both FPGs
A pronounced distrust of
PROGRESS,
especially, if technology-based
A COSMOPOLITAN outlook
fostering tolerance
(goes together with Skepticism)
A belief that WOMEN snare the
Genius
… and keep him from realizing his mission
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Nietzsche’s pervasive Influence
Nietzsche was the foremost philosopher of
DECADENCE and LIFE (Lebensphilosophie)
His impact on FPG’s entire generation
cannot be over-estimated
Recently, FPG’s debt to him has come
into sharp focus
A volume of sixty early manuscript poems
by Greve was discovered & acquired by
the UMA in March 2008
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Facsimile eEd. of Jahr der Wende
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Greve’s Jahr der Wende, 1901
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Greve’s First Poetry Book, Nov. 1901
Completed in Nov. 1901, Das Jahr der
Wende opens with four poems about
Nietzsche
In Greve’s Wanderungen (23 poems, Feb.
1902), Nietzsche, the painter Böcklin, the
poet Stefan George, and Beethoven are
hailed as “Masters” – in this order!
Only Böcklin & Nietzsche then have an
entire poem devoted to them
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Contents of Jahr der Wende
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"Vision", Jahr der Wende
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Friedrich Nietzsche, 1899
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Greve’s First Poetry Book, Nov. 1901
It is interesting that Das Jahr der Wende
reflects the unstructured style of
Nietzsche's "Dionysos Dithyramben"
They concluded the Zarathustra complex
in 1888, just before Nietzsche suffered the
mental breakdown that ended his career
In contrast, Greve’s Wanderungen show
the mark of the so-called Stefan GeorgeMache, a formally rigid way of crafting
poetry
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Nietzsche's Dionysos Dithyramben
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Grove’s indirect Nietzsche-Hints
Greve wrote FIVE poems about Nietzsche
In comparison, ALL of Grove's Nietzsche
pointers are covert & indirect
We saw his sly title reference to Nietzsche
in the 1914 "Rousseau" essay
Das Jahr der Wende / Year of the Turning
Point also echoes a title:
Grove chose The Turn of the Year (1923) for his 2nd
Canadian book
He thus pointed to the poems he had written in Jahr
der Wende two decades earlier
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Grove’s confessional Aphorisms
Back to Grove's “Saint Nishivara”
aphorisms: they are a confession in the
disguise of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
They can be dated internally to 1939:
30 years the hero spent “in the East”,
another 30 “in the West”
Both times he became entangled in sin …
Greve left Berlin when he was 30 in 1909,
& at 60 he mused about his life in 1939
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Grove’s Aphorisms, 1939
1939 marks a period of intense SoulSearching for Grove
Around his birthday in mid-February 1939,
he sends two of his books to Thomas Mann at
Princeton
He revises & expands his “Author’s Note”
for the 1939 ed. of ASA with explicit
references to Goethe's Dichtung &
Wahrheit/Fact & Fiction
Gide’s autobiography & fame provides the
impetus to start is autobiography ISM
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Nietzsche's Thus spake Zarathustra
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More Traces of Nietzsche in FPG's Poetry
While preparing the 2007 e-Edition of
FPG’s complete poetry, two of Greve’s
poems in Wanderungen warranted a link
to Nietzsche
One was to the moving “Die Sonne sinkt”,
the other to “Aus hohen Bergen”
Both the day/life & the mountain
metaphors were used repeatedly in
Grove's poetry
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Nietzsche in Grove’s Autobiography
Two years before his death, in In Search
of Myself (1946), Grove acknowledged his
great admiration for Nietzsche
He insists that he preferred the "early"
Nietzsche
And he obscures the fact that he made
lavish use of Nietzsche’s late & most
literary Zarathustra
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UMA FPG (Greve/Grove) & FrL Website
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eEd. of Grove's In Search of Myself (1946)
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Grove on Nietzsche in ISM (p.166)
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Wikipedia: Nietzsche
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Stanford Encyclopedia: Nietzsche
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Wikipedia: Nietzsches Werke
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Stanford Encycl: Nietzsche's Works
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Nietzsche's Ecce Homo
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