and human creations, but they are not rooted in nature or necessity or mayors of reality. >> speaker1: he wrote one time got his dead speak one time god is dead and this first makes its appearance and in it the gay science is an aphorism called the madman. 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 them you and i and everyone said he's crazy. he realizes that his time is not come yet and so there he is announcing what will be 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 troubles nietzsche was that

over the course of the 19th century in particular germans became more modern and more secular that they continued to go to church and pray to a god that they didn't really believe in any more. in other words, he thought modern thoughts, modern science and the forces of mo dermody were a new line the religion and he basically said people still held onto it and clutch onto it because they were too terrified to live without it. he found this despicable and that's what he tries to work out in this philosophy. >> host: where did he teach, how did he come about? >> guest: nietzsche, well we have to separate the myth 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 recession, but then he did

fade into obscurity. he was a philology professor, so professor of language, history of language, genealogy of language, but the academic life was not for him. he suffered from a lot of physical ailments, so, i mean, the stories and philosophers debate why did he have such a tough time in the academy. he taught for 10 years in basel with some success, but due to reasons that we can only sort of imperfectly suss out, with his health or that he needed to break free, nietzsche breaks free lives on a pension for the rest of his life and gets to inhabit the image of the freethinker that he so exalts and worships in his own philosophy. but, nietzsche did 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, and the pin a total vegetative state. he dies in 1900. he's discovered, so how does need to become nietzsche? he's discovered precisely in those months when his health is declining, surely before his mental collapse. one of the terrible ironies of friedrich nietzsche's life and the life of his ideas is that it's in the moment when intellectually and mentally, you know, there is a close never counts for him and 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: this is a little tricky because there is always a question or priority. people were reading nietzsche, but where those bagels being read and i think it's her 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 is a fair assessment that he brings the most fame to nietzsche and they do have a brief correspondence in that last year just as madness is closing in on nietzsche and nietzsche things finally someone recognizes my genius and then lo and behold he has mental collapse and that's pretty much the end of his productive life. so, broadus is credited with getting the word out in northern european circles that nietzsche is the one to watch and that's when nietzsche's reputation really takes off. >> host: who followed him? who liked his work? what kind of people? >> guest: everyone.

>> host: everyone? >> guest: atheists, religionists , the left, the right, women, men, black, white, old people, young people. that's not immediate because he needs to be translated. nietzsche's not translated in earnest until the late 1896, 1897 is the first round of translations, so there was another major effort of translations that happened in the early 20th century. in the late 19th century and early 20th century a lot of educated americans could read german so they were reading him in the original, but it really did require the translation for him to take off. hl mencken has a lot to do with nietzsche's superstar am. not to say that there weren't other folks reading nietzsche and popularizing nietzsche in

the united states, but he is the one who writes the first full-length monograph on nietzsche in 1908. that's where we get a kind of fall on synopsis about nietzsche's life, his travails, struggles with christianity, struggles with health care could get a bit of his sexuality took it would not be mencken if there was not something racy thrown in and then we get nietzsche's ideas. this book sold widely and sold well and it helped do two things. it's helped really establish nietzsche's reputation in america, but did something else, which helped mink and become mencken. >> host: so, if someone says i love friedrich nietzsche and i agree with him, what are they saying to you, professor? >> guest: if they are just saying that, not much because someone-- i mean, i use that example of chest thumping

atheist and bible thumping christians could both make that claim about nietzsche and that's what's so startling about his reception is that he doesn't track right or left. he doesn't track religious or secular work he tracks all over our intellectual spectrum, so just the statement i look nietzsche doesn't tell me much of anything other than it's an utterly conventional experience. to find it nietzsche so powerful in fact, think what is so interesting is how many people will say and have set over the course of the late 19, 20th century how they felt when they read nietzsche he was speaking to them personally. so, one of the things i argue in the book is that nietzsche becomes a superstar public philosopher by way of private lines in private fears.

you have a disturbed look on your face. >> host: who wouldn't like friedrich nietzsche? >> guest: plenty of people who don't like friedrich nietzsche and there were things like. he did not say very nice things about democracy. he didn't say very nice things about women. he didn't say very nice things about equality. and so, these are things if they matter to you you will take issue with him. /take if you're a concrete example of what's to like and what's to not like about nietzsche. gosh, it can take anyone but i will take a more spectacular example and that is the leopold-- leopold and loeb trial there to university chicago students who think that they are

wet nietzsche had in mind when they read about the boob and mentioned and they wanted to prove it to themselves. >> host: what is that? >> guest: superman, translated as superman and in fact the superman which is an superman comic which we tend to think of as soup-- american-- in fact, the two men who come up with superman where readers of nietzsche. so, that's just a little-- and there are many cases like that. we have the word uber and i think that comes into our language by that way. we are talking about example where we have two views his essay they have the right nietzsche and that is we pulled in loeb they read nietzsche and they think they are the superman he had in mind and they went to prove it to themselves and they kidnap and kill a 14-year old boy, bobby franks in the south shot of chicago.

they get caught and it turns out they weren't so uber as they say. clarence darrow, the famed trial attorney becomes their defense lawyer and he is also a fan of nietzsche, but he's not a murder and he's quite sure that is now a nietzsche had in mind, so the interesting thing about the whole leopold and loeb trial, which is tried to save these boys from these-- these young men from income from themselves is how darrow had to-- the reason why they did this is because nietzsche is toxic in a dangerous think her name is understood and yet nietzsche is a important thinker that we need a modern life, but that we need to handle him with care, so something like that, the leopold and loeb trial, you see these negotiations were nietzsche is both, you know, public enemy number one as we see with the

murder, but also with clarence darrow say nietzsche is the thinker that we americans need in order to embrace modern life. >> political movement that have co-opted nietzsche. >> guest: so many. i think i mean really the whole 20th century is a story of co-optation and i think the one that surprises my readers the most or at least when i get letters from readers or to come into contact with readers, it's nietzsche, the hidden nietzsche origin of black power, so hewitt nude tin was a reader of friedrich nietzsche and in nietzsche he discovered a lot of things in nietzsche, but what he understood from nietzsche is he

needed nietzsche to tell him that the things your culture tell you are true and are universal is in fact made up or it's a product of history, a product of chance, somewhat arbitrary, but not true and is so don't take the voice of a racist culture as the voice of your own inter- conscience. this is-- this is what nietzsche did for afghan americans is to help them here that they no longer had to pray to the white man's god and they no longer had to make themselves prostrate to a religion and in his view made them supplicants and that they should not take this morality, which tries to discipline them and keep them down as something universal, something timeless and so newton is really intellectually cutting his teeth on nietzsche as he is formulating the basis of black

power. >> host: world war ii. >> guest: the reason why i sigh is i don't know of any other philosopher in history that is blamed for two world wars, but nietzsche was. so, you can't just-- world war ii i actually think is a more interesting story here. because all the ways in which nietzsche's reputation is just so terribly damaged, but quickly if i may, world war i, nietzsche when world war i breaks out and if so shocking to american observers and start to come out its nietzsche, it's nietzsche, it's nietzsche and rumors of german with ministers preaching nietzsche from their pulpits and it was not hard to listen and hear it traces of nietzsche philosophy behind that imperialism up germany during

world war i. as it nietzsche is yoked to world war i and those who want to try to save his reputation and say this was not what he intended, just a misuse of nietzsche and they had a hard time afterwards. of course, leopold and loeb don't do much for his reputation and then with the rise-- not mostly to initially was a reader of nietzsche and enthusiast of nietzsche, the rise of hitler in particular was the more come i think, the more terrifying developments, so over the course in the 1930s as we see this specter of nazism and then as americans started to see mussolini has a greater threat than they initially had it was not hard to buy nietzsche and traces behind nazi philosophy and mussolini's fascist amend so lo 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 make him implicated. he wrote of the rise of the point beasts, which people thought took to be his celebration of the aryan race. his sick dirt-- actually was a nazi and in her closing year she welcomed hitler to the nietzsche archive, so there is a to history, so in the american imagination nietzsche really gets linked to world war ii and the entire nazi ideology. here we have the germans who didn't just wants-- want uber, but they wanted her mac race and as we know the subhuman people,

which was all throughout germany during world war ii, it nietzsche was just implicated in all of this. >> host: what his reputation today and who is the anti- nietzsche philosopher? is there such a thing? >> guest: , there's plenty. i don't think they are as interesting. sure, i mean, george sontag, a thinker that we don't talk about much today but we should because he was a towering intellectual, philosopher and poet and novelist and early 20th century. he thought nietzsche was a fitting that was wrong with the german mind. the hyper aggrandize self. he thought that what he called

the german mind or the german temperament and he traces this back and nietzsche becomes the great exemplar is an intellectual reminded that just could not do without limits, so we actually referred to nietzsche amateurish lessons, so he's pretty dismissive of it nietzsche and that's example of a thinker, that's wicked with a robust thinker and a careful thinker. there are plenty others. i actually think an interesting case here is an example-- the example of alan bloom who in the reception of his famous book "the closing of the american mind", a blockbuster book alan bloom says what's wrong with higher education, it's killing the souls of our children and they are getting this pluralism and multiculturalism, but what they are not is great ideas and

they are not getting the challenges of those great ideas, so how higher education is impoverishing the souls of our children. nietzsche is right there all along. he even talks about the nietzsche and american intellectual life and according to bloom, 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 like what george sontag on a said is that they are tired of universal truth, tired of someone else's power, they are tired of authority and so he says all of the counterculture of the 1960s is anti- authoritarianism and he said it's one thing to have these kind of protests in the street

and another thing to bring them into the economy and make such a ruckus. so, he's very critical of the uses of nietzsche, so i hit the positive and if you read how everyone is talking about alan bloom's book and they were talking they were talking because as you know it was a major, major, major blockbuster and people picked up on the nietzsche and bloom blames nietzsche and it's the american intellectual life, blob, blah, blah so you think alan bloom had a problem with nietzsche. he didn't. he thought nietzsche was a genius. he lobbed nietzsche and 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 cultural intellectual pygmies who could not appreciate the genius of nietzsche, so what he's actually doing in the closing of the american mind, which i think is such an interesting move is he's not really blaming nietzsche for the impoverishment of american intellectual life, the sort of

anti- authoritarianism that he find so despicable. he's blaming what he says is readers who just aren't up to the pasco truly understanding this a great genius. so, again that is not someone who is critical of nietzsche per se. although, he has a reputation for having penned all the failures of the late 20th century american intellectual life on nietzsche. by the opposite. what he's trying to do is keep nietzsche in his own image. against what he sees as the slavish inadequate, and poverty american intellectual life that just cannot handle these powerful ideas. >> host: jennifer rattner rosen hagan, you have written a biography of friedrich nietzsche. are you a fan? >> guest: if i may, i would say -- 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 the book is that, this is not actually book about nietzsche. in fact, some readers have been disappointed. he crops up quite a bit, but the book is not about nietzsche. on the american historian american intellectual historian and my interest is that history of american thought culture over 19th and 20th century. what i discovered is when you get to the late 19th century and through the 20th century you cannot talk about american intellectual life without talking about nietzsche's curious presence and his influence. anyways, just a modest correction here. it's not about nietzsche it's about as, so every reading of nietzsche, not listening whether clarence darrow or walter kaufmann who comes so important to redeeming each after world

war ii or need or rather alan bloom are getting him right or wrong. i don't think that's the question for historians to ask. on nietzsche listen to what they had to say about nietzsche, to listen to seek what that tells us about american intellectual life in that particular moments, so the book is actually not about nietzsche. it's about as and our intellectual life and our coming to our own ideas about truth come about democracy, about christianity, bow god by way of nietzsche, but i'm dodging the question. >> host: has he, in your view, but a positive influence in american political and cultural life? >> guest: you know, never been asked that question. i think he's a necessary influence. i think he is right, i mean, i think there is a lot of duncan and what he says and grandstanding, but you clearly some of that gunk and the ideas

come i think, are ideas that we had to come to terms with, which is again, to just repeat what i said earlier, the notion that so much of what we take to be universally true, whether it be god, whether it be democracy, whether it 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 semi- truth claims are not rooted in reality. they are rooted in power. they are rooted in need. they are rooted in fear. they are rooted in longing, but they're not necessarily rooted in truth and i think this is necessary. coming for any culture, truthfully, but especially american culture because we have from the start been a very pluralistic culture of many

languages, many religions, many ethnicities, different races and so part of what it means to be american from our earliest years here is contested truth. a pluralistic contest ability, and landed many religions and many beliefs and we never did it a good job of negotiating or we did not that great japanese negotiating prior to nietzsche, but nietzsche, his ideas-- it is become important moving forward, so in answer to your question do i think it is a positive force? yes, but it's also the negative. 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 solitary horse because he helped americans to confront fundamental problems that we have had, which is problems of the living and it more or less

takes a cited in humane way. and for that i think-- here i will just become 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 rattner rosen hagan teaches history here at the university. hears her book, "american nietzsche". you are watching book to be on c-span2. >> tv is live in wisconsin book festival today in madison, wisconsin. we are here with the book festival's director conor moran turkana, tell us a bit about what we will see today? >> guest: we will see 12 hours of live book events coming from madison public library, really runs the gamut everything from obscure a up through the

atonement when, politics of kathy kramer, memoirs from jeff chang and it will be a great day. >> host: conor, how long have you been with the book festival and how do you start building it >> guest: this is my fourth festival, about three and a half years since madison public library took over the event and it's turned into a year-round job with the best route the year with little over 105 events every year. i already have got to work on next year. >> host: how do you decide on what authors you were here and was the process? >> guest: i asked two questions, is there a book and is there an audience and i spent a lot of time working with madison community finding what i think will be interesting to them in working with publishers to see what will be interesting to the nation as a whole and bringing those people here. >> host: book to be present out a book festivals throughout the country. is their competition to get these authors? do you have to go to the

publishers? do you have to go to new york and pitch the festival? >> guest: we do a little bit of that and i wouldn't really say there's competition. book festivals bring so many people together. we will have 3000 people come and watch live events today just here in the library we have-- five other venues throughout town and i think the originality of the festival makes for authors who want to get out and meet the people who are reading a book and publishers and publicists understand that. >> host: tell me a bit about this venue we are in. it's a relatively new space. >> guest: we open the new madison central branch in late 2013, about three weeks before our first book festival here. the city really invested in making this space a gathering point and this event and lots of others like it are one of the reasons why. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> book tv is live from madison today with the wisconsin book festival. you can see today's full author schedule online at book tv.org. you can also follow us on twitter at book tv from behind-the-scenes pictures and schedule information and we will bring you pictures from the festival as well as on-site videos on facebook live. starting out from madison, then aaron wright discusses his book on palestine. this is good to be on c-span2, live from the wisconsin book festival. [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> hello and thank you so much for being here. we are here with ben ehrenreich who i want to say quick thank you to the public library for hosting this event. thanks to the madison public library foundation for making it all possible and lets me make sure everyone is hearing me well enough. correct? so, we are looking up today to have ben ehrenreich with us. he's a national magazine award

winning journalist, author of the novel "the suitors" and one of those rare journalist who also writes fiction and has reported from afghanistan, haiti, el salvador and this year he came out with a wonderful new book, "the way to the spring: life and death in palestine". the "new york times" called it a love letter to palestine. he spent a lot of time on the ground their reporting and traveling around the west bank. ..