Germans, particularly the Prussians. So far back as his campaigning days, he wrote to his best friend a letter in which he said, "I am very anxious about the near future. I believe it will represent the middle ages. Take care to free yourself from this fatal Prussia, so opposed as she is to all culture."
Having left, as already stated, his professorship, and possessing only the modest income of a very few pounds a week, he lived thenceforth in various places, such as Nice, Genoa, Venice, and the Engadine, endeavouring to find mental and bodily health and content so long as he had a sufficient dinner and the use of a piano. Under these circumstances, he developed his philosophy— if such it may be termed. It was, rather, a random unsystematic and eccentric expression—both from the point of view of matter and style—of his own very peculiar ideas. Prussia had never pleased him, for she was not sufficiently aristocratic according to his view of what aristocracy should be. He was obsessed with the aristocracy of the ancient Greek States, which, resting completely on slavery, was in fact, as compared with modern aristocracies, an ultra-aristocracy. So Nietzsche believed in an ultra-aristocracy, and was prepared, if necessary, to accept slavery with it. So he evolved the doctrine of the super-man and the super-nation, which involved the right of highly endowed individuals to withdraw from the mass in order that by treading upon the ordinary populace they might develop their own personalities and put into operation the Will to Power. So the doctrine of the supernation involved, not German aggression, but an end to the
German Empire and particularly to Prussia. Nietzsche was solely and entirely what he himself termed a "Good European." He was this as distinguished from and even as opposed to being a German, still less a Prussian. Whatever in the future had to be done, in the way of social progress, had to be done, in the view of Nietzsche, by Europe, not by Germany, still less by Prussia, though Nietzsche himself was unable in precise terms to state what he thought ought to be done. Looking back through the past, he had seen two great efforts made, in his view, to accomplish this indefinable object—namely, the establishment of Jesuitism, and the development of democratic enlightenment. But he regarded these efforts as failures. He felt that the object could only be defined and attained by free spirits—such as he—who were not Germans but " Good Europeans."He regarded a patriotic sentiment as a relapse into an old love and narrow view. Patriotism and soil-attachment were to him as "an atavistic attack." In the future he saw the slow emergence, not of a super-state (which is a very different thing to a super-nation),
