For Nietzsche, modern society represents the triumph of slave morality over the natural master morality.

By pretending that meekness is a moral choice, slave morality manufactures an ideal out of impotence.

But the old master morality cannot be completely vanquished, leaving us thoroughly confused.

In 1885, Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth married Bernhard Förster, a high school teacher turned German nationalist and rabid antisemite. Nietzsche so disapproved that he did not attend the wedding.

In 1886, Förster and Elisabeth left for Paraguay with fourteen German families to establish a vegetarian and teetotal colony, Nueva Germania, that admitted only “racially pure” Germans. While Elisabeth played the princess, the heavily indebted Förster drank heavily and became depressed. In 1889, he committed suicide in a hotel room in San Bernardino.

Nietzsche looked upon nationalism and democracy as the successors of the slave morality of Christianity. Instead, he championed the ideal of the “good European”, a cosmopolitan, supra-national individual who transcends petty national and religious prejudices and strives to unite Europe through a new, higher cultural synthesis. In 1886, the year that Elisabeth left for Paraguay, he wrote to his mother from the Swiss Alps, “Even if I should be a bad German, I am at all events a very good European.”

In 1886, Nietzsche broke with his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner, an antisemite who had been publishing antisemitic........

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