Ubermensch Versus Superman
by Marlene Kryza
Between 1883 and 1885, a forty-year old philosopher named Friedrich Nietzsche worked on a collection of writings that would become known collectively as Thus Spake Zarathustra. Seeking comfort for his weak body, he lived itinerantly around Europe teaching and writing copiously about morality, theology, and philology. He remained a bachelor for the entirety of his life, and felt his works were destined for importance. Europe was beginning the technological phase of the industrial revolution, and standardization and industrialization were reshaping notions of labor. A harrowing chasm existed between rich and poor. In his latest work, Nietzsche set out to proselytize, through the voice of a fictional prophet named Zarathustra about eternal recurrence, the death of God, and the role of modern mankind as a bridge between the apes of yesterday and the splendid being that is yet to come -- enter, the Ubermensch. This German word has been translated a number of ways such as "over-man" or "beyond-man". When George Bernard Shaw (b.1856) an Irish playwright, critic, and polemicist included the concept in his 1903 play titled, Man and Superman, he introduced the idea/word beyond Nietzsche's initial following.
In the early 1930's, in Cleveland, Ohio, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, both born in 1914, were infatuated with pulp fiction magazines - fantastical stories which often included beings from space with superhuman powers. One day, after Siegel spent a sleepless night with recurring visions, they met up and penned the first 12 episodes featuring a new character. They named him "Superman", a word that had been bouncing around the the pulp fan drawing community. Superman and other superheroes that gained popularity during the Golden Age of Comics were social justice warriors borne of left-leaning politics, and emerged from a hotbed of institutional corruption and Depression-era hardship. Superman was shown in his first appearances foiling a lynching, roughing up war prophiteers, breaking a wrongly accused criminal from death row, and rescuing a lady from from a domestic abuser. It was the beginning of a genre, and the idea of "hero" was redefined for generations to come.
The connection between Nietzsche's Ubermensch and the of Superman 1930's of pulp fandom may be tenuous, but it is not accidental. Superman "essentially owes his effect to the vanishing remnants of ancient mythology, that collective memory of mankind which has here been combined with Utopian anticipation" said one commentator. That 'anticipation' was also present in Europe at the end of the 19th century, when anarchist communes were established as people observed the rising autocratic right-wing regimes. This was a time in history where people mobilized themselves in an effort to dictate their own freedom. Throughout Europe, intrepid deviants formed small communities beyond the mainstream confines in an effort to create their own instantiations of Utopia. The imaginative impulse to create models of a more perfect system, person, or future has marked many eras of human existence, countering strictures and releasing the pressure of reality.
The Nazi party wrongfully subsumed the meaning of Thus Spake Zarathustra as they rose to power in the early 1930s. Nietzsche's utter disdain for the masses of people who seemed to him incapable of thinking for themselves never was never aimed at any one single group of people. Nietzsche disacknowledged the existence of God, and criticized the Jews' practice of letting God dictate their morals, but was a defender of them as a people. Nietzsche wished that amid the flaccid European population, that "some pack of blond bests of prey, a conqueror and master race which, organized for war and with the ability to organize, unhesitatingly lays its terrible claws upon a populace." (vi) Zarathustra delivers parables describing creative evolution wherein the Ubermensch is able to will himself into existence-- the next step in physical and spiritual evolution for mankind, leaving behind the last man, who is the loathsome link between primates and the Ubermensch.
"I tell you, one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a rising star. The cosmic. Superman was from outer space. Alas, the time is coming when man will give birth to no more stars. Behold, I shall show you the last man.......The last man is one who specializes not in creation, but in consumption. The last man is deeply miserable and resentful - stagnant in his nest of comfort. The misery does not render him impotent though; he seeks to victimize those who are seeking higher values, and subdue him by making him a part of the herd. " (TSZ)
Walter Kaufmann, the German-American emigre whose translations of Nietzsche were long the standard versions in English, once declared that the philosopher's writings are "easier to read but harder to understand than those of almost any other thinker." (3) The legibility of Thus Spake Zarathustra, and its prophetic descriptions of how only a select few can rise to the status of Ubermensch lent credence to the Nazi party's philosophies and served to bolster their popularity in the 1920's. The denigration of "the last man" and the comeuppance of a master race served as a template for the devaluation of undesirables and for the ascension of elite individuals who supersede the slothful gluttonous masses.
Simon and Shuster were both early generation Americans whose families had fled the antisemitism of Russia and Eastern Europe. They emerged into an America of burgeoning commercialism, but high-end illustration work was not available to Jews. Therefore, many talented Jewish artists gravitated toward the pen and ink of pulp art, seeing its promise, and becoming a significant shaper of it's future. This was also an era of institutionalized corruption during which mob bosses such as Boss Tweed in New York City and Chicago's Al Capone rendered the public unsure of who was protecting them. In 1925, Capone became crime czar of Chicago running gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging rackets and expanded his territory by gunning down members of rival gangs. Capone went largely unpunished, and in 1927, when he was just 28 years old, had amassed a fortune estimated to be 100 million dollars. William McSwiggan, an aggressive prosecutor who tried to indict Capone, failed to do so when witnesses, fearing harm to themselves or to their families, would lose their nerve and "forget" the details of an incident when called upon to recount these in court. Real life villains such as Capone had carved out a place for themselves in society which operated above the law as a way of vindicating themselves beyond their presumed socio-economic strata.
Although the Ubermensch is described as having superior intellect and intuition, some qualities such as the ability to defy obsolete moral codes and having self-defined virtues make him sound prone to villainy. Nietzsche had read Freud's The Ego and the Id, published in 1923, where he describes "three agencies of the mind jostling for supremacy: the ego, the id, and the superego. The ego strives for mastery over both id and superego an ongoing and often fruitless task in the face of the id's wild passion and demand for satisfaction on one hand, and the superego's crushing, even authoritarian demands for submission to its dictates, on the other."
The internal duel between the protagonist and the antagonist within an individual manifests itself in their personalities. It is the intensity of this struggle that creates depth in characters, both in fiction and real life. The villains faced by Superman are not patterned with much complexity, but they personify the criminal curiosity within the reader. Superman is a richly textured character who is living a lie by way of a false identity, and operates according to the dictates of law only as much as he personally sees fit. The presence of a villain in these early comic books sets the stage for redemption, retribution, or justice wherein the reader can be assured of their own moral codes. This is to compare the villain to the "id", a faltering justice system which places an innocent man on death row or allows another to beat his wife to the "superego", and Superman to the "ego". A "schizoid split" evinced by Superman's dual identity as Clark Kent "symbolizes a basic split within the American psyche," argued one analyst. Like Superman, Americans are caught between dream and achievement, and power and weakness."
That the darker, passionate, and unruly side that Freud called the id, is aligned with weakness, as one has a weakness for wine, lust, power, or money, This is called 'weakness' because it is something to be overcome. Nietzsche seized on this idea of weakness in his description of the Ubermensch to refer not to those that were too weak to control their vices, but that were too intellectually weak to observe the herd-like behavior cultivated in them by religion and traditional morality. Nietzsche said this in Twilight of the Idols in 1889:
The church fights passion with excision in every sense; its practice, its cure,
castrates. It never asks: 'How can one spiritualize, beautify, deify a craving?'
It has at all times laid the stress of discipline on the extirpation of sensuality,
of pride, of the lust to rule, of avarice, and vengefulness. But the attack on the
roots of passion means an attack on life: the practice of the church is hostile
to life.
The distinction here is that untempered passions are a part of the will distinguish him or her from others, thereby avoiding the herd.
Originally, Superman was a bald telepathic psychopath intent on eugenic omniscience - a very malevolent main character. Later in 1933, Shuster and Siegel rethought the character of Superman and recast him as a hero with with a rigid identification with morality. Superman's modis operandi became the defense of those incapable of defending themselves. Rendered defenseless by gender, age, or poverty, Superman flew to their rescue, imbued with the powers of modern machinery. Implicit within the backstory is the source of Superman's desire for justice - his own abandonment by his real parents and the ostensible loneliness that accompanies exceptionalism. Nietzsche had no compassion for those too weak to fend for themselves and made no secret of his adoration of aristocracy. He would have been enthralled by Superman's extraordinary capabilities, but put off by his interest in saving the weak.
Zarathustra's poetic prose announces the death of God. Not only did Nietzsche see fit to undermine the very idea of God, he also made some tweaks to Darwinism. Nietzsche believed that a factor in man's evolution was his ability to assert himself. Nietzsche called this the Will to Power. "Creative evolution" was brought about by creative will - the élan vital. This, according to Nietzsche was a force pulsing within man to a greater iteration of himself. The idea of the greater man is bound up in the idea of self, as in self-discipline and self-cultivation. Nietzsche promotes in his writings the presence of a different being within us waiting to express itself through the last man's destruction. Zarathustra declares:
I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have
you done to overcome him? All creatures hitherto have created something beyond
themselves: and do you want the ebb of this great tide and return to the animals
rather than overcome man?"
Whereas Nietzsche's Ubermensch comes from within, Superman comes from without. In order to protect and save, he is a surrounding force rather than one that is emergent. Nietzsche was plagued with health problems and lived a privileged mostly solitary life. In his solitude he conceived of a hyper-splendid being, perhaps as a way of out of his own yearning for something more. It was within a prison of poor health that he explored the power of mind of matter. "He was a sufferer for many years from severe ailments, but he brought his indomitable will to bear on his condition and for a while was able to will himself to health." (x) The 'blond beast' may have been a personification of his own will. The conception of Superman by Siegel and Shuster may have been more akin to Al Capone operating outside the law and creating his own rules, as their talent was not absorbed by traditional art channels due to their Judaism. However, by fluidly working around these strictures, they observed and alternative success within themselves, going on to redefine the word "hero" and found an culture-shaping industry for decades to come.
