RODRIGO JUVENTINO BASTOS DE MORAES

The present work intends to present the Hellenism in the thought of the young Nietzsche associated with the Wagnerian project of renewal of German culture in the context of a newly unified Germany after the victory against the French in the Franco-Prussian War. Pointing to the renewal of national cultures associated with the bequest of the ancients was a procedure widely used among European thinkers since the trend created by the Italian Renaissance. How the Germans of the first half of the nineteenth century, and in the manner of German classics such as Winckelmann, Schiller and Goethe, Nietzsche wanted to present to the Germans an idealistic image of Greece, their educating homeland, which would be edifying for the German consciousness of the present. Richard Wagner's musical drama represented the rebirth of Aeschylus' Greek tragedy and as such was also the symbol of the renewal of tragic culture on German soil. Faced with this event, Europe had in Germany the guardian of culture against the "infamous optimism" of frivolous French civilization, the spiritual reference of Europe. This conflict between Culture and Civilization, a product of Wagner's influence on the young Nietzsche's thought, gives to Nietzsche's Hellenism, as I have sought to show in this work, not only the elements that allow us to understand the character of the conflict that he waged with professional philology, but the precise place of his work on the Greeks in the context of a Germany which, by force of arms, was now formally freed from the political influence of France. Here, is expressed also, in the tradition of German Hellenism, the Nietzsche's originality that we discussed at the end of this research: the philosopher was the first to project the struggle between Cultur and Civilization in a musings on the Greeks and, therefore, also the first to to see in unsuspecting humanist ideal of jovial Greece Winckelmann's the sign of degeneration in German Hellenism. In his eyes, the Germans had produced an image of Greece erected from spirit of Franco-Alexandrine liberalism. And if they wanted to turn to Greece as their educating homeland it was necessary for her to stop being an Alexandrian and become German.