Nietzsche's appointment in Basel doomed before the start

Leipzig, Day of Repentence [November 20, 1868]

"My dear friend [Erwin Rohde]:
To see again from close at hand the seething brood of the philologists of our time, and every day having to observe all their moleish pullulating, the baggy cheeks and the blind eyes, their joy at capturing worms and their indifference to the the true problems, the urgent problems of life -- not only the young ones doing it, but also the old, full-grown ones -- all this makes me see more and more clearly that the two of us, if this is to be our only means of remaining true to the spirit in us, shall now go our way in life with a variety of offenses and intrigues. When scholar and human being do not completely tally, first the aforementioned brood looks on the miracle with amazement, then it gets annoyed, and finally it scratches, barks, and bites, as you yourself recently found out."

-- Friedrich Nietzsche to Erwin Rohde, Selected Letter of Friedrich Nietzsche, translated and edited Christopher Middleton, 1969, p. 41.

'real life' is out of this world

"Many advertisements took their place alongside other mass diversions -- the amusement park, the slick-paper romance, the movies. None demanded to be taken literally or even all that seriously; yet all promised intense 'real life' experience to their clientele, and all implicitly defined 'real life' as something outside the individual's everyday experience."

-- "From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930", T. J. Jackson Lears.

advertising's foundational anthropology for 'making customers'

"It was left to Edward Bernays, nephew of Freud and 'father' of public relations, to provide the epitaph for bourgeois ideals of individual autonomy and conscious choice. 'The group mind, ' he wrote in Propaganda (1928), 'does not think in the strict sense of the word. In place of thoughts it has impulses, habits, emotions.' To ensure that consumption kept pace with production, Bernays advised, advertisers must learn how to 'make customers' through an understanding of the 'structure, the personality, the prejudices, of a potentially universal public.' The advertisers' job of 'making customers' closely paralleled the new political consultants' aim of 'making voters.' From either view, the 'public' was no longer composed of active citizens but rather manipulable consumers."

-- "From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930", T. J. Jackson Lears.

all the world's a(n unconscious) stage

"In preindustrial England virtually all the actors in this social drama [the rank-ordered society] knew their places and the parts assigned to them. They enacted them in their clothes and deportment, their word and gesture, houses and furnishings, food and drink. Each actor always remained mindful of his relation to his immediate 'superiors' and 'inferiors', and of the ties of patronage and obligation that linked members up and down the social scale."

-- Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America, John F. Kasson, 1990, p. 19.

(un)suited

"In the course of the nineteenth century the image of the ideal gentleman rapidly shed the remnants of the eighteenth-century courtliness and assumed the aspect of the solid, substantial, inexpressive businessman. The colors of the wardrobe grew progressively somber. The New York Knickerbocker Abram Dayton recalled that by the 1830s 'black was the prevailing color' among fashionable young men of the city; 'it was worn for promenade, parlor, church, ball, business,' and 'in such uniformity of style, as effectively to destroy all individuality.'... By the later nineteenth century the modern suit developed in Europe and America and became the requisite costume -- virtually the anonymous uniform -- of the business culture."

-- Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America, John F. Kasson, 1990, p. 118.

religion and politics?

"Dispensing advice that dated back at least to the seventeenth century, etiquette writers stressed that relgious controversy was to be shunned and the very topic of religious doctrine avoided. Politics came under a similar prohibition. In social gatherings, civility supplated substance."

-- Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America, John F. Kasson,  1990, p. 158.
   

Pop Nazi Occultism

"Books written about Nazi occultism between 1960 and 1975 were typically sensational and under-researched. A complete ignorance of the primary sources was common to most authors and inaccuracies and wild claims were repeated by each newcomer to the genre until an abundant literature existed, based on wholly spurious 'facts' concerning the powerful Thule Society, the Nazi links with the East, and Hitler's occult initiation."

-- From Appendix E: "The Modern Mythology of Nazi Occultism", in The Occult Roots of Nazism, Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke, 1985/2004, p. 224-225.

Höss

"Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz concentration camp, was undoubtedly the greatest mass murderer known to history. Yet his autobiography reveals a rather normal, pedestrian bourgeois existence. In the same breath in which he acknowledges himself a professional killer, he also describes a normal family life, tells of his kindness to children and his fondness for animals. In one passage his Jewish prisoners march to their death surrounded by flowering apple trees and the beauties of springtime."

-- The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, George L. Mosse, 1964, p. 310.

American university authority: sub specie scientiae/academiae

"...As many professions as feasible would locate the center of their authority within university schools. By defining its functions comprehensively and constantly expanding its clientele, the American university would serve to enhance the public's image of a professional authority in the society.
"The weight of that authority could not be minimized in a nation that not only lacked respect for historical tradition but which, for the most part, lacked a common past.
...
"Americans lacked tradition as a source of authority, but did not lack 'science'. It was the primary function of American universities to render universal scientific standards credible to the public. Indeed, by means of science cultivated within the university, Americans even discovered the origins of a usable history in the German forest and on the American frontier -- a scientific history now pioneered by professional scholars. To the middle-class American in the later nineteenth century, science implied more than method and procedure."

-- The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America, Burton J. Bledstein, 1976, p. 325-326.

the new objectivity of late 19th-century higher education

"By screening students upon entrance, formalizing courses of study, publishing textbooks, standardizing examinations, and awarding degrees, higher educators convinced the public that objective principles rather than subjective partisanship determined competence in American life."

-- The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America, Burton J. Bledstein, 1976, p. 124.