Nihilism and the Cold War: the Catholic reception of nihilism between Nietzsche and Adenauer

Abstract

The discourse of ‘nihilism’ was of central ideological significance during the Cold War. The Soviet Union, argued many politicians and intellectuals, was inherently nihilistic and could only be overcome through a retrenchment of fundamentally Western ‘values.’ This article historicizes this emphasis on nihilism, suggesting that German Catholicism was one of the conduits that ferried the concept from the dark corners of Nietzsche's posthumous writings into mainstream Cold War culture. I begin by staging a debate over Catholicism and nihilism in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche and one of his most important early interlocutors: the Catholic philosopher, Max Scheler. Drawing on suggestions that Nietzsche himself had provided, Scheler argued that only certain forms of Christianity were subject to the nihilist temptation; Catholicism, in particular, was robust enough to stand up to Nietzsche's challenge. I then turn to the Weimar journalism of Waldemar Gurian, one of Scheler's students. Gurian carried the concept a step closer to its Cold War usage when he theorized that both Nazism and Communism represented forms of ‘conservative nihilism.’ In the early years of the Cold War, Adenauer and others had a ready-made rhetorical strategy to draw upon: the traditions of the Catholic West against the creeping nihilism of Bolshevism. In this way, paradoxically enough, the theory of nihilism that Nietzsche had formulated as a weapon against Christian moralizing was reformulated and used in its service.