The Foundations of Dominion

A New Translation from Friedrich Nietzsche

The following is drawn from an original Third Reich text, presenting Nietzschean philosophy to inspire the soldiers of the Wehrmacht.

PART ONE

He who has grown wise in ancient origins—behold, he shall seek the fountains of a future yet unseen, where new forces surge from depths unknown.

O my brethren, soon will new peoples arise, and new torrents will plunge into uncharted abysses.

For when the earth quakes, it chokes old wells; it smothers the stagnant. Yet it also unveils hidden powers, the dark secrets long held within.

In the upheaval of nations, new springs break free, fierce and untamed.

Zarathustra wandered across many lands, among many peoples; and there, he beheld their virtues and their vices. But nowhere did he find a greater power than that of good and evil itself.

No people survives without first raising its values high; yet if a people is to endure, it must not value as its neighbors do.

What one calls sacred, another may hold in disdain; what one exalts, another may curse as a blasphemy.

Each people hangs its own table of greatness above it—yes, a table wrought of its struggles and its triumphs, its Will to Power.

What they call good is forged in difficulty; what is unyielding, they deem holy; what lightens their burden in the darkest hour, that they extol above all.

And whatever makes them conquer, makes them strong, makes them radiant in the eyes of their foes—they crown as supreme, the measure of all things.

Truly, my brother, if you knew but a people’s need, its land and its sky, its enemies—then you would understand the law by which it ascends, and the heights to which it strains, ever upwards, towards its ultimate hope.

The destiny of a people—and of humanity—rests on civilization’s true foundation. It must begin not with the “soul” (a ruinous delusion spread by priests and their half-men) but with the body, with bearing, discipline, and strength; from these, all else springs. The Greeks understood this, and thus they stand at the pinnacle of civilization’s history: they grasped what was necessary and did it. In contrast, Christianity, which spat upon the body, has been the gravest curse upon mankind.

Every age has, at some point, tried to throw off the Greeks, seeking to liberate itself from their shadow. For beside them, every cultural accomplishment, no matter how revered or seemingly unique, quickly fades, wilts, and dies, leaving behind nothing but a sad distortion. So rises the resentment against this defiant people, who dared to call all that was foreign "barbaric." Who are they, we ask—these Greeks, who, despite their short-lived splendor, their imperfect customs, their evident vices, claim to be unique among nations and bring genius even to the masses?

We have found no hemlock potent enough to dispatch them; no poison of envy, slander, or rage could erase their unyielding pride. And so we stand—awed, unsettled—before the Greeks. Unless one values truth above all, it is tempting to deny this fact: the Greeks, as charioteers, hold the reins of our culture and every culture. Yet our chariots and steeds are too often feeble, unfit for the glory they demand.

On the acquired character of the Greeks. We are too easily deceived by the celebrated clarity, the discipline, and the unyielding simplicity of the Greeks, and by the sheer, crystalline force of their art, into thinking these virtues were simply bestowed upon them—as if they had no choice but to create with perfection. But nothing could be further from the truth. Simplicity, restraint, and order were conquests for the Greeks, forged in defiance of forces that sought to drag them back into the chaotic depths of the Asiatic. The shadow of regression into mysticism and primal darkness always loomed, and at times, they were engulfed by a torrent of raw, elemental force.

Yet even as they sank, with all of Europe then on the brink of being swept away—back when Europe was no more than a vulnerable foothold—they always rose again, like warriors forged in the waters of chaos. They resurfaced, the Greeks, masters of their seas, seasoned as both swimmers and divers, the sons of Odysseus, who could plunge into the abyss yet always return, unconquered and undefeated.

Greek wisdom. The Greeks knew well that the drive for victory, for supremacy, is a primal and untamable force—older and more potent than any passing desire for equality. This lust for distinction, for standing above all others, they understood as essential to human nature. And so, with foresight and cunning, the Greek state embraced this force, unleashing it in the athletic and artistic contests, where men could contend as equals but also as rivals. In the open arena, watched by their peers, the Greeks could throw themselves into these battles of skill and strength, letting this fire burn openly and proudly, without endangering the cohesion of the polis.

This was no mere spectacle; it was a forge, shaping men and reinforcing the power of the state itself. Each contest reinforced a natural hierarchy, with the victors standing as exemplars, drawing the admiration and respect of their people. These arenas were battlegrounds for mastery—spaces where the Greeks strove, not to appease the gods, but to command their own greatness, to sharpen their bodies and minds into weapons of endurance and excellence.

But as the athletic and artistic duels waned, as the Greeks turned away from these contests, the state itself grew weak. When they abandoned the arena, they turned their backs on their own lifeblood, and thus, Greece slipped into inner desolation and chaos. The decline of the contests was the decline of the Greek spirit itself, and from that desolation, they would never fully rise again.

True Heathenism. Nothing astonishes the observer of the Greek world more than learning that the Greeks held festivals for all their passions, even their darker instincts, establishing rituals to celebrate what was primal in them. This was true heathenism, incomprehensible to Christianity, which has despised and fiercely battled it at every turn. The Greeks, knowing this raw, human essence as part of their nature, never sought to curse it but instead accepted it, granting it a second rank of dignity through its integration into social and religious customs. Everything in man that bore strength they called godlike and carved into the walls of their paradise.

The Greeks did not deny the primal drives that expressed themselves in darker qualities, but channeled and restrained them. Once they secured measures to contain these wild forces, they assigned them to set rituals and festivals. Here lies the root of antiquity’s moral tree, the Greeks' own path to a noble life. The fierce, the suspicious, the animalistic—their inheritance from pre-Greek barbarians and the Asiatic wilds—all of it was woven into the foundations of Hellenic nature. Each was granted its outlet, yet without pursuit of eradication.

The Greek state embraced all this in its very structure. It did not cater merely to select castes or privileged individuals but acknowledged and accounted for mankind’s primal qualities. Through this, the Greeks revealed that remarkable grasp of reality and typicality that would later guide them as natural scientists, historians, geographers, and philosophers. Their state constitution and religion were not dictated by narrow priestly or caste morality; they were the product of a far-reaching comprehension of all human realities. From where did the Greeks derive this freedom and unflinching realism? Perhaps from Homer and the poets who preceded him—for it is the poets, not the sanctimonious or righteous, who revel in what is real and forceful, who see no need to condemn darker instincts. They are content if such forces remain contained, avoiding slaughter and internal corruption. Here, they shared kinship with the pioneers of Greek life and became their guides and heralds.

To search in the Greeks for “beautiful souls” or “noble simplicity”—all this soft praise—I was spared, thanks to my own nature as a psychologist. I saw instead their dominant instinct: the will to power, a force they knew and feared, a force they felt thundering within. I saw all their institutions evolve as safeguards against the explosive charge of their nature. Their great internal tensions sought external release in pitiless, unrestrained hostility. Their city-states tore each other to pieces, each striving to find inner peace by thrusting the chaos outward. Strength was demanded at all times, with danger never far off, lurking everywhere. The Greeks’ magnificent physical vigor, their daring realism, their immoralism—these were forged under necessity, not by “temperament.” These qualities were hard-won, earned over time, not freely granted from the start.

And the Greeks wanted nothing more than to feel themselves powerful, to display their might through their festivals and arts. These were instruments of self-glorification, and when needed, weapons to instill fear.

Greek culture stands on the firm rule of a single, slightly larger class over a dependent population four to nine times its size. The masses of Greece were once largely barbarians. How clearly we glimpse the ancients’ fierce sense of humanity!

To Be Continued.