Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844, four years before the old European order frayed at its center. The disconcerting philosopher is best known for the phrase “God is dead” and scarcely at all for also saying (also saying being his specialty), “We shall never rid ourselves of God, since we still believe in grammar.” The great naysayer’s family name is fraught with negativity, from niet in Russian, to nicht in German, to niente (nothing) in Italian to “ni…ni” (neither…nor) in French, with a stretch to “nix” in Anglo-American. Misinterpreted, misunderstood, the master of contradiction haunted the 20th century he never lived in, not least as the co-opted philosopher of Nazism.

His posthumous slump in the rankings was due to his sister Elisabeth, a fervent Hitlerian sidekick. Twisting her brother’s notion of the Übermensch into a prophetic endorsement of Adolf and his Aryan Master Race, she fouled his reputation. Mazzino Montinari, Nietzsche’s great 20th-century editor and ultra-diligent archivist, found a note in which the great man said of his sister, larkily maybe, “to believe myself related to such a canaille [bitch] would be a profanation of my divinity.” No one would gather from Philipp Felsch’s unsmiling volume, How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold, that Nietzsche was any kind of a joker. You need only note how the insolent, wonderfully sustained Thus Spake Zarathustra—a prose-poem parody of the supposed testament of the seventh-century B.C.E. Iranian sage—is wittier and wiser than the nonexistent original was ever likely to be. Not always understanding exactly what Nietzsche (or his followers and his hardly less ardent anti-followers) are talking about is a common reaction to his singular work. Even in Felsch’s exhaustive (and exhausting) treatise, Nietzsche’s odd lurch into anti-Semitism—commonplace in Anglo-American writers, from Thomas Carlyle to Theodore Dreiser and on to Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and Graham Greene—is taken to be definitive. He makes little note of how often Nietzsche observed, if only to tease his one-time totem Richard Wagner, that Jews were often smarter than Germans.

Unlike the self-important and opportunist Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche never showed signs of obsessive Jew-hatred. The notion of the literal extermination of inferior races appears nowhere in the thousands and thousands of pages in the whole of Nietzsche’s bulging archives or secret squiggles. Might it be that what he does say in casual disparagement was, as with Spinoza over two centuries earlier, a sly means of attacking Judaism’s swarming and fractious derivative, Christianity, without exciting outrage?

Despite his prolific output of paperwork, Nietzsche echoed the scarcely less prolific Plato in holding that “what is best and essential can be conveyed only from person to person and should never be ‘public.’” Indeed, the clue to Nietzsche’s teasing seriousness is encapsulated in “I spoil everyone’s taste for their party.” He also disposed them to attach his name to all kinds of extravagant ideologies that he would have regarded with disgust. How many noticed that he had said, in Human, All Too Human, “Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than are lies.” Hence the need for “the art of reading well”—with skepticism, he was implying. Accusing Nietzsche of some fundamental doctrine is the mistake that all the pro and con men have in common. That and unsmiling portentousness. For going on 150 years, intellectuals have wrestled with themselves and with the chameleon genius whose manifold vision seems to preview not that of the totalitarians of the 20th century but rather that of the cubist painters inspired by Nietzsche’s contemporary Cézanne.

How then should we read him—for unlike his commentators, Nietzsche is wonderfully readable? Perhaps the best clue to his sundry speculations is the Canadian humorist Stephen Leacock’s fictional hero, who “leaped on his horse and rode madly off in all directions.” It seems to have occurred to none of the many academic and philosophical names cited in Felsch’s book to have considered reading him as a satirist and wit. No allusion is made to Lesley Chamberlain’s trim eulogy Nietzsche in Turin, recounting how the great man (need we doubt it?) collapsed in tears as he embraced an ill-used cab-horse before being hustled away to the sanatorium where he was stalled for his last 10 years. How should we read him today? Seriously, while not omitting the odd smile (and scowl).

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