The Long Gestation of Superman (1 of 3)

It began with "be better."

The idea that became Superman went through a few less-glorious iterations before becoming the blue, red, and yellow icon we know today. The term superman entered English in the late 1800s, as a translation of Frederik Nietzsche’s Übermensch:

A polluted stream is man. One must be a sea, to receive a polluted stream without becoming impure.

Lo, I teach you the Superman: he is that sea; in him can your great contempt be submerged.

What is the greatest thing ye can experience? It is the hour of great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness becometh loathsome unto you, and so also your reason and virtue.

The hour when ye say: “What good is my happiness! It is poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency. But my happiness should justify existence itself!”

The hour when ye say: “What good is my reason! Doth it long for knowledge as the lion for his food? It is poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency!”

The hour when ye say: “What good is my virtue! As yet it hath not made me passionate. How weary I am of my good and my bad! It is all poverty and pollution and wretched self-complacency!”

The hour when ye say: “What good is my justice! I do not see that I am fervour and fuel. The just, however, are fervour and fuel!”

The hour when ye say: “What good is my pity! Is not pity the cross on which he is nailed who loveth man? But my pity is not a crucifixion.”

Have ye ever spoken thus? Have ye ever cried thus? Ah! would that I had heard you crying thus!

It is not your sin—it is your self-satisfaction that crieth unto heaven; your very sparingness in sin crieth unto heaven!

Where is the lightning to lick you with its tongue? Where is the frenzy with which ye should be inoculated?

Lo, I teach you the Superman: he is that lightning, he is that frenzy!—

Nietszche’s concept of superman, then, wasn’t just a strong guy who could fly. It’s a concept we now call transhumanism, the belief that people, individually or collectively, can move beyond what we now consider the limits of human experience.

Unlike the modern Clark Kent, Nietzsche wasn’t much for traditional morality—this was the same philosopher who wrote “God is dead” and Beyond Good and Evil. But he wasn’t amoral or immoral by modern standards, either. He’s no villain—unless you’re confronted with his name on a spelling test.

He believed we should love life—love this world in which we live (as opposed to hoping for heavenly rewards). Fueled by such love, we will improve ourselves into supermen—as far beyond today’s people as today’s people are beyond the apes. And as individuals improve, so will society. Anything that encourages the improvement of both—that’s what post-religious morality should be.

That all sounds pretty great, but one of Nietzsche’s biggest fans turned out to be Adolf Hitler, and the Nazis had more particular ideas about what would improve society, as well as who got to be a superman and who didn’t. By 1933, therefore, the word had more sinister overtones—overtones a couple of Jewish teenagers in Cleveland couldn’t help knowing about.

When Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster put together their first “Superman” story, their superman wasn’t a nice guy at all. Save the world? Improve the world? He’d rather destroy it and rule what remained.

Continued tomorrow…