How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold
Tale of a Redemption
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- 23,99 €
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- 23,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Nietzsche’s reputation, like much of Europe, lay in ruins in 1945. Giving a platform to a philosopher venerated by the Nazis was not an attractive prospect for Germans eager to cast off Hitler’s shadow. It was only when two ambitious antifascist Italians, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, began to comb through the archives that anyone warmed to the idea of rehabilitating Nietzsche as a major European philosopher.
Their goal was to interpret Nietzsche’s writings in a new way and free them from the posthumous falsification of his work. The problem was that 10,000 barely legible pages were housed behind the Iron Curtain in the German Democratic Republic, where Nietzsche had been officially designated an enemy of the state. In 1961, Montinari moved from Tuscany to the home of actually existing socialism to decode the “real” Nietzsche under the watchful eyes of the Stasi. But he and Colli would soon realize that the French philosophers making use of their edition were questioning the idea of the authentic text and of truth itself.
Felsch retraces the journey of the two Italian editors and their edition, telling a gripping and unlikely story of how one of Europe’s most controversial philosophers was resurrected from the baleful clutch of the Nazis and transformed into an icon of postmodern thought.
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During a 12-year period of mental illness, Friedrich Nietzsche generated nearly 5,000 pages of fragmentary notes, explains historian Felsch (The Summer of Theory) in this sinuous and sophisticated study. In the 1950s, it was revealed that Nietzsche's right-wing sister had made edits as she prepared these documents for publication, but most scholars, according to Felsch, were not concerned that major distortions had occurred. However, Giorgi Colli and Mazzino Montinari, two antifascist Italian academics with "an erotically charged teacher-student relationship," became transfixed by the idea of rehabilitating Nietzsche's philosophy after its embrace by the Nazis. With the help of their communist credentials, in 1961 they accessed the archive in East Germany, where it was locked away as fascist propaganda. Yet as they began piecing together an "original" edition, French philosopher Michel Foucault started using Nietzsche's writing to theorize that all engagement with a text is an act of interpretation. As this perspective coalesced into postmodernism, Colli and Montinari's search for an "authentic" Nietzsche was derided as backwards. Their work nonetheless gained influence, though it was hotly contested, including by leftists critical of the redemption of a right-wing figure. Drawing on four decades of correspondence between the duo, Felsch paints a nuanced portrait of postwar Europe's intellectual culture. It's an elegant examination of the passion of academic pursuit.
