How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold

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.

Autorentext

Philipp Felsch is Professor of Cultural History at Humboldt University, Berlin.

Inhalt

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

The Spoilsports: Introduction

1. Beyond the Gothic Line: Lucca 1943-44
   The Chosen Few
   Standard Positions of Nietzsche Reception
   Seduction of Youth
   The Blue Light
   Magic of Letters
   The School of Higher Ignorance

2. Painstaking Care and Class Warfare: Pisa 1948
   On the Joy of Being a Communist
   Comrade Job
   Le goût de l'archive
   Everyone Else's Nietzsche
   Academics in the War of Position
   Travels in Germany
   Drinking, Smoking, Reading

3. Operation Nietzsche: Florence 1958
   Off the Beaten Track
   Beauty and Horror
   The Other Library
   Crossing over the Abyss
   Dangerous Papers
   The Italian Job

4. Over the Wall and into the Desert: Weimar 1961
   No Suspicious Traces
   The Air in Weimar
   The Craft of Reading
   Nietzsche Is a Disease
   The Knight of the Woeful Figure
   The Politics of Facts
   Down with the Philosophers!

5. Waiting for Foucault: Cerisy-la-Salle 1972
   Alone Against the Nietzsche Mafia
   Against Interpretation
   Watching TV in Reinhardsbrunn
   The Ostracized Thinker
   Nietzsche's Dirty Secret
   Death of an Author
   Quote Unquote

6. Burn After Reading: Berlin 1985
   Anarchy of Atoms
   The Red Brigades of Textual Criticism
   Nietzsche in Paperback
   The Great Conspiracy
   Philology Degree Zero
   The Ring of Being

   Notes
   Bibliography
   Index