Table Of Content"[SAFRANSKII PROVIDES AN IDEAL COMPANION. .. .
THE MOST USEFUL AND INFORMATIVE STUDY OF
NIETZSCHE FOR THE GENERAL READER."
—CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
N I ETZSC H E
A P H I L O S O P H I C AL
B I O G R A P HY
R 0 D I G E R
S A F R A N S KI
T R A N S L A T ED B Y S H E L L EY F R I S CH
Nietzsche
A Philosophical Biography
R ü d i g er Safranski
TRANSI. ATED BY
Shelley Frisch
Granta Books
London
Grauita Publications, 2/3 Hanover Yard, London NI 8BE
First published in Great Britain by Granta Books 2002
Originally published in Germany as Nietzsche. Biographie Seines Denkens
by Cad Hanser Verlag Muenchen Wien, 2000
Published in die US by WW. Norton & Company, Inc.» 2002
Copyright Θ 2002 by Rüdiger Safranski
English translation copyright © 2002 by Shelly Frisch
Rüdiger Safranski has asserted his moral right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved.
No reproduction, copy or transmissions
of this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or
transmitted save with wiillea permission or in accordance with die
provisions of die Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person
who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
may be liable to criminal prosecution and
civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from die British Library.
1 3 5 79 10 8 6 4 2
ISBN 1 86207 506 9
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by Mackays of Chatham pic
It is absolutely unnecessary, and not even desirable, for you
to argue in my favor; on the contrary, a dose of curiosity, as
if you were looking at an alien plant with ironic distance,
would strike me as an incomparably more intelligent atti-
tude toward me.
—Nietzsche in a letter to Carl Fuchs, July 29,1888
Contents
Translator's Preface 11
Reference Key to Nietzsche's Writings 17
Overture: The Drama of Disillusionment 19
1. Inventing a Life 25
2. Schopenhauer and die Will to Style 42
3. The Birth of The Birth of Tragedy 59
4· Redemption through Art 85
5. Untimely Meditations 108
6. The Panacea of Knowledge 133
7. Human, All Too Human 155
8. The Bicameral System of Culture 178
9. Daybreak and Grand Inspiration 201
10. Eternal Recurrence and The Gay Science 223
10 Contents
11. Lou Salomé and the Quest for Intimacy 245
12. Setting the Stage for The Will to Power 276
13. The Finale in Turin 304
Epilogue: Europe Discovers Nietzsche 317
Chronicle of Nietzsche's Life 351
Selected List of English Translations of Nietzsche's Works 373
Bibliography 377
Additional English Language Studies of Nietzsche 387
Index 393
Translator's Preface
1 HE GERMAN satirist Kurt Tucholsky once quipped: "Tell me
what you need, and ITI supply you with the right Nietzsche quotation."1
Nietzsche has proven fascinating to readers of all persuasions. Each of
us can discover a different Nietzsche to admire and/or detest Beyond
his many published works, Nietzsche left behind a voluminous literary
estate (.Nachlass), from which we can now pick and choose "our"
Nietzsche. Access to die full range of his writings was not always possi-
ble in the past Over the course of decades, readers' choices were dic-
tated by the censoring hand of Nietzsche's sister and literary executor,
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who suppressed and falsified his writings
to assure her own prestige and finances and to secure Nietzsche's appeal
among the radical right2 The twenty-volume edition of Nietzsche's
works compiled under her supervision served as the standard edition
into the middle of the twentieth century.
1 Tucholsky, "Fräulein Nietzsche," in Gesammelte Werke, voL 10 (Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1960), p. 14.
2 H. E Peters's Zarathustra's Sister {New York: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1985)
provides a fascinating account of Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche's manipulative
will to power after Nietzsche's death. See also Walter Benjamin's scathing
indictment of Förster-Nietzsche in his 1932 essay ''Nietzsche und das Archiv
seiner Schwester," in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hella Tiedemann-
Bartels, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp. 323f£
12 Translator's Preface
In 1967, the Italian scholars Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari
began publication of a groundbreaking complete critical edition of
Nietzsche's published and unpublished works, followed by an eight-
volume edition of his letters. These editions have allowed readers of
German to examine all extant writings by Nietzsche, and have provided
the foundation for subsequent Nietzsche scholarship in all parts of the
world.
Unfortunately, there is as yet no English counterpart to this critical
edition of Nietzsche's works. Walter Kaufmann's English renderings of
a series of individual texts and compilations and his influential schol-
arly analyses represented a milestone in Anglo-American Nietzsche
scholarship, but they predate the critical edition. Several additional
translations by Kaufmann's collaborator R. J. Hollingdale appeared in
the series Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Among the
more recent noteworthy translations of individual texts are those by
Marion Faber, Carol Diethe, Douglas Smith, and Duncan Large.
A promising new development in Nietzsche studies is a planned
twenty-volume set of The Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, which was
launched under the editorship of Ernst Behler. Three volumes of this
set (Unfashionable Observations, Human, All Too Human /, and Unpubäshed
Fragments from the Period of Unfashionable Observations) have appeared in
outstanding translations by Richard T. Gray and Gary Handwerk.
Owing to Behler's untimely death, the project was on hiatus, but addi-
tional volumes are now in preparation.
When I first embarked on the translation of Nietzsche: A Philosophical
Biographjy I planned to cite published English translations for the
Nietzsche passages wherever these were available. As the project pro-
gressed, this approach proved ill-advised for two reasons. First, the word-
ing of the available translations too often clashed with the particular
nuances of Rüdiger Safiranski's interpretations and therefore tended to
detract from an understanding of the texts under discussion. Second,
translations that predated the Colli/Montinari critical edition failed to
13 Translator's Preface
include key passages because these passages had been expunged by
Nietzsche's sister. In Ecce Homo, for example, Nietzsche aimed a series of
barbs at his mother and sister, calling them a "consummate machine of
hell" of "unfathomable vulgarity." He went so far as to decry his cher-
ished theory of eternal recurrence because it might force him to reen-
counter his family members (6,268; EH "Why I Am So Wise" § 3).
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche justified her excision of these scathing
remarks by calling them the product of her brother's febrile delirium and
deeming it imperative that they be destroyed before he recovered. She
contended that her brother actually loved her dearly, citing as evidence his
affectionate references to her as "llama," an animal featured in one of
their favorite children's books. In fact, the book in question depicted the
llama in downright repulsive terms: 'The llama, as a means of defense,
squirts its spittle and half-digested fodder at its opponent."3
Under the circumstances, I opted to provide new translations of all
Nietzsche passages in Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, with the single
exception of a poem that opens the fourth book of The Cay Science, for
which I have relied on Walter Kaufmann's felicitous rendering. To allow
for ready access to all passages in both the German critical edition and
any English editions, I have supplied bracketed references in the text
that provide the volume and page of the German critical edition as well
as the name and section number of each cited text.
The unique publication history of The Will to Power merits separate
attention. Although Nietzsche had planned to write a book called 'The
Will to Power," he never did so. After Nietzsche's death, his sister and his
friend Heinrich Köselitz, whom Nietzsche called Peter Gast, picked
through and contrived their own selection from Nietzsche's many jot-
tings, and published a book with this tide. The critical edition does not
recognize this compilation as a work by Nietzsche, and restores the mate-
3 Cited in Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
(Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), p. 55.
14 Translator's Preface
rials so assembled to their original fragmentary form.4 In those instances
in which Nietzsche passages found their way into this fabricated work, I
have noted the section number of The Will to Power for readers wishing to
locate the corresponding passages in Kaufmann's translation.
Rüdiger Safranski excels at the art of philosophical narration, as evi-
denced in his earlier biographies of Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Ε. T.
A. Hoffmann, and amply confirmed in this latest offering on Nietzsche.
Safranski's presentation is informed first and foremost by Nietzsche's
thought as expressed in his published and unpublished writings, and only
secondarily by the facts of his life, which are brought to bear where they
shed light on Nietzsche's thinking. Nietzsche's many physical ailments,
for example, which significandy shaped his philosophical attitudes, are
described in fitting detail, whereas his final descent into madness and
catatonia receives accordingly less attention. Readers in search of the
sort of tell-all memoirs and scandalmongering that litter bookstore
shelves will encounter only intermittent references to topics that anoth-
er biographer of Nietzsche might have seized on—sexual proclivities,
romantic entanglements, and graphic details of the final decade of mad-
ness. They will find instead subtle, yet riveting, descriptions of the major
junctures in Nietzsche's life that served to mark turning points in his
philosophical orientation, most notably in Safranski's sensitive portrayal
of Nietzsche's dashed hopes for a new musical era at the Bayreuth
Festival, when it became painfully evident to him that Richard Wagner's
fawning hypocrisy and showmanship had overshadowed the composer's
once lofty visions of new mythology of art Nietzsche: A Philosophical
Biography provides a sweeping panorama of the philosophical currents
that converged in Nietzsche, from the pre-Socratic period to the mid-
nineteenth century, and devotes a final chapter to the resonance of his
philosophy throughout the century following his death.
4 Karl Schlechta's edition of Nietzsche's writings, Werke in drei Bänden
(Munich: Hanser, 1954—56), was the first to consign "The Will to Power" to
the status of fragments from the 1880s.
