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.

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