In 1935, the Russian-born philosopher Dimitry Gawronsky wondered how it could be that Nietzsche was held to be “the pioneer, the ideological founder of the Third Reich” at the same time that he was claimed by the fiercest opponents of National Socialism. “How is that possible and who is right? Are both camps perhaps correct, or is neither?” Gawronsky asked. By the time the Second World War broke out, it was the ideologues of National Socialism who appeared to have triumphed in their appropriation. Writing in The Journal of Politics in 1944, Eric Voegelin claimed that Nietzsche “has the distinction of being the only philosopher who was ever regarded as a contributing factor to a world war.” And as Philipp Felsch points out in his absorbing new book, How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold: Tale of a Redemption, the German philosopher even stood in the docket at Nuremberg in 1946: François de Menthon, the French prosecutor, made a point of singling out Nietzsche as a “forebear” of the Nazi menace.
After the war, Nietzsche was practically radioactive. In the newfound German Democratic Republic (GDR), where he was officially declared a “pioneer of fascism,” his writings were forbidden, while in West Germany he was shrouded in silence and suspicion. Not until the 1950s was an attempt at “denazification” seriously undertaken. Between 1954 and 1956, the Darmstadt professor Karl Schlechta, who had worked in the Nietzsche archives in the thirties, published his edition of Nietzsche’s Werke in drei Bänden (Works in Three Volumes), the last volume of which contained an explosive “Philological Report” revealing that Nietzsche’s sister and literary executor, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, had altered, manipulated, and in some cases even fabricated parts of her brother’s posthumous publications. Most damning of all was the revelation that The Will to Power, that fin-de-siècle reputation-maker, was nothing more than an arbitrary selection of Nietzsche’s notes cobbled together to satisfy Elisabeth’s need for a “primary” work. In the ensuing debate over Nietzsche’s legacy—a debate contested even in the pages of Der Spiegel—an inconvenient fact was curiously ignored: no one had actually seen Nietzsche’s archive of papers and manuscripts, the so-called Nachlass, since before the war. The large wooden crates containing roughly ten thousand pages had been in the possession of Soviet Trophy Brigades until 1946, when they were placed in interim storage before being returned in 1950 to the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar in the GDR—where Nietzsche was verboten. In his “Philological Report,” Schlechta spoke of the papers as if they were both unimportant and inaccessible, even though, as Felsch points out, Schlechta had made no attempt to contact the archive. Many other West German intellectuals, including Martin Heidegger, simply took it for granted that Nietzsche’s original manuscripts were unavailable because they were behind the Iron Curtain.
And here’s where the story gets really interesting. Sensing an opportunity, two Italian philologists, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, plotted what they privately referred to as “Operation Nietzsche”: they would undertake a definitive complete edition of Nietzsche’s published and unpublished writings based on the manuscripts in the GDR. The two men made for unlikely candidates for such a daunting task. Colli was an adjunct professor in his mid-forties who taught ancient philosophy at the University of Pisa. Montinari, a former high-school student of Colli’s, was a disillusioned member of the Italian Communist Party “incapable of practical work,” as he put it himself. And yet these loveably eccentric dilettantes emerge in the pages of Felsch’s book as genuine heroes of intellectual history: two men who hoped that the patient, determined study and transcription of Nietzsche’s manuscripts and papers would not merely absolve him of his National Socialist associations, but allow him to speak for himself for the first time. As Colli later put it: “In truth, Nietzsche must not be interpreted in any way. We must simply lend him our ears.”
The story of how Colli and Montinari produced the forty-volume Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Collected Critical Edition) begins in Lucca in northern Italy in 1942, when Colli arrived there from Turin to teach high-school philosophy and Greek at the Ginnasio N. Machiavelli. A charismatic and bookish Graecophile, he ignored the school curriculum and attempted to implement “a German, philhellenic” model of cultural reeducation, consorting with a “chosen few” students in private and instructing them in dramatic readings of Nietzsche and Plato. By the age of sixteen, Mazzino Montinari, one of the chosen few, was listening to Brahms and Beethoven, reading Kant and Nietzsche, and longing to live out philosophy “in its complete etymological sense.”
Felsch’s narrative, which smoothly integrates history, biography, and philosophy, is most alive when it describes the paradoxes of Colli and Montinari’s intellectual lives. Take Colli’s “philological mysticism,” as Felsch calls it. Here was a man who insisted on philological exactitude, but for whom bookishness and philology were finally only the means for penetrating to the secret wisdom behind the text. (He was especially drawn to writings “on the edge of writtenness,” as Felsch puts it, such as pre-Socratic works or Nietzsche’s unpublished notes.) It was one of Colli’s many apparent contradictions that he “exhorted his pupils to go beyond bookish knowledge” at the same time that he drove them to “practice a philological rigor that far exceeded the standard measure.”
Despite living under a Fascist regime, Colli explained to his students that Nietzsche “is the anti-political man par excellence” and that his doctrine “aims for mankind’s total distance from social and political interests.” Not that Colli had any sympathies for the Duce. He was clearly inclined toward liberalism; his father had been the managing director of the liberal daily La Stampa until the Fascists forced him into early retirement. As a boy, Colli attended the same preparatory school as Cesare Pavese and Leone Ginzburg, husband of the novelist Natalia Ginzburg. Still, “to call him a liberal,” Felsch argues, “is a half-truth at best, for unlike with the bourgeois antifascists, no sort of political agenda emerged from his liberalism. The freedom of the individual that he believed in is the freedom from politics.”
But politics would not leave him or his students alone. Throughout the summer of 1943, as American troops landed in Sicily and the Fascist regime collapsed, northern Italy was occupied by Nazi Germany under “Operation Axis.” Bombing raids wreaked havoc on Italian towns and cities, while occupying Wehrmacht troops terrorized the population. A bloody and bitter civil war soon unraveled. Italians fit for military service either joined the Resistenza or were conscripted into the Fascist militia.
Ironically, Colli’s antipolitical teaching seems only to have radicalized his students, many of whom joined the fight against Fascism. Montinari himself became actively involved in the resistance and was arrested, beaten, and imprisoned by Guardia Nazionale militiamen on several occasions. When Colli was deemed fit for service and received his conscription, it was Montinari who helped him escape. They traveled via Milan into the Alps and on to neutral Switzerland, where Colli spent a year in a refugee camp in Lugano. Montinari, meanwhile, returned to Italy.
What’s especially interesting about this episode is that Colli’s students didn’t join the resistance despite their apolitical teacher’s ideas but because of them. In later years, Montinari would always insist that he owed his enthusiasm for Nietzsche as well as his “opposition to fascism” to Colli. Far from making them morally complacent, the intellectual bubble these students inhabited with their teacher, where they were taught to think philosophically and critically, is what finally inspired them to resist Fascism.
After the war, Montinari enrolled at the Scuola Normale Superiore and, like many of his generation, joined the Italian Communist Party. According to Felsch, it was Delio Cantimori, a former follower of the Hegelian philosopher and Fascist politician Giovanni Gentile, who persuaded him to join. Cantimori had actually been a member of the National Fascist Party until undergoing a political conversion sometime in the 1930s, when he married the militant Communist Emma Mezzomonte. Felsch describes Cantimori as “a dubious character,” but he played a significant part in Montinari’s intellectual development by presenting Nietzsche as a radical apostate from the bourgeois world, rather than the apolitical thinker of Colli’s teachings.
Colli and Montinari did not reconnect again until 1956, when Montinari was working as the director of the GDR-sponsored Centro Thomas Mann in Rome. He had spent the intervening years as a Communist cultural official in East Germany, while Colli was at work editing a series of classic texts of philosophy for the antifascist publisher Einaudi. Both were intrigued by the ongoing debate in Germany over Nietzsche’s legacy, and by rumors of “undeciphered manuscripts” on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Despite the incalculability of the political situation, in 1961 Colli and Montinari managed to persuade a publisher, the Milan-based Adelphi Edizioni, to foot the bill for a complete critical edition of Nietzsche’s writings.
Montinari, whose East German connections proved useful, spent the next several years deciphering and decoding Nietzsche’s manuscripts in Weimar, where he “exchanged the large bills of ideological convictions for the small change of textual criticism,” as Felsch puts it. According to the unofficial Stasi informant in charge of surveilling him, he went about his work with a pietistic devotion, blind to all other concerns. “My life takes place here amid great quiet and absent outside events,” he wrote one week after the Berlin Wall had gone up.
At a German-French summit in Royaumont Abbey in 1964, Colli and Montinari successfully rallied Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Karl Löwith to their cause. Before long, agreements for French and German editions—with Gallimard in France and Walter de Gruyter in West Germany—were secured. Publication of the first volumes began in 1967. The timing was everything. As Felsch shows, the Kritische Gesamtausgabe played an important role in the rebirth of Nietzsche as a prescient postmodern thinker during the intellectual and political upheavals of the 1960s and ’70s—even if hermeneutics and poststructuralism and textual deconstruction seemed to Colli and Montinari woefully misguided. There is a genuine pathos in their anachronistic insistence on forming a “sober, historically contextualized opinion grounded in the facts, that in essence virtually ignores the quarrels of the anti- and pro-Nietzscheans,” as they described their mission. Suggestively, Felsch mentions Karl Lachmann, the godfather of textual criticism, who once insisted that his methodology could not only reconstruct an author’s intentions but also “give [the work] a more perfect form than the one in which the author brought it into the world.”
Is it any surprise that an undertaking as bold and ambitious—as impossible, even—as the Kritische Gesamtausgabe eventually became a victim of its own pursuit of objectivity? After the deaths of Colli (in 1979) and Montinari (in 1986), there still remained several planned volumes of commentary and a critical apparatus to prepare for publication, a task Montinari’s students distributed to various working groups. These groups eventually abandoned the original philological methods of Colli and Montinari in favor of newer, more “accurate” techniques. Reviewing one of the subsequent volumes published in 2001, consisting of 650 pages plus a CD-ROM, the journalist Ulrich Raulff asked: “Who is supposed to read all these notations—and, most importantly, how?”
The end of How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold reads like a cautionary tale about what Dwight Macdonald once called “fact-fetishism,” a holdover from the nineteenth century’s rationalism. Fittingly, then, it is Nietzsche who emerges as the most astute critic of all attempts to present his work “objectively”: “In opposition to Positivism,” he wrote in his notebooks, “which halts at phenomena and says ‘There are only facts and nothing more,’ I would say: No, facts are precisely what is lacking; all that exists consists of interpretations.”
How Nietzsche Came in From the Cold
Tale of a Redemption
Philipp Felsch, translated by Daniel Bowles
Polity
$29.95 | 264 pp.
