Middleton Christopher(ed.

Middleton Christopher(ed., Philosophy, Friedrich Nietzsche Studies

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SELECTED LETTERS OF Friedrich Nietzsche
Edited and Translated by CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON
Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Indianapolis/ Cambridge
-iii-
Friedrich Nietzsche: 1844-1900
Copyright © 1969 by The University of Chicago Reprinted 1996 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc.
All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America
02 01 00 99 98 97 96 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
For further information please address Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. P.O. Box 44937 Indianapolis,
Indiana 46244-0937
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. [Correspondence. English. Selections] Selected letters of Friedrich
Nietzsche/edited and translated by Christopher Middleton. p. cm. Originally published: Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1969. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87220-359-X (cloth: alk.
paper) ISBN 0-87220-358-1 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900--Correspondence. 2. Philosophers--Germany--Correspondence.
I. Middleton, Christopher. II. Title. B3316.A4 1996 193--dc21 [B] 96-46577 CIP
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for
Information Sciences -- Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ∞
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Contents
Preface
vii
Introduction
x
The Letters
I. 1861-69
Student Years; Schopenhauer and Wagner
1
II. 1869-76
First Years at Basel; Wagner and the Break with Wagner
49
III. 1877-82
End of the Professorship; Lou Salomé; Genoa
151
IV. 1883-89
Zarathustra; Transvaluation of Values; Turin
201
Epilogue
349
Pages 354-57 are a reproduction of Nietzsche's letter (No. 118
in this volume) to Malwida von Meysenbug, August, 1883,
from
Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten
358
Indexes
(Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv)
Weimar
-v-
Preface
I have usually retained the German titles of works by Nietzsche and by other authors and composers, except
when the context prompted an ad hoc or standard English title. The standard English titles of works by
Nietzsche mentioned in letters or annotations are as follows:
Die Geburt der Traöbdie
The Birth of Tragedy
Die Zukunft unserer
The Future of Our Educational
Bildungsanstalten
Institutions
Unzeitgemösse Betrachtungen
Thoughts out of Season (or
Untimely Meditations)
Menschliches, Allzumenschliches
Human, All-Too-Human
Morgenröte
The Dawn of Day
Die fröhliche Wissenschaft
The Joyful Wisdom
Also sprach Zarathustra
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Jenseits von Gut und Böse
Beyond Good and Evil
Zur Genealogie der Moral
The Genealogy of Morals
Der Fall Wagner
T
he Case of Wagner
Götzen-Dömmerung
Twilight of the Idols
Der Antichrist
The Antichrist
Ecce Homo
Ecce Homo
Nietzsche contra Wagner
Nietzsche contra Wagner
Quotations from the writings of Nietzsche are from the edition by Karl Schlechta,
Werke in drei Bänden
(
Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1954-56), which includes the
Nietzsche Index
( 1965).
My sources for the letters have been, principally, the three following works: (1) F. Nietzsche,
Briefe
, vols. 1-
4, in the
Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe
( Munich: C. H. Beck), vol. 1 ( 1850-65), edited by Wilhelm
Hoppe and Karl Schlechta, 1938; Vols. 2-4 ( 1865-69, 1869-73, 1873-77), edited by Wilhelm Hoppe, 1938-
42. The notes to these volumes provided me with many details. The volumes contain 1,020 letters of the
period 185077. (2)
Werke in drei Bänden
, vol. 3, edited by Karl Schlechta, pp. 929-1352.
-vii-
This was my main source for letters of the period 1878-89, though for the same period I also used the
Briefwechsel mit Franz Overbeck
(see below). Schlechta's annotation of the letters is slight. I used his notes
for several matters of fact, but have added a large number of my own. His edition contains 278 letters from
the period 1861-89. (3)
Nietzsche in seinen Briefen und Berichten der Zeitgenossen
, edited by Alfred
Baeumler ( Leipzig: Alfred Kröner Verlag, 1932), pp. 527. This compilation was used for filling various gaps
in the two works cited above.
In order to avoid selecting, for the period 1878-89, only from existing selections, I have referred to
Gesammelte Briefe
( Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1907) in 5 volumes. The reliability of this edition being dubious,
all texts used have been the ones established by Hoppe and Schlechta after the death of Elisabeth Förster-
Nietzsche except for those letters in
Nietzsche in seinen Briefen
which do not appear in
Werke in drei
Bänden
, vol. 3. Pedantry or no, and at the risk of too much deference to Schlechta's often sweeping verdicts, I
have not included letters whose authenticity is doubtful, with one exception, which I include as an example
of a faked letter, showing how and why Elisabeth tampered with her brother's correspondence.
Other collections:
F. Nietzsches Briefwechsel mit Franz Overbeck
( Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1916) and
F.
Nietzsches Briefwechsel mit Erwin Rohde
( Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1923). Both of these have gaps in the texts
of some letters, but they have been remedied in those which appear in
Werke in drei Bänden
, vol. 3. C. A.
Bernoulli,
Overbeck und Nietzsche
, 2 vols. ( Jena: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1907): this immense
compilation includes letter material by and about Nietzsche. An early German selection also exists:
Nietzsches Briefe
, selected and edited by Richard Oehler ( Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1915; 2d enlarged edition
1917).
The following are collections of letters to Nietzsche: Peter Gast,
Briefe an Friedrich Nietzsche
, 2 Vols. (
Munich, 1923-24).;
Die Briefe Carl von Gersdorffs an Friedrich Nietzsche
, 3 vols. ( Weimar, 1934-36), vol.
4, edited by Erhart Thierbach ( Weimar, 1937), containing Gersdorff's letters about
Nietzsche to Rohde
,
Wagner, Cosima Wagner, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and Carl Fuchs.
Cosima Wagners Briefe an Friedrich
Nietzsche
, 2 parts ( Weimar, 1938-41), edited by Erhart Thierbach. All except a few of Nietzsche's letters to
Cosima were destroyed by fire at Bayreuth.
There exist in English the following three collections:
Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche
, edited by
Oscar Levy, translated by Anthony M. Ludovici ( London: William Heinemann, 1921);
The Nietzsche-
Wagner Correspondence
, edited by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, translated by Caroline V. Kerr ( New York:
Boni and Liveright, 1921);
Nietzsche: Unpublished Letters
, translated and edited by Kurt F. Leidecker ( New
York: Philosophical
-viii-
Library, 1959) -- containing seventy-five letters of the period 1861-89, but defective translations in defective
English. In French:
La vie de Frédéric Nietzsche, d'après sa correspondance: Textes choisis et traduits par
Georges Walz
( Paris: Les étions Rieder, 1932) -- 274 letters, detailed biographical preface, excellent
apparatus.
Nietzsche's punctuation in his letters tended to be idiosyncratic. His dashes, ellipses, and parentheses have
been retained to a large extent. But in order to facilitate reading, dashes between sentences have been largely
eliminated. In most instances, dashes within sentences were retained, also ellipses within sentences and at the
ends of sentences: these usually indicate an implied aside, or some kind of break in thought. Ellipses in
square brackets (as in the footnotes) indicate an editorial cut in the text cited. A few square-bracketed words
occur in the text, in lieu of annotation. One long dash in brackets indicates an earlier editorial cut from the
text of a letter, which cannot be remedied.
The division of the letters into four periods is based on Nietzsche's own analysis of his life, as suggested in
letter No. 110 ( February 11, 1883). For convenience, biographical notes for each period are printed at the
start of each period. The Epilogue gives details of Nietzsche's breakdown and of the years which ensued.
I want to thank James Hynd, William Arrowsmith, and Donald Carne-Ross for help with quotations and
references in Greek and Latin, and the National Translation Center for a grant which made this work
possible.
-ix-
Introduction
Nietzsche has had an incalculably immense impact on European writing and thought since 1900. During the
early 1930's, when his thought was lending itself to Nazi distortions, Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch,
among German writers, turned against him as a representative "bourgeois esthete" of the later nineteenth
century. Mann connected him with the "guilt of the intellect, its unpolitical disregard of the actual world,
surrender to the esthetic enjoyment of its own audacities. . . . In those secure bourgeois times, nobody
realized how easily a people can be made to believe that there are no longer any iniquities which cry out to
heaven."
1
Nonetheless, Nietzsche's nihilism was so symptomatic, his quest of the naked truth so
singleminded, his character as a writer and thinker so exhilarating, that Mann used him as a model for his
fabulous artificer of the age, the composer Adrian Leverkühn , in his novel
Doktor Faustus.
This ambiguity
is also found in Broch remarkable essay "Evil in the Value System of Art" ( 1933). Nietzsche may not be of
this age, Broch wrote, since he was a creature of the bourgeois
"estheticizing"
nineteenth century. But his
discovery and analysis of the problem of value are as crucial as Kierkegaard's: they meant the end of an
outworn metaphysics, and they anticipated "the immense tension between good and evil, the almost
unbearably tense polarizations which mark this age and give it its extremist character, this pressure on people
to incorporate into their lives both the highest ethical challenge and a reality which has terrors that often
surpass comprehension -- so that life may be lived at all."
2
A third writer, Gottfried Benn -- whose
Nietzschean fixation had made him a radio puppet of Nazi ideology at the time Mann and Broch were writing
the sentences quoted -- argued as late as 1950 that Nietzsche was in fact innocent of social and political
crimes committed in his name:
Politicians. . . are people who, when they get rhetorical, hide behind minds and behind intellectuals whom
they do not understand. . . . Yet it is a remarkable fact that,
____________________
1
Thomas Mann,
"Leiden an Deutschland",
in
Tagebuchblätter 1933-34
(StockholmĆ: Fischer Verlag,
1946), p. 151.
2
Hermann Broch,
Gesammelte Werke: Essays
, vol. 1:
Dichten und Erkennen
( Zurich: Rhein Verlag,
1955), pp. 313-14.
-x-
in a certain period of his work (
Zerathustra
) he was dominated by Darwinistic ideas, believed in the selection
of the fittest, the struggle for existence which only the hardest survive, but he took over these ideas for the
coloring of his vision, it was not granted to him to ignite his vision with the images of saints. He would
certainly not have welcomed the blond beast who came out of this. As a human being he was impecunious,
immaculate, pure -- a great martyr and a great man. I might add: for my generation he was the earthquake of
an epoch and the greatest genius of the German language since Luther.
3
Even to his most penetrating critics, like Georg Lukacs, Nietzsche remains something of an enigma.
4
His
books are highly idiosyncratic, born of questioning in the face of pain and death, a kind of crystallized spray
from massive brain waves. He is obviously one of the great moribunds of the nineteenth century -- kindred
spirit to Kierkegaard, Leopardi, Amiel, Baudelaire, Dostoevski, and (not least) Wagner. Going further back,
there is his acknowledged and obviously chemical sympathy for Hölderlin. One might hope that his letters
would reveal the man behind the immoralist, behind the visionary, behind the terrorist of metaphysical revolt,
who had such delicately beautiful hands and such a famous mustache. Yet he was a reticent man, in his
conversation as in his letters. The letters are like aerial photography of a subterranean labyrinth.
Until about 1876, when he was thirty-two, Nietzsche's letters do contain protestations of friendship: with
Gersdorff, with Rohde, with the motherly Malwida von Meysenbug. It was to be a system of friends, with a
spiritual center in Bayreuth, that should regenerate and transform German society, in the names of
Schopenhauer and Wagner. As late as 1884, he is dreaming of a "Brotherhood of the
Gaya Scienza"
to be
assembled in Nice. But after 1876, he becomes steadily more conscious of his isolation: of the strangeness of
his mind, the "inconununicability of the heart." To Wagner in November, 1872, he writes of his existing "in
the midst of a solar system of loving friendship." Yet in the same month he writes to Malwida: "Why on
earth did I not write to you for such a long time? That is what I ask myself in amazement, without finding
good reasons or even excuses. But I have often found it most difficult to decide on writing to those of whom
I am thinking most. Yet I do not understand it. . . . There is much that is irrational, and only forgetting can
help one against it." Eleven months before his breakdown, there is a momentary lifting of the iron mask of
self-imposed (and self-creating) isolation: "The perpetual lack of a really refreshing and
healing human love,
the absurd isolation which it entails, making almost any
____________________
3
Gottfried Benn,
Gesammelte Werke,
1 ( Wiesbaden: Limes Verlag, 1959), 482-83.
4
Georg Lukacs,
Die Zerstörung der Vrnunft
( Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1955).
-xi-
residue of a connection with people merely something that wounds onethat is all very bad indeed and right
only in itself, having the right to be necessary." Five months later, he is writing: ". . . a great emptiness
around me. Literally, there is no one who could understand my situation. The worst thing is, without a doubt,
not to have heard for ten years a single word that actually got through to me. . . ."
His experiences during the second half of, 1882 certainly enforced this isolation, which
Zarathustra
sublimates. He even goes so far as to say, in February, 1883: "All my human relationships have to do with a
mask of me, and I must perpetually be the victim of living a completely hidden life." Yet this was all part of
his gestalt as a human being. It was the context of what he called "the vehemence of my inner pulsations" --
the presence and the preponderance in the "scale of my experiences and circumstances. . . of notes that have a
rarer, remoter, and thinner pitch than the normal ones in the middle" ( 1887). This kind of finesse, which he
cultivated (as Kafka later cultivated his own eccentricity), is noticed as early as 1871, when he writes,
"Everything that is left over and cannot be grasped in terms of musical relations does of course disgust and
horrify me." The total heterodoxy of his last writings is torn from this humanly almost untenable situation. It
"drips with blood," as he wrote of
Zarathustra II
in 1883. That heterodoxy is the fruit of the terror and joy of
seeking the antithesis while still trapped in the human shell. Remy de Gourmont, whose writings in the early
1900's are permeated with Nietzsche, seems to have derived from him his own intellectual imperative: "We
must lodge contradictory ideas in the hotel of our brain, and possess enough disinterested intelligence,
enough ironic force, to impose peace on them."
5
De Gourmont is no less Nietzsche's unavowed apostle when
he writes, in 1904, "Truth is only a statue of shadow, but to reach it man takes a thousand troubles, one of
which perhaps is fertile."
6
Nietzsche's revolt against a petrified morality could not have been so deep and so audacious without this
alienation. And the letters do show that this was no revolt without objectives, that there is nothing to be
against if you are not for something, and that you are finished if it is only yourself you are for. The objectives
and their dangers were defined as follows in 1876: "Since the belief that a God directs the fate of the world
has disappeared . . . mankind itself must set up universal goals embracing the whole earth. . . . If mankind is
not to destroy itself through the conscious possession of such universal rule, it must first of all attain to an
unprecedented knowledge of the preconditions of culture, as a scientific standard for uni-
____________________
5
Epilogues ( 1913), in:
Selections
, edited and translated by Richard Aldington ( London: Chatto and
Windus, 1932), p. 149.
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