Nietzsche, Freud, Benn, and the Azure Spell of Liguria by Martina Kolb (review)

The central argument of Martina Kolb’s engaging and beautifully written study is that the “smallness, steepness, compactness, and remoteness” of the northern Italian coastal region of Liguria infuse the thinking and writing of the German-language authors Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and Gottfried Benn (1886–1956), along with a host of further literary figures of diverse nationalities and epochs. Located in the historically shifting borderland between Italy and France, and between the Alps and the Mediterranean Sea, this region, also called the golfo dei poeti, is examined here as the convergence of cultural landscape and topos of the literary imaginary.

After the preface, entitled “Ligurian Geopoetics,” the work is divided into two parts of three chapters each. The first part, “‘Twixt Halcyon and Marathon: Azure Spell and Difficult Beauty,” examines the historical, cultural, and mythical topography with particular attention to etymology and the associative charge of places and place names, including the primordial ur of this steep section of coast. That “land engenders the writing and the writing the land” is exemplified through Dante’s Divina Comedia, hovering between “geographic fact and poetic form”; Orhan Pamuk’s mobilization of the Turkish noun kita as both poetic stanza and geographical continent; the French troubadours’ hermetic or “enclosed” poetry; and Goethe’s distinction in the Italienische Reise between poetic writing as vertical and steil as compared to horizontal prose. In Kolb’s perceptive reading it is these physical and metaphorical promontories, the littoral, literal, and literary Liguria, that stage the expressive paradigms of Nietzsche, Freud, and Benn.

The second part of the book is devoted entirely to the Ligurian engagements of the three titular authors and begins with the chapter “Copious Dawns, High Noons, Blessed Isles: Nietzsche’s Ligurianity.” It traces the philosopher-poet’s nomadic oscillation between summers in the Swiss Sils-Maria and winters spent wandering through the Italian Riviera and experiencing “southerly aesthetics” in the manner of Goethe. This is the creative climate in which his Zarathustra could come about or, in his words, “overtake” him during his Ligurian walks. His most dense, compact, and esoterically enclosed work reflects Nietzsche’s sensitivity to place and atmosphere, as well as to metaphor as a vicarious poetic image preceding thought and transcending rhetorical figuration. The second chapter, “Guilt Trips on Royal Roads: Freud’s Ligurian Affinities,” follows Freud as he indulges in his persistent and existential urge to travel, particularly to Italy, in dreams, literature, and actuality. In Liguria in particular, Freud likely found – as Kolb suggests – both a fitting backdrop for an extramarital tryst and also the twisting paths, vertical structure, and “condensed,” remote, difficult-to-access landscape of the mind or “inner land abroad.” It is an oneiric journey, if not a literal one, that Benn takes to this Mediterranean region. In “Blind Spots, Alibis, Sceneries: Benn’s Ligurian Complexes,” Kolb follows Benn’s vicarious fascination with Nietzsche’s Liguria and what in his aesthetic manifesto of 1919 he calls “Ligurian complexes.” Here words and images poetically condense subjectivity, creating potentially explosive associations rather than logical structures, and a geopoetics “situated at the crossroads of geography and psychoanalysis.” A brief postface both closes and opens up the study by sketching out further dimensions of “ligurianity” that invite geopoetic exploration.

Nietzsche, Freud, Benn, and the Azure Spell of Liguria is exemplary for its meticulous scholarship, comparative scope, and rigorous geopoetic analysis while remaining accessible to a wide readership. The book comes highly recommended for those interested in German and comparative literary studies generally, and in particular in comparative approaches to the poetics of place.