The Nietzsche Commentary of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities

Although Nietzsche is a universally recognized author and has had such an extensive impact—on anthropological thought, philosophical discussions of everything from linguistic to moral philosophy, literature and the fine arts, psychological analysis, and cultural criticism—there is no comprehensive commentary on his collected works. The supplementary volumes (Nachberichtsbände) of Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari's Kritische Gesamtausgabe offer only a few references and are intentionally reserved in their commentary, due to their primary function as an instrument within a philological edition. To date there is no scientific, foundational commentary that reviews and makes accessible, in equal measure, the historical and literary as well as philosophical premises, contexts, and impacts of Nietzsche's work. In view of Nietzsche's extraordinary influence, this task is one of particular importance and international interest. Because this impact has been so broad, extending into such diverse cultural and academic fields, a Nietzsche commentary must be interdisciplinary in its conception—which surely complicates its preparation but at the same time makes it uniquely significant.

In extraordinary ways, Nietzsche's works call for interdisciplinarity in a commentary on them. It is apparent how intensively Nietzsche, the classical philologist, makes recourse to ancient literature and philosophy, how the Bible impacted even the linguistic mannerisms of this Protestant pastor's son, what deep impressions were left on him by the modern philosophical tradition and by German literature from the classical and Romantic periods through to the late nineteenth century. From Montaigne to La Rochefoucauld, the French Moralists animated the aphorist in Nietzsche; the French Enlightenment (particularly Voltaire) was formative for the notion of the "free spirit" that became decisive in his manner of thinking; finally, he oriented himself by the exponents of a "modern" diagnosis of decadence, from Baudelaire to Bourget. From the French Revolution to the uprising of the Paris Commune, historical upheaval provoked his thinking just as strongly as did the contemporary insights of the natural sciences, medicine, and psychology. Historical analyses from Tocqueville to Burckhardt were important coordinates for him. The milestones of his intellectual activity include the positivism and historicism of the nineteenth century every bit as much as they do Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Darwin.

Similarly multidimensional is the reception history of Nietzsche's work, the dissemination and impact of which were, according to Gottfried Benn, unsurpassed in the history of ideas. One need only recall Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil, Gottfried Benn, Sigmund Freud, and Martin Heidegger; or Nietzsche's impact on French intellectual life from André Gide to Jacques Derrida; or the ideological and political brisance that Nietzsche took on when co-opted in the name of a twentieth-century Weltanschauung; or finally his key role in modern anthropology and cultural criticism.

The Nietzsche edition that Colli and Montinari founded in 1967 has been appearing ever since and is almost complete. Nietzsche's works and letters are now available in more than fifty volumes.¹ Despite some shortcomings originating mainly in the early phase of preparation, this edition is a fundamental achievement that forms the basis for all future work. Here the voluminous Nachlass and the correspondence are edited in their entirety for the first time, fulfilling the most important precondition for a grounded commentary. Nietzsche's personal library has been documented (now up to date),² as has the body of Nietzsche research (Weimar Nietzsche Bibliography in five volumes, continuing as the Internet Bibliography of the Anna Amalia Bibliothek Weimar).³ Standard bibliographic works also include William Schaber's publication history of Nietzsche's writings and Richard Frank Krummel's registers of Nietzsche scholarship in German through 1945.⁴ The Web site www.nietzschesource.org by Paolo D'Iorio is a most valuable tool, given how many of Nietzsche's statements are aphoristic and scattered and thus difficult to coordinate. Henning Ottmann's Nietzsche Handbook facilitates an efficient orientation to almost all subjects, through its articles as well as its selected bibliographies on specific topics.⁵ This handbook is supplemented by Christian Niemeyer's extensive Nietzsche-Lexikon.⁶ Steven E. Aschheim...