Thirty Years of Sense-Making: Richard Schacht’s Nietzsche in Germany

In this article, I investigate the reception of Richard Schacht’s Nietzsche in Germany. Despite the fact that his later work was widely acknowledged in Germany, his 1983 monograph did not receive much attention. I suggest that this is due in part to the significantly differing landscapes in the United States and in Germany during the 1980s and in part to different methodological approaches. Schacht’s incentive to introduce Nietzsche to an analytically minded and generally quite hostile American audience by means of extracting his arguments, not the least through extensive use of The Will to Power, did not contribute much to the contemporary focus of the founders of Nietzsche-Studien, who aimed to establish a professionalized reconstructive Nietzsche-research based on the critical edition of Colli and Montinari. However, in my concluding remarks I argue that Schacht’s balancing approach and his notion of discourse-relative truth might serve intercontinental dispute about Nietzsche better than some currently more striking alternatives.