Nietzsche-Lexikon ed. by Christian Niemeyer (review)

The fact that a second edition of this Nietzsche-Lexikon has appeared only two years after the publication of the first indicates—as its editor, Christian Niemeyer, suggests in his new introduction—that, even in the age of the Internet, there is still a demand for compact information between two book covers. (Or does it reveal something about the comparatively slow rollout of broadband in Germany?) Surprisingly, in 2009 as now, there are no competitors to this Nietzsche-Lexikon, although other reference works to date have included a Nietzsche-Handbuch (ed. Henning Ottmann [Metzler, 2000]), a lexicon of Nietzsche’s contemporaries (ed. Hauke Reich [Schwabe, 2004]), a handbook to Wagner and Nietzsche (ed. Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, H. James Birx, and Nikolaus Knoepffler [Rowohlt, 2008]), the major project to produce a Nietzsche-Wörterbuch (edited by the Nietzsche Research Group in Nijmegen), an Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche (ed. Ken Gemes and John Richardson [Oxford University Press, 2013]), and now the Nietzsche-Kommentar from the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. This is to say nothing of the Historical Dictionary of Nietzscheanism (ed. Carol Diethe [Scarecrow Press, 1999; 2nd ed., 2007; 3rd ed., 2014]), and a plethora of Companions to Nietzsche (a Cambridge one, ed. Bernd Magus and Kathleen Higgins [Cambridge University Press, 1996]; and a Blackwell one, ed. Keith Ansell Pearson [Blackwell, 2009], among others).

Nietzsche himself was attracted to the idea of lexica, to the extent that he consulted the Suda, a massive tenth-century Byzantine lexicon written in Greek, and worked, under the supervision of Ritschl, on an Aeschylus lexicon, for which he studied the Codex Mediceus and investigated the Choephorae in detail (See the useful document compiled by Rainer J. Hanshe, “Nietzsche’s Library,” http://www.nietzschecircle.com/Pdf/NIETZSCHE_S_LIBRARY.pdf). Some readers may object that the very idea of a lexicon is anathema to Nietzsche, on the basis that such an approach demonstrates precisely the “will to a system” that he condemned as “a lack of integrity” (TI “Maxims and Arrows” 26). Yet surely what Nietzsche is condemning in this famous maxim, with remarkable economy, is both the relentless philosophical systematization (of, say, Hegel, for whom philosophy itself is a system) as well as the crudely reifying approach of the administrative, “check-box” mentality. Whatever the case, one might still feel there remains a need for something to assist newcomers to Nietzsche to orient themselves within his thought—and to help more seasoned readers to discover (or rediscover) new aspects of his life and thought. This is exactly what Niemeyer’s lexicon provides to all those who can read German.

For it contains, as Niemeyer explains, a variety of entries (almost 450 in total) covering different aspects of Nietzsche’s life and works by as many as 145 different contributors, with Niemeyer himself contributing a good number of them. Some of the entries are survey articles (e.g., “Postmoderne,” “Interpretation”), some are articles providing coverage of individual works (from “Socrates und die Tragoedie” to Nietzsche contra Wagner), and others are articles on major concepts (e.g., “Bildung,” “Kultur”), on slogans (e.g., “gefährlich leben!,” “amor fati”), on images (e.g., “glückselige Inseln,” “Zwerg”), and on Nietzsche’s sources (e.g., “Emerson,” “Schopenhauer”), his contemporaries (e.g., “Paul Rée,” “Erwin Rohde”), and significant commentators on his work (e.g., “Foucault,” “Derrida”). The articles on individual works are arranged according to the alphabetical order of their usual abbreviations, so that—somewhat counterintuitively—the entry on Götzen-Dämmerung appears before Die Geburt der Tragödie, as GD precedes GT.

The entries vary considerably in length, from a paragraph to a mini-essay covering several pages, and the logic of the coverage is not always immediately apparent: for example, almost two whole pages are dedicated to Arthur Comte de Gobineau (written by Niemeyer), but less than a page is provided for Goethe (Hans-Gerd von Seggern). And there are some surprising gaps: after the excellent entries on Naumburg (Martin Pernet) and on Basel (David Marc...