he was appointed, at the ripe age of twenty-four, to the chair of classical philology at Basel. Among his acquaintances was the great scholar Jakob Burckhardt, the historian who put the Italian Renaissance on the map. It was there that he wrote his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), an original, highly suggestive analysis of tragedy and of ancient Greek culture as a tense struggle between liberated Dionysian impulses (whose prestige Nietzsche was intent on restoring) and controlled Apollonian reason. In its later chapters, the book threw a bridge between antiquity and his own times by extravagantly praising Richard Wagner, whose friend he had become. His next widely read work, Untimely Meditations (1873–76), a collection of four lengthy essays dealing with such subjects as Schopenhauer, Wagner, and the writing of history, displayed Nietzsche’s interest in current affairs and his delight in polemics. The “Untimely” in the title of this collection must be read to mean only that its author stood ready to confront his times with some unconventional views.
Plainly, the philologist and lover of music was turning into a cultural commentator, an unrelenting critic of the modern bourgeoisie, of religion and moral philosophy as then practiced, and of the German Empire, founded in 1871, the unremitting target of his sarcasm and contempt. He took pride in calling himself a good European. His admiration for Wagner, that all-too-German composer and virulent anti-Semite, waned until his animosity became marked, principled, and public. Readers of this volume can get a good account of the grounds for this hostility in “The Case of Wagner” and in Walter Kaufmann’s introduction (which, like all his other introductions in this volume, is outspoken and authoritative).
In 1879, intermittently troubled by ill health including almost intolerable headaches, Nietzsche resigned his professorship and sought relief in the Swiss mountains (the little village of Sils Maria) and Italian cities like Turin—in vain. It was by and large a lonely life, his solitude broken only by occasional visits by a few—a very few—loyal disciples. But for a decade, he produced his most enduring books in this hermitlike existence. Two among these crucial texts appear in this volume, in full: Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and The Genealogy of Morals (1887), and repay the closest attention.
For the most part his writings are cast in chains of brilliant aphorisms or connected essays. He pursued his quarrel with Christianity and conventional morality, his analysis of the aristocrats of life and the crowd man, his thoughts on human knowledge and human destiny. He did not complete a philosophical system; he had intended to write a synthesis of his thinking and diligently took notes for what he wanted to call “The Will to Power.” But he never did, and what his sister brought out after his death under this title had neither the form, nor the intellectual argument, he had wanted to give it. Still, the enterprise he managed to stamp with his unique way of thinking was one of stupendous daring and unending interest even for the reader who in the end disagrees with Nietzsche. In 1888, the great Danish critic Georg Brandes gave Nietzsche his first general recognition in a series of lectures. And then, in January 1889, Nietzsche went mad and could no longer defend himself against the distortions by his sister and like-minded ideologues.
Yet now, thanks in considerable part to the expositions and the translations by Walter Kaufmann, of which generous samples appear in this volume, and to the work he inspired over the years, it is possible to see Nietzsche plain. As he put it a little pathetically in the intellectual autobiography he wrote shortly before his breakdown, Ecce Homo, a book eminently worth reading: “Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else.”
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PETER GAY is Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University and the director of the Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library. His works include The Enlightenment and, most recently, Mozart (Penguin Lives).
A Note on This Edition
This volume contains five of Nietzsche’s major works, complete, as well as seventy-five aphorisms from his five aphoristic books, selections from his correspondence about The Case of Wagner, and variants from Nietzsche’s drafts for Ecce Homo. I have also furnished footnote commentaries on all of this material, and have contributed introductions and indices.
All footnotes are mine, except three in The Case of Wagner, which are clearly identified: these are the only footnotes Nietzsche himself included in any