The Trouble with Publishers

Fritz Stern

  • The Nietzsche Canon: A Publication History and Bibliography by William Schaberg
    Chicago, 297 pp, £29.95, March 1996, ISBN 0 226 73575 3

Another book on Nietzsche – to add to the thousands that already attest his towering presence in our world. But this one is different. It restricts itself to one central theme, Nietzsche as author, and to the history of the 56 works and compositions that he prepared for publication. We are told how and when and with whom these books, pamphlets and musical scores were published, according to what plans and instructions, with what covers, what quality of paper, what price, what fate. Nietzsche’s works – or at least those written after the rigorously philological ones of his early years – were sacred texts for him. Their life was his life, and hence this closely focused book, this ‘bibliobiography’, as Schaberg calls it, is of surpassing interest even if it omits almost all discussion of content and substance. Here are the earthbound details that illuminate one aspect of the life of a soaring spirit.

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[*] How appropriate that these scholars were Italian! Nietzsche early on proclaimed his antipathy to Germans, especially to the then new Reichsdeutsche. Conversely, he had great faith in Europeans, in Europe itself, and we have a draft of a letter from late December 1888 – just before his breakdown – to Giosuè Carducci, urging him to publish Nietzsche contra Wagner first in Italian. In 1877 a French translation of Richard Wagner in Bayreuth appeared, the only translation of any work into a foreign language during Nietzsche’s active life, and he wrote to Schmeitzner: ‘Let us hope that Europe will be kinder than Germany.’ Indeed, the few critics who did recognise him were mostly non-Germans: Brandes, Taine and Strindberg among them.