The Nietzsche Boys

How Nietzsche Came in from the Cold, by Philipp Felsch, trans. Daniel Bowles (Cambridge: Polity, 2024), $29.95

The most learned man I know suggests a comic figure. He is bald, short, and excitable. He wears thick glasses. An idiosyncratic filler tic (“um-nyah”) punctuates his communication in, presumably, all 17 languages he knows. That Vittorio Hösle’s Morals and Politics ought to be more widely read in the United States is another way he reminds me of Timofey Pnin. He is also kind, wise, and deadly serious. When he habilitated at the tender age of 26, people made the inevitable comparisons to the youngest German philosopher to qualify for a professorship: Friedrich Nietzsche, at age 25.

Mention this earlier prodigy, however, and Hösle will shudder with disgust. He suggests a shower may be in order after reading Ecce Homo. His graduate class at the University of Notre Dame was my first encounter with vicarious embarrassment (of course the Germans have a word, Fremdscham) regarding Nietzsche. Some people cannot forget the enthusiasms of the Nazis and the young Benito Mussolini. Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s only sibling to survive into adulthood, selectively promoted anti-Semitic scrawlings among the papers that Nietzsche had left behind (his Nachlass). She pawned off others as his posthumous masterpiece, The Will to Power. Her presentation of the Nachlass was not seriously challenged until the postwar era. Philipp Felsch’s How Nietzsche Came in from the Cold begins here, at the nadir of this strange thinker’s reputation, and tells the curious story of its rehabilitation by two underappreciated Italian scholars. 

Felsch’s is strictly a European story. Americans are too affable, too blasé, or too credulous to have turned Nietzsche the cold shoulder, ever. At Princeton since the days of Walter Kaufmann, a dash of spiritual elitism is permissible to give style to your character; it even makes a salutary ingredient in the mix of democratic individualism. Didn’t Nietzsche have a lifelong respect for Ralph Waldo Emerson? At Chicago since the time of Leo Strauss, and in the many places Hannah Arendt taught, the brooding provocations of Martin Heidegger loom, and wasn’t it Nietzsche who made possible Heidegger’s overturning of metaphysics? But Baltimore first and foremost welcomes Nietzsche. Here H. L. Mencken wrote the first monograph on Nietzsche in English. And it was to Johns Hopkins that Richard Macksey and René Girard invited Jacques Derrida to introduce the “poststructuralist” Nietzsche at a famous conference in 1966. Poststructuralist shenanigans at two Nietzsche conferences in France, the Royaumont colloquium (1964) and “Nietzsche adjourd’hui?” at Cerisy-la-Salle (1972), bookend Felsch’s reception history. Derrida and his colleagues make Nietzsche into a hero of playful textual vandalism. Nowhere is “the truth” or even the intentions of “the author” to be found, they argue, least of all in Nietzsche’s exposé of the will to truth as the will to power. Felsch’s main subjects are mostly ghosts at these banquets. During this time, Giorgio Colli (1917–1979) and Mazzino Montinari (1928–1986) were compiling a new critical edition of Nietzsche’s collected works, including his Nachlass, on the other side of the Iron Curtain in Weimar. Even as Derrida quotes their manuscripts, however, he mocks their painstaking philological effort. Seizing upon one marginal note, “I have forgotten my umbrella,” Derrida asks, does this jot belong to Nietzsche’s “works”? Is, he gibes, the forgotten umbrella a key to unlocking the “truth” of Nietzsche’s intent?

Felsch presents this Nietzsche reception history in the context of a love story between young men and philosophy. It begins at Ginnasio N. Machiavelli in Lucca in 1942. Colli is a charismatic 25 year-old high-school teacher. Montinari is a promising pupil of 14. Surprisingly, Colli’s obsession with Nietzsche chafes against the official fascist curriculum more radically than the liberal opposition. For while Benedetto Croce presented a rival understanding of Hegelian historicism (storicismo) to Giovanni Gentile’s, Nietzsche promised untimely thoughts, an escape from unfortunate times, and even philosophy as practiced by the ancient Greeks. Colli’s desire to overcome time-bound ideas and return to classical philosophy also struck Leo Strauss, another Nietzsche enthusiast from his youth, around the same time in New York. Now Nietzsche’s promise may or may not be a false one, since he may regard the “truths “ of the ancient thinkers as artistic expressions of their will to power. And some people also question the earnestness of Strauss’s return to timeless philosophical questions. But to anyone who has encountered the debates among and surrounding “Straussians,” the decades-long disagreements between Colli and Montinari, about the relationship between art and philosophy in general and over Nietzsche in particular, will sound familiar. 

According to Montinari, who would spend decades in Nietzsche’s archive, there is not an accidental phrase, word, or even punctuation mark in all of Nietzsche’s writings. “Logographic necessity” is the Straussian term for this inerrancy. If Colli and Montinari had taught in the United States, they might not stand out at Colgate, Keynon, or Carleton, where Strauss’s students insisted on the possibility of a return to philosophy, despite Nietzsche and Heidegger, by close readings of Plato and other worthies. And even Felsch, despite his close focus on Europe, cannot avoid citing Allan Bloom’s phrase (from The Closing of the American Mind) when Colli and Montinari bemoan the “Nietzscheanization of the Left”.

In all great philosophical love stories, like Nietzsche contra Wagner, the student overcomes the master. Does Montinari betray and outshine Colli? Felsch suggests that Montinari’s communism is a repudiation of his apolitical teacher. But this is complicated. Italian Communist Party membership is Montinari’s ticket to Weimar, in East Germany, where the Soviets had stashed the one hundred wooden crates of Nietzsche’s original papers. Archival research was good communist praxis in the party of Antonio Gramsci, with its critical focus on the cultural hegemony of the bourgeois class. The Soviet Union, too, was invested in cultural diplomacy in Italy. (On the other side of this cultural-diplomacy contest, Professor Hösle was born to the director of the Goethe-Institut in Milan and an Italian mother in 1960.) Before rededicating himself to Colli’s dream of bringing Nietzsche back to philosophical life, Montinari was the director of the communist-funded Centro Thomas Mann in Rome.

Both Colli and Montinari elevate artistic insight over the reigning philosophical opinions of the day. This is not exactly apolitical. Take Montinari’s favorite writer, Thomas Mann. Nietzsche inspires Mann to declare for aestheticism in Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), which means the artist’s freedom from politics. Mann opposes German Kultur—the dark, passionate, even “Dionysian” world of life, love, and art—to the rational principles and socially conscious literature of Enlightenment Zivilisation. Artists have a prior responsibility to primal experience that cannot be historicized into a conscious story of bourgeois social progress. The non-political man turns out to be opposed to the progressive politics of the socialist Left and the liberal Right. The same impulse that brings Mann to the defense of the Kaiserreich during the First World War impels him, thirty years later, to defend blacklisted communist film directors in America. There are more loose ends of third-way political aestheticism than Felsch is able to sort out. Is Colli non-political in the sense of Mann, that is, aiming for something like Nietzsche’s aesthetically higher “great politics” that Germany can learn from classical Greece? Do Montinari’s communist sympathies go beyond this same aestheticism? Teacher and student, who are perhaps not so different politically, die as friends.

The power of art does not only confound philosophy and politics in these abstract ways, but also drives the narrative of the Nietzsche Boys, as they are nicknamed in Turin. It is crucial that the archive director in Weimar, Helmut Holtzhauer, is a man of culture. No communist official would have sanctioned archival work on Nietzsche’s decadent barbarism for any other reason. (I was at times reminded of the film The Lives of Others.) Of course, Montinari’s work on Nietzsche had to remain a secret within East Germany. Felsch’s narrative touches can be a little heavy-handed. He initially withholds the identities of a rival researcher and the Stasi informer who monitored Montinari, for example, though neither amounts to a plot twist.

Expectations of profound insights in Nietzsche’s unpublished writings bring Heidegger closer to the Nietzsche Boys than the supercilious Derrida. Yet Heidegger’s insistence that The Will to Power is Nietzsche’s masterpiece makes him an anachronism who was unlikely to appreciate Montinari’s only book, The Will to Power Does Not Exist. Colli and Montinari do not strike gold in the Nietzsche archives. Felsch’s story is one of underappreciated scholarly labors.

If there is gold among Nietzsche’s unpublished letters, for me, it is a remark to his friend Erwin Rohde in 1869. This remark was collected in Montinari’s 1977 edition of Nietzsche’s letters, and it is singled out by the contemporary German philosopher Byung-Chul Han to show just how far this philosopher of the will to power searched for what is beyond power. “Outside the windows, there lies the autumn… which I love as much as my very best friends because it is so mature and unconsciously without a wish,” Nietzsche writes, “It does not desire anything for itself and it gives everything of itself.” These are the contradictory insights, despite Professor Hösle’s apotropaics, that draw young people into this strange love story of art and philosophy.