To imagine an Italian communist holding an original note by Nietzsche in his hand for the first time on an April day in 1961, four months before the Wall was built, and being so moved by it that he became a lifelong reader of it Becoming “antiphilosophers” is a truly Nietzschean task.
Nietzschean in the sense that Nietzsche always wanted to be out of date and to be understood.
And at a time when evil has a name again, what could be more outdated than dealing with the author of a book called "Beyond Good and Evil"?
Mazzino Montinari, that's the name of the Italian communist, who is also the subject of this article, found Weimar at the beginning of the 1960s to be "out of date".
There, of all things, “in an educated middle-class enclave of real existing socialism”, he found his “personal post-history”, as Philipp Felsch writes.
Felsch, cultural scientist at the Humboldt University in Berlin, tells in his recently published study "How Nietzsche came out of the cold" the "story of a rescue", as the subtitle says, of a thinker who was already immersed in complete evil.
The evil in this case was Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and their will to power.
A will that the Nazis and their young followers from the educated upper classes had siphoned off from the writings of Nietzsche.
In 1901 a volume of aphorisms allegedly by Nietzsche entitled Der Wille zur Macht.
Attempt at a revaluation of all values”, with a foreword by Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
Immediately after his death in August 1900, Frau Förster-Nietzsche, who owned the estate rights to her brother's work, began to publish his alleged main work, which she sold as "Willen zur Macht", in a heavily edited and falsified manner.
The fact that today all compilations that were created from their arrangement are considered untenable is due to the meticulous philological work of Mazzino Montinari and his partner Giorgio Colli, who are responsible for the only scientifically relevant critical edition of Nietzsche's works.
As Philipp Felsch can show, Colli and Montinari not only got Nietzsche out of the coldness of his sister and the Nazis with their philology, they also helped to initiate the great years of that theory, which today is known under such thin terms as "postmodernism" and " Posthistoire” posted.
In his book on Nietzsche, Felsch, who became known for his book The Long Summer of Theory: History of a Revolt, undertakes something like deep drilling into the long summer of theory.
Deep drilling should not deter you.
Despite all the accuracy, Felsch does not follow Montinari's sacred immersion in Nietzsche's note, in which "no picture, no word, not even one punctuation mark instead of another" is arbitrary, as Montinari wrote.
Felsch is concerned with two special founding acts: the two Italians and their motives in turning to Nietzsche's writings and the intrusion of Nietzsche's texts into the theoretical worlds of so-called postmodernism.
As a starting point, he chose a Nietzsche colloquium in July 1964 in Royaumont near Paris, entirely in line with the history of ideas.
Felsch begins his study of Nietzsche with a tattered copy of the program of the Royaumont days, showing who met there.
Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, Foucault
On the one hand there were veterans of Nietzscheanism like Jean Wahl and Karl Löwith.
The latter had gone through all phases of Nietzsche worship since the youth movement of the Weimar Republic until the Nazis imposed a professional ban on him because of his Jewish origins.
On the other hand there were young, still unknown thinkers like Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze.
The fact that Foucault's contribution "Nietzsche, Freud, Marx" subsequently brought it to world fame and, as Felsch correctly notes, is the only one that is still read today, is only part of the history of its impact.
The other, the living part is that which Felsch introduces and which accounts for the quality of his writing.