16 NOTES

FOREWORD

1. heaviest demand. The forthcoming Revaluation of all Values – together with the effect it may be expected to produce – is presumably what is meant.

2. Nitimur in vetitum. We strive after the forbidden (Ovid).

3. ‘It is the stillest… guide the world’. Quoted from Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part Two: ‘The Stillest Hour’.

The figs are falling… sky and afternoon. Quoted from Zarathustra, Part Two: ‘On the Blissful Islands’.

décadent. Nietzsche employs, here and elsewhere, the French word, since none with precisely this meaning was available to him in German.

I now go away… will I return to you. Quoted from Zarathustra, Part One: ‘Of the Bestowing Virtue’.

‘On This Perfect Day…’

first book of the Revaluation of all Values. Nietzsche was at the date of Ecce Homo still referring to the just completed Anti-Christ as the first book of the forthcoming Revaluation. Either immediately before or immediately after the mental breakdown of 3 January 1889 he withdrew this designation by erasing it from the title-page of the manuscript.

Songs of Zarathustra: i.e. the Dionysos-Dithyramben, published in 1892.

Why I am So Wise

2. as summa summarum: as a totality.

3. I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman. This seems to have been a ‘family legend’ which Nietzsche’s hatred of the Reich inspired him to propagate during his last sane years; but it is refuted by the genealogical evidence. Nietzsche’s ancestry has been traced back to the sixteenth century and over two hundred ancestors are known: all are German, and the name Nietzsche is, together with its cognate forms (e.g. Nitsche, Nitzke), a common one in central Germany.

At the end of December 1888 Nietzsche posted to his publisher a set of corrections to the manuscript of Ecce Homo. The revised section 3 was discovered among the papers of Peter Gast in the Nietzsche collection of the Goethe-Schiller Archive in Weimar in 1969. Gast had sent the manuscript of this section to Nietzsche’s mother and sister, who destroyed it; but he had copied it out. This is the first edition of Ecce Homo in English to include it. The passage reproduced below is the originai section 3 published in the first edition, and ali subsequent English translations.

This twofold succession of experiences, this accessibility to me of apparently separate worlds, is repeated in my nature in every respect – I am a Doppelgäger, I have a ‘second’ face in addition to the first one. And perhaps also a third… Even by virtue of my descent I am permitted to look beyond ali merely locally, merely nationally conditioned perspectives, it costs me no effort to be a ‘good European’. On the other hand I am perhaps more German than prescnt-day Germans, mere Reich Germans, are stili capable of being – I the last anti-political German. And yet my ancestors were Polish noblemen: I have preserved from them much racial instinct, who knows? ultimately even the liberum veto. When I consider how often I am addressed as a Fole and by Poles themselves, how rarely I am taken for a German, it might appear that German has only been sprinkled on to me. But my mother, Franziska Oehler, is in any event something very German; likewise my paterna! grandmother, Erdmuthe Krause. The latter lived her entire youth in the middle of good old Weimar, not without coming into contact with Goethe’s circle. Her brother. Professor of Theology Krause of Königsberg, was called to Weimar as general superintendent after Herder’s death. It is not impossible that her mother, my great-grandmother, appears in the young Goethe’s diary under the name ‘Muthgen’. Her second marriage was with the superintendent Nietzsche of Eilenburg; it was on the day of the great war year 1813 on which Napoleon entered Eilenburg with his general staff, on 10 October, that she had her confinement. As a Saxon she was a great admirer of Napoleon; it could be that I am so stili. My father born 1813, died 1849. Before he took over the pastorship of the parish of Röcken, not far from Lützen, he lived for some years in the castle of Altenburg and instructed the four princesses there. His pupUs are the Queen of Hanover, Grand-Duchess Constantin, the Grand-Duchess of Oldenburg and Princess Therese of Saxe-Altenburg. He was full of a deep reverence for King Friedrich Wilhelm the Fourth of Prussia, from whom he also received his pastorship; the events of 1848 distressed him beyond measure. I myself, born on the birthday of the said king, on 15 October, received as was appropriate the HohenzoUern names Friedrich Wilhelm. The choice of this day had at any rate one advantage: throughout my entire childhood my birthday was a holiday. – I regard it as a great privilege to have had such a father: it even seems to me that whatever else of privileges I possess is thereby explained – life, the great Yes to life, not included. Above ali that it requires no intention on my part, but only a mere waiting, for me to enter involuntarily into a world of exalted and delicate things: I am at home there, my innermost passion becomes free only there. That I paid for this privilege almost with my Ufe is ccrtainly no unfair trade. – To understand anything at ali of my Zarathustra one has perhaps to possess a qualification similar to that which I possess – to have one foot beyond life…

‘good Europeat’: a coinage of Nietzsche’s, probably as an antithesis to ‘good German’.

liberum veto: the tight to veto legislation possessed by the nobility of the Polish Diet.

the events of 1848: the revolutionary outbreaks in many parts of Europe which characterized this year.

4. Heinrich von Stein. He had been tutor to Wagner’s son, Siegfried, and Wagner’s last published writing was an introduction to his book Helden und Welt (1883). He died in 1887, at the age of thirty.

swamp of Dühring: Eugen Dühring (1853–1901), philosopher and economist. The ‘swamp’ is probably anti-Semitism.

‘Zarathustra’g’s Temptation’: Part Four of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is meant.

6. ressentiment. French in the original, for a similar reason to the author’s employment of décadent.

7. pure folly. A favourite joke of Nietzsche’s, here not very apposite. (I quote the note on it from my translation of Twilight of the Idols: Parsifal, eponymous hero of Wagner’s last opera, is described as a pure, i.e. chaste, fool [reine Tor] whose naivety is proof against temptation of every kind. Nietzsche considered the plot of Parsifal preposterous and persistently uses the phrase ‘reine Torheit’ [pure folly] in the sense of complete folly.)

Yet what happened… against the wind. Quoted, with slight alteration, from Zarathustra, Part Two: ‘Of the Rabble’.

Why I am So Clever

1. (It is said… in this domain): due, presumably, to the occupation of Saxony by Prussia during the German War of 1866.

alla tedesca: in the German fashion.

Piedmont: the Italian province of which Turin, where Ecce Homo was written, is the chief city.

Assiduity… holy spirit. Quoted from Twilight of the Idols.

3. Frau Cosima Wagner, born Liszt, Wagner’s second wife and (by the date of Ecce Homo) widow.

ex ungue Napoleonem: from the claw, Napoleon (from ex ungue leonum = from the claw [you can reconstruct or infer] the lion).

4. mere Germans: Heine was a Jew, Nietzsche supposed himself descended from Poles (see note above).

American shallow-pates and muddle-heads. Alludes to the American origin of the Baconian movement, with the implication that Nietzsche does not derive his own views from it.

9. nosce te ipsum: know thyself.

10. amor fati: love of (one’s) fate.

Why I Write Such Good Books

1. ‘non legor, non legar’: I am not read, I will not be read.

Dr V. Widmann (1842–1911), minor Swiss poet.

Karl Spitteler (1845–1924), major Swiss writer, Nobel Prize-winner for literature in 1919.

‘Kreuzzeitung’: an extreme reactionary newspaper.

3. ‘beautiful souls’: phrase from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.

To you… hate to calculate. Quoted from Zarathustra, Part Three: ‘Of the Vision and the Riddle’.

5. eternal-womanly: from the concluding chorus of Goethe’s Faust.

The Birth of Tragedy

1. battle of Wörth… walls of Metz: i.e. during service in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

The Untimely Essays

2. ‘old faith and new’: the tide of the book by David Strauss, an assault on which is the starting point of the first Untimely Meditation.

‘Berlin blue’: i.e. Prussian blue.

Ewald of Göttingen: Heinrich Ewald (1803–75), theologian.

Bruno Bauer (1809–82), theologian.

Professor Hoffmann of Würzburg. Franz Hoffmann (1804–81), writer on philosophy.

Karl Hillebrand (1829–84), historian and essayist.

Human, All Too Human

2. the late Brendel: Franz Brendel (1811–68), writer on music and a Wagnerian.

Bayreuther Blätter: the magazine, founded in 1878, of the Wagnerian faction.

Nohl, Pohl, Kohl. Ludwig Nohl and Richard Pohl were writers on music and Wagnerians; Kohl means ‘cabbage’, colloquially ‘nonsense’.

6. But what is the main… all great perceptions. Quoted, with slight alterations and easily identifiable interpolations, from Human, All Too Human, section 37.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

1. that sacred hour… died in Venice. If this is to be taken literally, it means at 3.30 p.m. on 13 February 1883.

2. the clock-hand… the tragedy begins: alludes to and inverts the stopping of the clock at midnight at the end of Faust’s tragedy.

3. ‘here all things… speech from you–’. Quoted, with slight alterations, from Zarathustra, Part Three: ‘The Home-Coming’.

4. Aguila: originally a fortress, established by Konradin, son of Friedrich the Second, during the thirteenth-century conflict between the papacy and the Hohenstaufen dynasty.

palazzo del Quirinale: then the official residence of the king.

third and last. Part Four was at the date of Ecce Homo still unpublished.

6. I form circles… holier mountains. Quoted from Zarathustra, Part Three: ‘Of Old and New Law-Tables’.

the soul which possesses… ebb and flow. Quoted from the same source.

7. before sunrise: title of a ‘dithyrambic’ chapter of Zarathustra, Part Three.

8. I walk among men… I call redemption. Quoted from Zarathustra, Part Two: ‘Of Redemption’.

no more to will… gods to me now! Quoted from Zarathustra, Part Two: ‘On the Blissful Islands’.

Genealogy of Morals

‘For man will… than not will’. Quoted from On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay: ‘What is the Meaning of Ascetic Ideals?’

Twilight of the Idols

2.‘obscure impulse’… the right path: alludes to the Unes ‘Ein guter Mensch in seinem dunklen Drange/Ist sich des rechten Weges wohl bewusst’ (A good man is, in his obscure impulse, well aware of the right path), spoken by the Lord in the prologue to Goethe’s Faust.

3. I attacked the tremendous task… banks of the Po. This passage records the writing, between 3 and 30 September 1888, of The Anti-Christ.

Claude Lorrain (1600–82), painter.

The Wagner Case

Written before Twilight: the chronological order has, in this one instance, been departed from, probably so as to conclude the chapter with Wagner and the Germans.

1. ridendo dicere severum: laughing to say what is serious – the motto of The Wagner Case.

old artillerist: alludes to his one-year’s military service in 1867–8.

the Trumpeter of Säckingen: a poem by Joseph Viktor von Scheffel (1853) which enjoyed in Germany the same order of popularity as Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin did in England; but Nietzsche may perhaps be referring to Viktor Nessler’s opera based on it (1884), which was also very successful.

cunning: listiger, a pun on Liszt.

2. Vischer: Ernst Theodor Vischer (1807–87), aesthetician.

Why I am a Destiny

2. and he who wants to be… the creative good. Quoted, with slight alterations, from Zarathustra, Part Two: ‘Of Self-Overcoming’.

3. Zarathustra. The historical Zarathustra (Greek Zoroastres), after whom Nietzsche named the central figure of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, is the founder of the Persian religion called in English Zoroastrianism. He is thought to have lived in the seventh century BC.

4. good men never… through the good. Quoted from Zarathustra, Part Three: ‘Of Old and New Law-Tables’.

The good… most harmful harm: from the same source.

5. You highest men… in his goodness. Quoted from Zarathustra, Part Two: ‘Of Manly Prudence’.

6. Ecrasez l’infâme: crush the infamous thing! (Voltaire, with reference to the church).