Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~72,600 words · 345 passages
Cite this work
- APANietzsche. (n.d.). Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/selected-letters-of-friedrich-nietzsche
- MLANietzsche. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/selected-letters-of-friedrich-nietzsche.
- ChicagoNietzsche. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/nietzsche/selected-letters-of-friedrich-nietzsche.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
Selected letters: to Wagner, to Rohde, to Overbeck, to his mother, and the last ones from Turin.
Context and history
There is no thesis to defend here, and that is why they matter: one sees the solitude, the headaches, the cheap hotels and the growing certainty of writing for a century that did not yet exist. The final letters, signed 'Dionysus' and 'The Crucified', are the collapse in real time. **Note:** a selection of letters is an editor's choice; to cite Nietzsche, use the books. English translation from the complete edition edited by Oscar Levy (1909-1913), the one in the public domain. It is over a century old and it shows. The original is GERMAN and citation should follow the original, but of this work only the translation is here.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
subjects. It will be a revelation to many who are still under the influence of the singular misunderstanding that nowhere was pre-war Germany more fiercely denounced than in the writings of this German (who was, by the way, half a Pole), and who was, in fact, the first good European. The anti-Prussian, anti-German, anti-nationalistic current runs throughout the whole of Nietzsche's correspondence. At the height of Germany's victory in 1870 Nietzsche wrote from Bale (Nov. 7, 1870): "As regards the conditions of culture in the immediate future I feel the deepest misgivings. If only we are not forced to pay too dearly for this huge national success in a quarter where I at least refuse to suffer any loss. Between ourselves: I regard the Prussia of to-day as a power full of the greatest danger for culture." Nietzsche never wavered in his deep distrust and his fierce denial of Imperial Germany; when near the end of his spiritual life we still find him writing from Nice under date of February 24, 1887: "German politics are only another form of permanent winter and bad weather. It seems to me that Germany for the last 15 years has become a regular school of besotment.…