I. spring in autumn

Although it is now mid-October, spring weather has set in for the duration of this year's International Nietzsche Congress in Naumburg an der Saale. This year, the five-day event has the motto “Commenting on Nietzsche.” On the flyer (see the article image): Nietzsche sitting and reading; on the top of a mountain of books that can only be climbed through a ladder. The painting is by Halle artist Michael Girod, who has designed almost all posters for the annual conferences since 2006.

The event was organized by literary scholars Prof. Dr. Sebastian Kaufmann and Prof. Dr. Katharina Grätz as well as the philosopher Prof. Dr. Andreas Urs Sommer, who are all members of the Nietzsche Research Center at Albert Ludwig University Freiburg. All three are centrally involved in the Freiburg Nietzsche Commentary, which is based at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. Sommer is also director of the Nietzsche Foundation.

The conference is a cooperation event between the Friedrich Nietzsche Foundation, the Nietzsche Society and the aforementioned research center. The venue was the both modern and contemplative Nietzsche Documentation Center, which is directly adjacent to the Nietzsche House decorated with vines, whose leaves shimmer wonderfully bright reddish this autumn. Although Nietzsche was neither born nor died here, he spent his youth here since 1858 and several years during his mental transformation.¹ Today, there is a playground and a daycare center right nearby, next to the historic city center.

To get in the mood for the conference, which took place from Wednesday, 16/10/2024 to Sunday, 20/10/2024, Renate Müller-Bruck gave a presentation about her booklet published in the summer “... trembling with colorful bliss.” Nietzsche in Venice. Müller-Bruck is a distinguished Nietzsche expert and worked for Mazzino Montinari, among others. From the mid-60s, Montinari, together with Giorgio Colli, initiated the Complete critical edition of Nietzsche's works, estate fragments and letters, which form the basis for the published in the 80s Critical study edition forms. Montinari is therefore one, if not which An essential figure in the history of critical editions of Nietzsche's writings. The congress was opened on Thursday with various greetings, including from Naumburg Mayor Armin Müller, Sommer and Prof. Dr. Marco Brusotti, chairman of the Nietzsche Society. Katharina Grätz took over the introduction after the program.

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II. The (un) popular philosopher

Even before the conference, in conversation with a Belgian business manager I know, the event comes up as a topic. The well-connected manager asks whether Nietzsche is very well known in Germany. So as is known. Known as... Sigmund Freud?! In Belgium, people are probably more familiar with Freud. — For him, Nietzsche is a philosopher, no more, no less. Beyond that, he can't say anything. Does not know any of the writings, is vaguely familiar with the term “superman” and correctly estimates it in the 19th century. — The average citizen will feel the same way: Ever heard, a title and one or two terms may be correctly guessed.

For lovers, this idea is sobering. Nonetheless, Nietzsche is probably one of the great philosophers who have also taken up a firm place in the pantheon of thinkers and writers abroad and in popular culture — his quotes have become commonplaces and bon mots. In this respect, he lives on, even though Nietzsche never quite as suited himself as a poster boy as Che Guevara, Karl Marx or Jesus, for example.

It is a sad truth that it will have remained more or less a side note for the majority of our current modern fellow citizens. He has this in common with most major figures in the history of literature and philosophy.
Although the Nietzsche brand remains an educational and intellectual phenomenon in a certain sense, it is true for Nietzsche in particular that this sphere repeatedly proves to be porous. On the Internet, he is celebrating success as a subject of videos, as an icon with a moustache or reference figure for a wide variety of celebrities and performers or those who consider themselves to be such. The Internet only rarely comments on Nietzsche in the way science would like. But more on the question of its digitization later. His significance is enormous for post-modern philosophy, as is for modern artists and, in their followers, popular culture, which certainly also has to do with the provocative and offensive character of his writings. Time and again, he used to cross the artificial limits of individual scientific disciplines with a romantic approach to completeness. For the event, I would like to watch the lectures, which promise a certain level of popularity, and confidently leave Nietzsche to the principle of chance; I hope they won't take offense at me.

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III. Destructions, Explanations, Editions

The first talk I'm listening to on Friday is surprising because of its joviality. Young scientist Milan Wenner talks about the Freiburg Nietzsche commentary. The long title of the commentary already suggests a tension between historical and critical editions. Different from the title of the talk From destruction to deconstruction? The Freiburger-Nietzsche Commentary as a phenomenon in the history of science suggests, this is neither about Martin Heidegger nor Jacques Derrida, but about the question of how editorial studies developed from its strongly philosophical beginnings — more on that later — to a more analytical, textual orientation: “The subject [Nietzsche] secede” from the text, means deconstruction in Wenner, the technical “lyrical ego” and the “texts as a complex fabric of clear voices.”

I am unable to listen to the full length of the second presentation I would like to attend, as Wenner's presentation resulted in such lively discussions in the already overcrowded room that I had no choice but to stay. The atmosphere is generally more cheerful and open than would have been expected from a scientific conference. The short length of the section presentations of 20 minutes, including the 10-minute discussion, gives the event a pleasant pace. The audience is also more diverse than you might think: interested people (I talk to a musician, a yoga teacher, a mechanic), experts, professors, teachers, scientists and those who want to become one, from a variety of different countries and of all ages.

One of the centerpieces follows in the afternoon. Dr. Sarah Bianchi, also a young scientist whose research focused both on micropolicies in Adorno and Foucault and critically on the implications of so-called digital enhancement, gives a presentation entitled Read essayistically. Power, Enlightenment, and Experimental Philosophical History after Nietzsche. According to Bianchi, commenting is already an enlightenment practice and — speaking with Nietzsche — not only a question of the subjectivity of essayistic artistry, but also of genealogy. A thoroughly controversial view, since, as was later interjected by the audience, the question is whether Nietzsche and, following him, Foucault's method would not exactly consist in undermining the philosophy of Enlightenment and its narratives of subjectivity. Bianchi refers to current French novelists, including Annie Ernaux and Édouard Louis. The aim would be to create spaces of discourse for the marginalized through essayistic writing and thus contribute to the “unmasking of ideologies.” As well as to contribute to the possibility of “affect and power-sensitive” positions beyond “digital perfection logic,” which, in contrast to the often predisposed self-help or advice literature, opened up “not a therapeutic or naturalistic, i.e. drive-based understanding, but a power-based” of subjects.

Bianchi's presentation is followed by a laudatory speech and panel discussion with Sommer, Kaufmann, Müller-Bruck and Grätz. With free speech sparkly with Swiss charm and gentle irony — and in print-ready letters — Sommer remembers Prof. Dr. Karl Pestalozzi and Prof. Dr. Annemarie Pieper. The former was, among others, president of the Nietzsche House Foundation in Sils Maria² and involved in the continuation of Complete critical edition, the latter of her name co-editor of Complete critical edition the letters and yearbook of the Nietzsche Society. In his laudatory memoriae, Sommer describes Pestalozzi as a representative of the University of Basel with integrity and improbably literate. Pieper, on the other hand, as a feminist and unadjusted pioneer in philosophy, whose academic-critical novel The Klugscheisser GmbH He doesn't go unmentioned with a long smile. Pieper died in February this year, Pestalozzi died in the previous summer.

From the panel discussion following the presentation with a title that references Nietzsche's famous essay, The benefits and disadvantages of Nietzsche editing for (academic) life, Grätz also tells me in passing, deciphers the motto of the congress. It is the project of a “new critical edition of the estate,” which is explained in more detail by Kaufmann. With a digital genetic edition, for which Prof. Dr. Paolo d'Iorio in the form of the website nietzschesource.org has already presented a prototype, Montinaris and Collis will be followed up on the preparatory work. The new edition should be even closer to the originals and create a digital citable source. As Kaufmann explains, parts of the Colli/Montinari edition are based on conjectures — i.e. editorial interventions — which no longer meet today's editorial standards. These include stylistic “corrections,” which were not without interpretive moments on the part of the editors, as well as problems with the critical apparatus that the project sets out to fix.

Many lectures also mentioned the exemplary years of failed editing practice on the part of the Nietzsche Archive under the aegis of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, whose administrative practices, although they did not remain without widespread impact, can be described as thoroughly abusive. An indiscriminate source — even though it is still considered uncritically by parts of the international audience as a genuine work of Nietzsche and is published as such — is and remains the book The will to power, published by the sister herself and Nietzsche's close confidante Heinrich Köselitz alias Peter Gast. As all speakers never tire of stressing: an editorial construct, a very free interpretation by the editors. To put it bluntly: A “philological nonsense” that sailed under “false flag [the name 'Nietzsche']” is what one of the speeches that evening said; and not even the only one of its kind.

However, according to Kaufmann, the criticism can also be transferred to today. This is how the “myth of the alleged estate” emerged from the disorderly hodgepodge, which was also further fuelled by Colli and Montinari. The whole range of editorial questions arise: What is the score with the order, the authorization; but also the correct evaluation and evaluation, e.g. the question of whether the estate should be assessed as a work of equal importance at all? Even the Colli/Montinari edition is thus subject to a history of interpretation and a filtering process, which the new estate edition aims to compensate for and expand the possibilities of digital editing work. However, the project has not yet been able to find a financier.

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III. Spiritual flower reading

Saturday is still spring-like and warmer, a pleasant breeze is blowing — again: the beauty of the red vines of the Nietzsche House.

In the presentation The flower harvest — an endless commentary Dr. Catarina Caetano da Rosa, Deputy Director of the Documentation Center, presents a project in which she meticulously excerpted references to Nietzsche in secondary literature and references to them. A collection of second-hand quotes, pictures and mentions found on the Documentation Center website can be found. Da Rosa is also reminiscent of the list of fantastic animal groups that Michel Foucault wrote in his Order of things quoted by Jorge Luis Borges. In short, although this is more than an idiosyncratic art project, for the time being it is not a reception science project in the strict sense of the word. The experimental collection illustrates a “fragmented profile” of the philosopher and the “driving force” Nietzsche. In the room in the former study on the first floor of the Nietzsche House, there are a number of trendy T-shirts that look like a cross-section of the philosopher's iconography. They once again underline his pop cultural influence, which does not always have to coincide with reality or historical contexts.

In the evening, the grand awarding of the International Friedrich Nietzsche Prize to Prof. Dr. Renate Reschke, a luminary in Nietzsche research who in particular was one of the few in the GDR to conduct research on Nietzsche, will be celebrated. The prize is endowed with 15,000€. She receives congratulations, greetings and gifts from her colleagues and the mayor. The ceremony will be rounded off with a laudatory speech by Prof. Dr. Christoph Türcke. The evening will be accompanied by a performance of Nietzsche's compositions with vocals and piano.

Reschke's own presentation under the title About the dilemma of presence of mind and the lack of sense of history. On the continued topicality of Nietzschean cultural criticism characterizes a wonderfully pessimistic diagnosis of the present — in the sense of Nietzsche's time, but also of our own. In fact, according to Reschke, she would rather have talked about the topic “Why I am not a Nietzscherian”, but then decided on the present one. Reschke critically examines the concept of “presence of mind” and its relationship to history. Summarizing the enormously dense and partly polemical presentation seems neither possible nor effective to me at this point; rather, Reschke's wonderfully natural style is emphasized, which does not have much affection. She only rarely becomes very concrete: She speaks of the philosophical, so her presentation remains enigmatic in a certain sense and in the space of abstract. Her criticism is directed not only against the mass culture of modern media, which tended more to solidify the present (machine culture, acceleration, etc.), but also against his own milieu, including the (political) role of Nietzsche in the past East-West conflict, in which he long (for both systems) as Enfant Terrible valid, does not remain unaffected. Only Nietzsche himself could probably express it more beautifully: “No, we don't love humanity”³.

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IV. Two ghosts

What is crystal clear at the end of the conference is how closely interpretation, criticism and editorial studies are linked. As shown in particular by the dispute over Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's administration of the estate, political, economic, but also private interests play a role time and again.

Finally, one last picture: Two ghosts, in the form of two mutually exclusive methodological camps, seemed to haunt Congress time and again. One that wants to stick to the concept, figure and personality, an authentic Nietzsche and a philosophy of his own, and the other, which is concerned with scientific analysis, technical structures and the historical and intellectual influences in his thinking. The image of the battle of scientific love for truth with theatrical love for appearances is not something you want to try in the end. I'd rather spend a moment with sunlight and the changing colors of autumn.

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Jonas Pohler was born in Hanover in 1995. He studied German literature in Leipzig and completed his studies with a master's degree on “Theory of Expressionism and with Franz Werfel.” He now works in Leipzig as a language teacher and is involved in integration work.

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Except for the article image, the pictures for this article are photographs of the author.

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Footnotes

1: Editor's note: See also the Nietzsche House and its history this Article by Lukas Meisner on this blog.

2: Editor's note: See the article by Christian Sährendt on this blog (link).

3: The happy science, Aph 377.