Nietzsche Critical Edition
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The critical complete edition of Friedrich Nietzsche's works and notebooks, edited by the Italians Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari from their own decipherment of Nietzsche's manuscripts in Weimar. An Italian edition appeared from 1964 and then a French one, and the German original edition has been published since 1967 by Walter de Gruyter in Berlin. Unlike the old editions of the Nietzsche Archive, it prints the notebooks in full, notebook by notebook and in chronological order, which showed that The Will to Power was a compilation rather than a book by Nietzsche, and it became the standard edition of Nietzsche scholarship. The fifteen-volume study edition of 1980 and the digital edition since 2009 follow its text.
In depth
Why does a critical edition matter so much for Nietzsche?
A reliable edition matters for any philosopher, but for Nietzsche it changed the very shape of his thought. When his mind collapsed early in 1889, Nietzsche left no ordered form of his works. His published books existed in various editions with various publishers, two were in the press, and thousands of pages of notebooks and notes remained. His sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who took possession of these papers, and her Nietzsche Archive monopolised his texts for half a century, presenting The Will to Power, compiled from selected notes, as his main work and even altering his letters. The image of Nietzsche in the first half of the twentieth century, above all the Nietzsche the Nazis appropriated, rested to a great extent on these editions.
The Nietzsche Critical Edition changed this. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari read the manuscripts afresh from the beginning and printed everything: the books Nietzsche published in the last form he gave them, and the notebooks in the actual order of the notebooks and notes. As a result Nietzsche's late thought emerged not as a finished "system" but as experiments constantly revised and abandoned, and The Will to Power dropped out of the list of his books. Almost all scholarship that quotes Nietzsche today rests on this edition or its derivatives. Nearly every Nietzsche quotation in this genealogy is likewise translated directly from its digital version.
What editions came before?
According to the German Wikipedia, after Nietzsche's collapse his papers were first collected by his friend Franz Overbeck in consultation with Heinrich Köselitz (Peter Gast), and in 1892 a first collected edition under Köselitz's care began to appear from Naumann. But Elisabeth, back from Paraguay in September 1893, stopped it after five volumes and had it recalled and pulped. The Nietzsche Archive she founded published the nineteen-volume Großoktavausgabe from 1894 to 1913 (with an index volume added in 1926) and the twenty-three-volume Musarion edition in 1920–1929, of which Montinari remarked that its monumentality stood in inverse proportion to its scholarly value. A historical-critical edition that the Archive began in 1933 with C. H. Beck stopped after a few volumes, criticised by the Nazi authorities and halted by the war.
The Archive's editions were criticised from the start. Fritz Koegel and Rudolf Steiner, who had worked at the Archive, and the Horneffer brothers, Charles Andler and Erich Podach, among others, challenged its editorial methods. But the problem became known to the public only after the three-volume edition Karl Schlechta began publishing with Hanser in 1954, whose "Philological Afterword" (1957) exposed Elisabeth's forgeries and dissolved The Will to Power. Schlechta, however, had not examined the manuscripts held in Weimar in East Germany, and as Podach pointed out, his edition still inherited the selection and errors of the old compilation.
How did Colli and Montinari make the edition?
Colli, from Turin, was a scholar of ancient philosophy who taught at the University of Pisa for thirty years; Montinari had been his pupil at a high school in Lucca in the 1940s. In the early 1950s Montinari was an activist in the cultural organisations of the Italian Communist Party, translating German texts such as Franz Mehring's History of German Social Democracy; after the suppression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 he turned away from orthodox Marxism but remained a party member all his life. From the late 1950s the two were preparing an Italian translation of Nietzsche for the publisher Einaudi when the work of Schlechta and Richard Roos showed them that the existing German editions could not be trusted.
In April 1961 Montinari went to Weimar in East Germany himself and examined the manuscripts in the Goethe and Schiller Archive, which held the holdings of the former Nietzsche Archive. The two then decided to make an entirely new critical edition as the basis for the translation. Einaudi rejected the project for financial and ideological reasons. Luciano Foà, an Einaudi editor, founded the new publishing house Adelphi to take on the edition and secured a French edition through a contract with Gallimard in Paris. The first Italian volumes appeared in 1964. According to the English Wikipedia, at an international Nietzsche colloquium in Paris that same year Karl Löwith put the two in touch with an editor at Walter de Gruyter, and from 1967 the German original edition, Nietzsche Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGW), began to appear.
Montinari moved to Weimar in 1965. The German Wikipedia says that in his ability to decipher Nietzsche's late, almost illegible handwriting he had no equal except Köselitz, who had died in 1918. His status as a member of the Italian Communist Party helped him gain access to the East German archive. Colli died in 1979 and Montinari in 1986, and other scholars carried the work on.
How is the edition arranged, and what derives from it?
The critical edition divides works and notebooks into "divisions" (Abteilungen) by period, printing each period's published works followed by its notebook fragments, identified by notebook number and fragment number. This is the system by which this genealogy cites Nietzsche's notes, as in "NF-1888,18[17]". According to the German Wikipedia some forty volumes have appeared so far; since 2001 the notebooks from 1885 on have been republished in a differentiated transcription that shows the lines and corrections of the manuscript, with facsimile CD-ROMs, and mainly commentary volumes remain outstanding. The letters appeared separately as Nietzsche Briefwechsel. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGB, 1975–2004).
In 1980 the fifteen-volume Kritische Studienausgabe (KSA) appeared, with the same text as the critical edition, containing all the works and philosophical notebooks from 1869 on with a reduced critical apparatus (second edition 1988), followed in 1986 by a study edition of the letters (KSB). The German Wikipedia's article on Nietzsche's reception says that with the KSA a complete and unfalsified edition of Nietzsche's writings existed for the first time and that it is regarded today as the standard edition. Since 2009 Paolo D'Iorio has published at Nietzsche Source in Paris a Digital Critical Edition (eKGWB) based on this text, together with a digital facsimile of all the manuscripts. Together with the yearbook Nietzsche-Studien, founded in 1972 by Montinari and others, the edition displaced the old editions in the 1970s and became the foundation of international Nietzsche scholarship. A Korean collected Nietzsche translated from it has also been published.
How did the edition change the interpretation of Nietzsche?
The biggest change was the dismantling of The Will to Power. Reading the notebooks in chronological order revealed how at the end of August 1888 Nietzsche abandoned the plan for a book called "The Will to Power" and moved to the "Revaluation of All Values" and then to The Antichrist. Montinari called The Will to Power a "historical forgery", and interpretations that relied on the compilation, Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche as a systematic metaphysician and Baeumler's reading of him as a forerunner of Nazism, were shaken at their textual foundations. Gilles Deleuze welcomed the work, hoping it would be the dawn of a return to Nietzsche. It was no accident that the French readings of Nietzsche by Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida flourished in the 1960s and 1970s when the edition appeared.
The edition mattered on the Marxist side too. In East Germany, after György Lukács's The Destruction of Reason, Nietzsche was labelled a thinker of fascism and his books were hardly published, yet it was in the Weimar archive of that same East Germany that the communist Montinari cleared the forgeries from Nietzsche's texts. This made it possible to distinguish what the Nazis did with Nietzsche from what Nietzsche actually wrote. The critical edition did not, of course, erase Nietzsche's aristocratism, anti-democratism and anti-socialism; these are plainly written in Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, which Nietzsche published himself. What the edition did was to make such judgements rest on Nietzsche's own texts rather than on falsified ones.