Volume 35, Number 1 · February 4, 1988
The Polemical Philosopher
By William H. Gass
WORKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ESSAY
Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
by Friedrich Nietzsche, translated by R.J. Hollingdale, introduction by Erich Heller
Cambridge University Press, 395 pp., $10.95 (paper)
Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of His Contemporaries
edited by Sander L. Gilman
Oxford University Press, 296 pp., $26.00
Postponements: Women, Sensuality, and Death in Nietzsche
by David Farrell Krell
Indiana University Press, 117 pp., $22.50
Nietzsche, "the Last Antipolitical German"
by Peter Bergmann
Indiana University Press, 239 pp., $27.50
Nietzsche: Life as Literature
by Alexander Nehamas
Harvard University Press, 261 pp., $17.50
In an early, autobiographical essay, written for school, Friedrich Nietzsche recalled that he found Naumburg overly busy—dusty and indifferent as well as bewilderingly various—after the close, quiet, neighborly life of Röcken, the tiny country village in Saxony where he was born. Naumburg would shrink as his own mind woke and widened, of course, but the boy could not immediately realize in what sleepy surroundings he would endure his early dreams. A decidedly Pietist community, peopled in large part by pensioners with their defensive pretentions, Naumburg over the years had lost its economic position to Leipzig, its cultural eminence to Dresden, its political boldness to repeated disappointment (even the intellectual center of the Pietist movement had shifted to Halle), and was now so reluctant to grow or change that its thirteen thousand seemed to increase significantly when the three Nietzsches arrived.
Review, 9243 words
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