On that day, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany, and with that, the charge that Nietzsche had inspired much of the Nazis’ murderous ideology became widespread and seemed utterly plausible. In Germany itself, after that fateful date, servile commentators, knowing what would please Joseph Goebbels, did their utmost to claim Nietzsche for Hitler’s “movement.” This was not so easily done; it necessitated explaining away the passages in Nietzsche that could not possibly be reconciled with Hitlerian dogma, but which were present, the authors had to admit, in Nietzsche’s works. One way of dealing with this dilemma was to falsify his texts, or to take some of Nietzsche’s comments out of context. Thus, his infrequent anti-Jewish remarks, normally surrounded by declarations of admiration for the Jews, could be stripped of this praise, so that they could misdescribe Nietzsche’s philo-Semitism as anti-Semitism. The fact is that it was particularly the German anti-Semites of his own time that Nietzsche most despised. In the United States, a not dissimilar view—Nietzsche the prophet of the Third Reich—though of course less infected with propaganda, carried the day. The one or two more responsible interpreters who knew their Nietzsche better than this were swamped in the hostile consensus.

One influential interpretation, which declared Nietzsche to be half a Nazi, was Crane Brinton’s Nietzsche, published in 1941. A highly respected historian at Harvard University, Brinton was an accessible essayist whose weighty opinions seemed to confirm what more casual writers and readers had long held against Nietzsche. Then, nine years after, a philosopher at Princeton University, Walter A. Kaufmann, published Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, and Nietzsche scholarship was never the same again.

Polemics about philosophers rarely reach a wider audience, but the academic world and to some extent even the interested general public read Kaufmann’s intellectual biography with admiration and shame—admiration for the author’s powerful defense of Nietzsche and his effective work of demolishing legends about him; shame for their own hasty and ill-informed verdicts on a thinker who apparently deserved their close and sympathetic attention far more than they had believed possible. It is safe to say that in the course of the twentieth century no American academic study has had a wider, and more fully deserved, impact than Kaufmann’s Nietzsche.

Kaufmann was nothing if not thorough. He exposed in detail the machinations of Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth to manipulate her brother’s texts, and to enlist him in the very causes that he had consistently denounced. Her crude prejudices, including a heavy dose of anti-Semitism, had nothing in common with her brother’s philosophy. Since she controlled his papers, she could publish from his vast pile of notes what she chose, and carpenter together materials that did not belong together or that he had discarded. For eleven years, until Nietzsche’s death in 1900, and for years thereafter, she held a virtual monopoly on interpreting her brother to the world, and other commentators on Nietzsche’s thought more or less helplessly followed her deceptive lead. What Kaufmann calls “the Nietzsche legend” owes more to her than to any other commentator.

Her work as her brother’s editor, then, made the “real” Nietzsche virtually disappear from view. Readers in the English-speaking world who had no German faced an additional obstacle: the translations. In Nietzsche, Kaufmann spends no time giving the gruesome details, but he left no doubt that all the translations in the book were his in part because, he writes in the preface, “[t]he purpose of the quotations was often to establish new interpretations …” (p. ix). And he faced the consequences of his critical view toward existing translations: in order to enable English-speaking readers to confront Nietzsche as authentically as any translation can make it, Kaufmann, after publishing Nietzsche (a book that went into several editions), set about rendering Nietzsche’s main writings into English. The reader of Basic Writings of Nietzsche is the beneficiary of Kaufmann’s diligence: he has translated every text in this volume.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s life was a dramatic one, but all his drama was interior. He was born in 1844, the son of a Lutheran pastor and a devout hausfrau, and proved a prodigy. After studying at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig, in 1869 he was appointed, at the ripe age of twenty-four, to the chair of classical philology at Basel. Among his acquaintances was the great scholar Jakob Burckhardt, the historian who put the Italian Renaissance on the map. It was there that he wrote his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), an original, highly suggestive analysis of tragedy and of ancient Greek culture as a tense struggle between liberated Dionysian impulses (whose prestige Nietzsche was intent on restoring) and controlled Apollonian reason. In its later chapters, the book threw a bridge between antiquity and his own times by extravagantly praising Richard Wagner, whose friend he had become. His next widely read work, Untimely Meditations (1873–76), a collection of four lengthy essays dealing with such subjects as Schopenhauer, Wagner, and the writing of history, displayed Nietzsche’s interest in current affairs and his delight in polemics. The “Untimely” in the title of this collection must be read to mean only that its author stood ready to confront his times with some unconventional views.

Plainly, the philologist and lover of music was turning into a cultural commentator, an unrelenting critic of the modern bourgeoisie, of religion and moral philosophy as then practiced, and of the German Empire, founded in 1871, the unremitting target of his sarcasm and contempt. He took pride in calling himself a good European. His admiration for Wagner, that all-too-German composer and virulent anti-Semite, waned until his animosity became marked, principled, and public.