Perhaps no other great writer has written a comparable preface to one of his own works. Certainly this self-criticism is far superior to most of the criticisms others have directed against The Birth of Tragedy.

Before considering briefly the most famous critique of the book, it may be well to suggest something of its importance. Apart from the fact that this essay has been widely admired and is generally taken for one of Nietzsche’s major works, its significance may be said to be threefold.

First of all, The Birth of Tragedy is, for all its faults, one of the most suggestive and influential studies of tragedy ever written. Perhaps only Aristotle’s Poetics excels it. What other study of tragedy could one place beside it? Only Hegel’s scattered remarks on the subject—many of them to be found only in posthumously published, and very badly edited, lectures. It is arguable that all three philosophers were wrong about the fourteen extant plays of Aeschylus and Sophocles and the nineteen of Euripides. But there is no denying that Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche have vastly enriched the discussion of tragedy—probably more so than anyone else.

Secondly, The Birth of Tragedy does not deal only with tragedy—nor only with tragedy and with Wagner: it also deals with the relation of art to science, with the whole phenomenon of Greek civilization, and with the modern age. On all these subjects Nietzsche has much to say that is interesting, and a good deal that is exceptionally brilliant and penetrating.

Finally, some of the distressing faults of the essay are inseparable from its third claim to importance. Nietzsche was probably Germany’s greatest prose stylist as well as one of the most profound and influential modern philosophers. But much of The Birth of Tragedy is badly overwritten and murky, as Nietzsche himself pointed out in section 3 of his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism;” and occasionally a more extreme contrast to his later style—both literary and philosophical—would be difficult to imagine. To appreciate fully his later accomplishment, one should know his beginnings. Indeed, it is one of Nietzsche’s central points in the book that we cannot do justice to the achievement of the Greeks and the triumph of those powers of restraint that he calls Apollinian unless we first behold the unrestrained Dionysian energies that the Greeks managed to harness. Similarly, his own later style, so remarkable for its lucidity and aphoristic brevity, seems doubly impressive when we compare it with the prose he himself found so embarrassing by 1886—prose that at times, particularly in the last ten sections, reads like a parody of Wagner.

It is partly, though not only, on account of this third point that the book should not be read by itself, without knowledge of Nietzsche’s later writings. And no other essay forms as perfect a pair with it as the exceedingly brief and malicious Case of Wagner, here offered in the same volume.

One corollary of what has just been said must be noted expressly. Confronted with the occasionally hyperromantic and turgid prose of The Birth of Tragedy, it is tempting for the translator to tone down what offends his own taste and to make the style leaner and drier. But I have made a point of resisting this temptation. To the extent to which one gives in to it, one makes nonsense of parts of Nietzsche’s brilliant “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” and one deprives those interested in Nietzsche’s development of the opportunity to see for themselves to what extent Nietzsche changed. A faithful translator should strive to let Rilke sound like Rilke, Heidegger like Heidegger, The Case of Wagner like Der Fall Wagner—and The Birth of Tragedy like Die Geburt der Tragödie.

2

The first edition of The Birth of Tragedy was published in 1872, when Nietzsche was twenty-seven. It was immediately attacked by a young philologist, Ulrich Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, in an unbridled polemical pamphlet entitled Zukunftsphilologie!1 Wagner’s music was then called “music of the future,” and Wilamowitz tried to expose Nietzsche’s “philology of the future”—a philology devoid of Greek quotations and footnotes.

Actually, there was much more to the attack than this. Nietzsche had been called to a chair at the University of Basel in Switzerland in 1869, and promoted to a full professorship of classical philology the following year—at the age of twenty-five. His doctoral degree had been conferred by the University of Leipzig without his having written a dissertation, on the basis of the call to Basel. That call, in turn, had been based on a superlative recommendation by Professor Ritschl, who had published articles by Nietzsche in the philological journal he edited and who had informed Basel that Nietzsche “is the first from whom I have ever accepted any contribution at all while he was still a student.” The tenor of Ritschl’s estimate of Nietzsche is perhaps best summed up in his sentence: “He will simply be able to do anything he wants to do.”2 Nietzsche’s appointment to a chair at twenty-four was a sensation in professional circles, and it was to be expected that in his first book he would try to show the world of classical philology that his meteoric rise had been justified. Instead—he published The Birth of Tragedy, the kind of volume that could not be expected to appeal to the guild at any time, least of all to German professors in the new Empire, founded the year before.

Wilamowitz (1848–1931) was four years Nietzsche’s junior, had just received his doctorate but not yet the title of professor—and the attack on Nietzsche was his first “book.” He did try to establish the range and solidity of his scholarship by cataloguing Nietzsche’s faults—and he saw nothing good at all in The Birth. His attack culminated in a charge of “ignorance and lack of love of truth” (p. 32).

Nietzsche’s friend Erwin Rohde replied, still in 1872, in a pamphlet he called Afterphilologie3 to signify a perversion of philology. Luther had liked the prefix After, which refers literally to the human posterior; Kant, too, had used it in his book on religion (1793); and Schopenhauer had spoken of Afterphilosophie when he attacked the philosophy of the universities. Rohde tried to show how many of the mistakes Wilamowitz claimed to have found in The Birth involved errors on his part. But Rohde also called Wilamowitz repeatedly “our Dr. phil.” (our Ph.D.)—Rohde himself had just received the title of professor, though he was not yet a full professor—and “the pasquinader”;4 and the level of his polemic was no higher than that of the attack he sought to meet. Two quotations may show this:

“I have emphasized this example because it may serve you as a sample at the outset of the manner in which throughout this pasquinade ignorance, the art of eager slander, and speculative reliance on the blind prejudices of the general reader are woven together into an attractive whole” (p.