14 Translator's Prefacerials so assembled to their original fragmentary form.^4 In those instances
in which Nietzsche passages found their way into this fabricated work, I
have noted the section number of The Will to Power for readers wishing to
locate the corresponding passages in Kaufmann's translation.
Rüdiger Safranski excels at the art of philosophical narration, as evi-
denced in his earlier biographies of Schopenhauer, Heidegger, and Ε. T.
A. Hoffmann, and amply confirmed in this latest offering on Nietzsche.
Safranski's presentation is informed first and foremost by Nietzsche's
thought as expressed in his published and unpublished writings, and only
secondarily by the facts of his life, which are brought to bear where they
shed light on Nietzsche's thinking. Nietzsche's many physical ailments,
for example, which significandy shaped his philosophical attitudes, are
described in fitting detail, whereas his final descent into madness and
catatonia receives accordingly less attention. Readers in search of the
sort of tell-all memoirs and scandalmongering that litter bookstore
shelves will encounter only intermittent references to topics that anoth-
er biographer of Nietzsche might have seized on—sexual proclivities,
romantic entanglements, and graphic details of the final decade of mad-
ness. They will find instead subtle, yet riveting, descriptions of the major
junctures in Nietzsche's life that served to mark turning points in his
philosophical orientation, most notably in Safranski's sensitive portrayal
of Nietzsche's dashed hopes for a new musical era at the Bayreuth
Festival, when it became painfully evident to him that Richard Wagner's
fawning hypocrisy and showmanship had overshadowed the composer's
once lofty visions of new mythology of art Nietzsche: A Philosophical
Biography provides a sweeping panorama of the philosophical currents
that converged in Nietzsche, from the pre-Socratic period to the mid-
nineteenth century, and devotes a final chapter to the resonance of his
philosophy throughout the century following his death.
(^4) Karl Schlechta's edition of Nietzsche's writings, Werke in drei Bänden
(Munich: Hanser, 1954—56), was the first to consign "The Will to Power" to
the status of fragments from the 1880s.