Translator's Preface
1 HE GERMAN satirist Kurt Tucholsky once quipped: "Tell me
what you need, and ITI supply you with the right Nietzsche quotation."^1
Nietzsche has proven fascinating to readers of all persuasions. Each of
us can discover a different Nietzsche to admire and/or detest Beyond
his many published works, Nietzsche left behind a voluminous literary
estate (.Nachlass), from which we can now pick and choose "our"
Nietzsche. Access to die full range of his writings was not always possi-
ble in the past Over the course of decades, readers' choices were dic-
tated by the censoring hand of Nietzsche's sister and literary executor,
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who suppressed and falsified his writings
to assure her own prestige and finances and to secure Nietzsche's appeal
among the radical right^2 The twenty-volume edition of Nietzsche's
works compiled under her supervision served as the standard edition
into the middle of the twentieth century.
(^1) Tucholsky, "Fräulein Nietzsche," in Gesammelte Werke, voL 10 (Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1960), p. 14.
(^2) H. E Peters's Zarathustra's Sister {New York: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1985)
provides a fascinating account of Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche's manipulative
will to power after Nietzsche's death. See also Walter Benjamin's scathing
indictment of Förster-Nietzsche in his 1932 essay ''Nietzsche und das Archiv
seiner Schwester," in Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Hella Tiedemann-
Bartels, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1972), pp. 323f£