Has Nietzsche's works been tampered with?

Nietzsche is the philosopher who caused the most controversy in later generations. After World War II, scholars who suffered from the war thought Nietzsche was the direct source of German fascist thought. Sandworth, a German, also wrote a book called Nietzsche and Hitler, describing in detail their ideological similarities. As a "Western Marxist", Lukacs also wrote three works about Nietzsche, entitled Nietzsche as a Pioneer of Fascist Aesthetics, Fascism and Nietzsche and the Destruction of Reason. The final conclusion is that Nietzsche is an extreme Nazi. There is a reason for this. Nietzsche's theory was indeed used by fascists. Hitler visited the Nietzsche Museum in Weimar many times and gave the Complete Works of Nietzsche as a gift to Mussolini. Nazi thinker Rosemburg also claimed to believe Nietzsche's theory.

On the contrary, some scholars think that Nietzsche is not a pioneer of fascism at all. Nietzsche has always opposed racism and anti-Semitism, which are the two cornerstones of fascist theory. Nietzsche is wrongly associated with fascism because his works have been tampered with.

According to these scholars, the tamper is Nietzsche's sister Elizabeth Foster Nietzsche. Nietzsche was unmarried all his life and had a good relationship with his sister Elizabeth, but she had strong racist thoughts. Elizabeth later married bernhardt Foster, a German anti-Semitic, and went to Paraguay with her husband to establish Teutonic immigrant village. The immigrant village plan failed, her husband committed suicide, and she returned to China to take care of her crazy brother. Foster Nietzsche monopolized the publishing rights of all Nietzsche's manuscripts, letters and works by sorting out his brother's legacy. By mastering all Nietzsche's manuscripts, she began to act as an authority to explain Nietzsche's thoughts. When sorting out Nietzsche's works, she often misinterprets Nietzsche's thoughts with her husband's anti-semitism and racism. While detaining some of Nietzsche's manuscripts, she quoted some words out of context and explained them at will. As others can't see the manuscript, they can't object to her explanation. It was she who tampered with Nietzsche's works and made them fascist.

Karl schleich, a German Nietzsche expert, was the first scholar who put forward the viewpoint that Nietzsche's works were tampered with. 1958, he published the book Nietzsche's Incident, exposing Nietzsche's sister's forgery, believing that she also forged Nietzsche's letters. At the same time, German Richard Luce and American walter kaufmann also proposed to clear Nietzsche's name. Thus began a movement to restore the original appearance of Nietzsche's works and Nietzsche's theory.

The tampered Nietzsche's works identified by these scholars are Nietzsche's later works "Will to Power". As a matter of fact, Nietzsche did intend to write a book called Revaluate All Values after writing Zarathustra on 1885, but he didn't finish it, leaving some essays. Foster Nietzsche and Nietzsche's friend Peter Gast compiled these essays into a book called Will to Power-Revaluing All Values. Foster Nietzsche called it Nietzsche's main work and a masterpiece of Nietzsche's thought. Schleich Tower suspected that Foster Nietzsche had forged this part of the manuscript, so he republished it in the original order and named it Selected Manuscripts from 1980s.

196 1 year, Italian scholars Montinari and Currie went to Weimar in the German Democratic Republic to consult all Nietzsche's manuscripts in Goethe and Schiller's archives in order to translate Nietzsche's works into Italian. After 40 days of hard work, they found that the book compiled by Foster Nietzsche seriously distorted the true face of Nietzsche's legacy. Some important papers and fragments in Nietzsche's manuscript were discarded. Nietzsche prepared 374 aphorisms for the book Will to Power and classified them. However, when Forster Nietzsche compiled The Will of Power, he deleted Article 104 and edited other manuscripts at will. Among the 270 articles adopted, 137 articles were irresponsibly revised, including dropping titles or even breaking sentences, breaking up complete paragraphs and so on. In order to restore the true colors of Nietzsche's works, Montinari and Curley edited a collection of Nietzsche's works called The Complete Works of Nietzsche in the New Critical Edition, with a total of 33 volumes. They think it is not good to equate Nietzsche with fascism. They took part in the anti-fascist movement in World War II and regarded Nietzsche's thoughts as spiritual food. "It was not until the end of the war that Nietzsche became a victim of Germany's campaign to eliminate Nazism." At this point, the case of Nietzsche's works being tampered with seems to be over.

Further analysis, it is hard to say whether Nietzsche's sister's "forgery" distorts Nietzsche's thought. To be fair, Nietzsche did have a plan to write the will to power. Although the text compiled by Foster Nietzsche is unreliable, it is based on his brother's manuscript. Although there are omissions, it is not forged. When China scholars Zhang Niandong and Ling Suxin translated the book Will to Power, they compared the text compiled by Nietzsche's sister with the text compiled by schleich Tower according to the original manuscript, and found that although the sequence of fragments was different, the content was exactly the same. Nietzsche created the epigram style of dried bean curd, and each article was its own, without following the same format. Therefore, the order of the bars is not important, just like a deck of playing cards, no matter how you wash it, it is still the 54 cards. Schleich Tower's Selected Works is like a deck of cards arranged in sequence, while Forster Nietzsche's Will to Power is only newly washed.

According to this statement, there is still no strong evidence to assert that Nietzsche's works have been tampered with, let alone that Nietzsche's sister tends to fascism by editing manuscripts.