REVIEW -- Carol Diethe, Historical Dictionary of Nietzscheanism, 2nd edn, The Scarecrow Press, 2007, in Modern Language Review, 104 (2009), 248–49. |
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Historical Dictionary of Nietzscheanism. By C D. nd edn. (Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements, ) Lanham, MD, and Plymouth: Scarecrow Press. . lviii+ pp. £. ISBN ––– –. At the heart of this admirable single-volume reference work is a -page dictionary containing separate entries, which covers and cross-references aspects of Nietzsche’s thought from ‘amor fati’ to ‘Züchtung’, his philosophical precursors and bêtes noires from Bachofen to Voltaire, his personal friends and enemies from Lou Andreas-Salomé to Wagner, as well as later ‘recipients’ of his ideas from eodor Adorno to Helen Zimmern. e majority of the entries are short and easily digestible, though more space is devoted to Nietzsche’s works from e Birth of Tragedy () to Twilight of the Idols () and to his (in)famous notions of the ‘Übermensch’, ‘Eternal Recurrence’, and the ‘Will to Power’. is well-organized volume also includes an overview of Nietzsche’s life and work and brief accounts of his reception in Germany, France, Britain, the USA, Italy, Spain, Russia, and the Far East, as well as a glossary of Nietzschean terms and an extensive bibliography. Some Nietzsche specialists may wish to quibble with aspects of the interpretations contained in Carol Diethe’s introduction and dictionary entries. One suspects, though, that many more are likely to welcome Diethe’s dictionary as a valuable and more easily accessible supplement to existing, collaborative reference works on the thinker, such as the Nietzsche-Handbuch, ed. by Henning Ottmann (Stuttgart: Metzler, ; reviewed in MLR, (), –), the five-volume Weimarer Nietzsche-Bibliographie (Stuttgart: Metzler, ), and the Nietzsche-Wörterbuch being compiled by the Nijmegen Research Group, of which only one volume has so far appeared (Berlin: de Gruyter, ). e Historical Dictionary of Nietzscheanism is not as ambitious in scope as any of these. However, it is to Diethe’s credit that she has succeeded in producing an extensive dictionary of Nietzscheanism without the backing of a major collaborative project. While it is slightly curious that neither the criteria employed in selecting items for inclusion nor the term ‘Nietzscheanism’ itself are clarified in the introduction, three features of Diethe’s Historical Dictionary are particularly welcome: the first is the number of entries she devotes to the German intellectual and historical context of Nietzsche’s writings and to their subsequent impact on an astonishing variety of personalities and currents of thought in the German-speaking world; the second is her inclusion of important Nietzschean metaphors (e.g. ‘dance’, ‘war’, ‘the child’, ‘dynamite’) alongside his philosophical concepts; and, finally, Diethe has taken the trouble to research and include examples of Nietzsche’s influence outside its familiar Franco-German and Anglo-American contexts. e Historical Dictionary of Nietzscheanism can be thoroughly recommended as a reliable introductory guide to the salient features of Nietzsche’s life, works, and influence, although its exorbitant price is likely to discourage many potential buyers. U B N M
(c) Modern Humanities Research Assn