Nietzsche’s thinking seems destined to be mangled and misunderstood

For Mussolini’s 60th birthday, Hitler gave him a de luxe edition of Friedrich Nietzsche’s complete works, bound in blue pigskin. After the war, writers vied to revile the philosopher. Then, in the 1960s, he suddenly became philosophy’s darling. How come? Enter two erotically entangled Italians: Georgio Colli, a philosophy teacher at Lucca from 1942, and his pupil Mazzino Montinari, who in 1943-4 was beaten, interrogated and imprisoned for anti-fascist activism. Both found Nietzsche’s philosophy irreconcilable with fascism.

Rumours had been swirling that the Nazifying of Nietzsche emerged from the Nachlass, a mysterious hoard of Nietzsche’s manuscripts suspected to contain forgeries that were the work of his sister Elisabeth and her Nazi minions. Nietzsche loathed Elisabeth for her extreme racism and nationalism. After he went mad in 1889, Elisabeth took charge of him and his papers. Between his death in 1900 and hers in 1935, Elisabeth’s Nietzsche archive magically kept on turning out new works by her dead brother, including The Will to Power, a fascist’s Bible. Elisabeth hobnobbed with Mussolini; and Hitler even went to her funeral – unusual for him, funerals being negative publicity.

How could the two Italians prove or disprove the authenticity or inauthenticity of the post-mortem texts? Only by examining the Nachlass, rumoured to be stashed away in secret catacombs somewhere in East Germany or Russia. The Cold War was on. Joining the Communist party got Montinari into East Berlin in 1953. On he went to Weimar, home of the archive where Elisabeth had confined Nietzsche.

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It turned out that the Nachlass had been there all along. Under the vigilant eye of a dedicated Stasi minder, Montinari made his home in Weimar, microfilming the Nachlass and sending the pages to Florence, where Colli prepared a transcription for publication.