Nietzsche's reputation like much of Europe lay in ruins in 1945. Giving a platform to a
philosopher venerated by the Nazis was not an attractive prospect for Germans eager to cast off
Hitler's shadow. It was only when two ambitious anti-fascist Italians Giorgio Colli and
Mazzino Montinari began to comb through the archives that anyone warmed to the idea of
rehabilitating Nietzsche as a major European philosopher. Their goal was to interpret
Nietzsche's writings in a new way and free them from the posthumous falsification of his work.
The problem was that 10 000 barely legible pages were housed behind the Iron Curtain in the
German Democratic Republic where Nietzsche had been officially designated an enemy of the
state. In 1961 Montinari moved from Tuscany to the home of actually existing socialism to
decode the 'real' Nietzsche under the watchful eyes of the Stasi. But he and Colli would soon
realize that the French philosophers making use of their edition were questioning the idea of
the authentic text and of truth itself. Felsch retraces the journey of the two Italian editors
and their edition telling a gripping and unlikely story of how one of Europe's most
controversial philosophers was resurrected from the baleful clutch of the Nazis and transformed
into an icon of postmodern thought.
