[Nietzsche Circle][Hyperion]

Interview with Katja Brunkhorst

Page II

AH: Do you consider the relationship between Nietzsche’s published writings, his notebooks, letters, and his personal psychology as transparent as it partly appears in your book? Do you draw on these sources without making a distinction of status? After all, there is the discussion, initiated among others by Werner Stegmaier, on the relationship between and the handling of private and published works by Nietzsche.

KB: Firstly, I never draw on a source without making a distinction of status. However, that status is in itself a matter in need of investigation. Letters in particular are strange hybrids of poetological statements, records of life, and works of art. They are neither always unadulterated testimony to a writer’s experience, as some if not all are certainly written with the possibility of publication in mind (in his will, Rilke ‘[envisages] their publication […] as works of art in themselves’), nor can they automatically be included in his literary work, as some surely do not transcend and transform the personal enough to be quite that.

At HyperNietzsche, we make visible the web of connections of different stages of a thought. You can follow genetic paths from drafts to notebooks to manuscripts to the printed text. The web is of course the ideal place to do this and will probably change the way we look at the canon of texts in the future.

AH: I was struck by two major choices in your book. First, you focus on emotional themes and on the possibility of the cognizance of emotions in Nietzsche’s and Rilke’s works, which is, as you explained, preconditioned by Rilke’s reading of Nietzsche. Frequently, you resort to biographical or psychological information in order to clarify the correlation of the works and the personal situations of Nietzsche and Rilke. In both cases you draw attention to their existential loneliness in later years and their inability to love. I really applaud and admire your recourse to other sources, e.g., Otto Modersohn’s diary, to elucidate the biographical background and the problematic—selfish—behavior that Nietzsche might have inspired in amorous contexts. Also, Lou Andreas-Salomé, her elusiveness for both and their glorification of her play a crucial role here. She also functions as an intellectual relay between Nietzsche and Rilke and as inspiration for both. In fact, you even argue that her absence ultimately inspired creativity. Secondly, you also, subtly and rarely, refer to feminist theory and the ‘object’ role that Salome was often ascribed to in scholarship. This is also expressed in the tendency to jovially refer to her as ‘Lou,’ which you consciously avoid. How else do you think your study avoids that ‘objectification’ of Salome? She mainly appears as muse or as mirror.

KB: My book started out as project on Freud and Salomé as well as Rilke and Nietzsche, and I soon realized maybe that would be a good idea if I had 50 rather than five years to write it! Hence, the focus needed to be narrowed and I decided to concentrate solely on the Nietzsche/Rilke nexus—for now. Therefore, Salomé can necessarily merely feature in her mediating role between the two here. There are plans, however, to dedicate a future project entirely to her writing, which in turn is inextricably linked to the way she read Nietzsche—as evident in her working copy of Zarathustra I found which remains unevaluated as of yet—mirroring the brief but utterly intense dialogue they were engaged in in life. For, as much as she was muse and mirror to Nietzsche, he was to her! They were “sister brains” to each other, after all.

AH: This leads me to another question. What role, do you think, does or should Feminism play in an engagement with Nietzsche today? Would you argue that ‘women,’ if that category can be used here for heuristic purposes, have read or should read Nietzsche differently? Do you think there is a striking imbalance in Nietzsche scholarship? Have you ever seen it as male dominated?

KB: I am not an expert in Feminist theory. Nor do I, in fact, believe in a category “women.” Again, the poststructuralist Nietzsche interpreters (especially Derrida in Spurs, as Carol Diethe has pointed out in her book on Nietzsche and women, Beyond the Whip) and their casting of “woman” into the restraining yet hollow corset of a pure metaphor have merely hardened patriarchal perspectives. To me, Nietzsche still is not recognized enough as and for doing away with -isms and stereotypes of all sorts. Of course there are bitter and, indeed, misogynist remarks about women in his texts and I do not wish to apologize them away, but they have to be read in context—like everything in Nietzsche.

This brings me back to my defense of biographical information: many of those remarks may be understood much better knowing what he experienced in his personal life at the time. And most can probably be deduced back to the unpleasant personalities of the “Naumburg virtue”: his mother and sister, who were to him the only objection against his concept of the eternal return. On the other hand, there are his numerous deep friendships with women such as Malwida von Meysenbug, for whom he had the greatest respect and admiration. Not to mention Salomé, whom he called the most intelligent human being he ever met—that is, before she turned him down as a lover, which sadly marks the start point of his bitter onslaught on “women,” including the infamous whip statement in Zarathustra, which can be traced back to a photograph Nietzsche himself had staged, showing Salomé brandishing a makeshift whip over him and Paul Rée.

As to your suggestion of an imbalance in Nietzsche scholarship: I would agree, and add that it simply mirrors the general situation in our society, which remains male dominated still.

AH: A striking situation considering the fact that more female than male students take up a humanities curriculum at German and British universities. With regard to Nietzsche, he certainly also objected to the ‘idealist’ Meysenbug, and at times he displayed an extraordinary attachment to both mother and sister. Another point that I would now like to bring up, however, is your interpretation of Nietzsche’s poems, especially ‘Einsiedlers Sehnsucht.’ Nietzsche’s poems, it seems, are today largely absent in engagements with his work. What status do you accord to them?

KB: While it is true that Nietzsche objected to the idealist Meysenbug, as Rainer Hanshe reminded me, he also was in awe of her and her book and wrote a fascinating letter to her about it on 14 April 1876. An example:

You walked before me as a higher self, as a much higher self—but encouraging me rather than shaming me; thus you soared in my imagination, and I measured my life against your example and asked myself about the many qualities I lack. I thank you for so much more than a book.

Concerning the absence of Nietzsche’s poems from engagements with his work, I very much agree with your observation, and find it deplorable that what was very much part of his work to Nietzsche is virtually ignored by his interpreters. The problem seems to be that of a hierarchy of discourses, with thought still thought to represent truth, and literature, and especially poetry, “just” beauty or emotion. At any rate, poetry is regarded as philosophy’s little discourse sister. The tendency towards blinkered compartmentalization within the academy I spoke about answering an earlier question worsens those issues. There needs to be more work on the cognitive value of art; especially in the case of Nietzsche. As Rilke puts it in the wonderful fourteenth chapter of his only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge:

Alas, but writing verse amounts to so little if one does it too early. One ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for an entire lifetime, and possibly a long one, and then, at the very end, maybe one could write ten good lines. For verse is not, as people believe, emotion (that, one has early enough in life),—it is experience.

AH: Will the book be available in both English and German?

KB: It is based on my PhD dissertation, which I wrote in English, as that is usually required at a British university. I quoted from the original German, however, as I was able to work more accurately in that manner, given the lyrical quality of much of Nietzsche’s writing—not to mention Rilke’s, of course. Still, I regret not having gone with other publishers’ offers at times—as they would have required me to translate all of the book into English (or German, respectively), it probably would have reached a much wider audience. As time was of the essence, however, I signed with Iudicium, who were happy to include the bilingual book in Erich Kleinschmidt’s CURSUS series. An entirely monolingual and possibly partly re-written edition is something I would love to do at some point; not least because I find my style too dry and stilted in places and the description of methodology, etc., excessive. I would focus on matters of interpretation much more now given a chance. There is so much material I have not yet been able to evaluate adequately. Sadly, just at the moment such plans will have to remain dreams due to an acute lack of both time and money. I am still struggling to pay my publisher for Verwandt-Verwandelt and I think it is an unfortunate situation to be in for us budding writers, and quite telling of the society we live in, to have to shoulder the printing cost for dissertations solely by ourselves, even for books that sell well (as, luckily, does mine).

AH: You studied, for the most part, in London. Were you born in Germany and will you continue your work in both countries or do you have a preference? I am asking also in conjunction with the question regarding the situation of Nietzsche studies in both countries. Do you recognize a perceptible difference with regard to diverging interests in Nietzsche in both countries and their academic and institutional Nietzsche-Forschung?

KB: Yes, I am German born and bred but lived in London for a decade. I studied as well as taught at universities in both countries and have indeed noticed considerable differences. At the University of London I was lucky enough to encounter an intangible possibility of truly original thinking in the air. Students were being encouraged to transgress boundaries, both disciplinary and hierarchical, and genuinely develop their own opinions. Above all, they were not afraid to express them, rather than just rattle off thoughtlessly whatever they could copy from their professors. By comparison, in a Germanistik seminar in Germany, for example, one hardly understands a single word that is being said for all the jargon. Also, structures are still more rigid, and one is compartmentalized according to strict subject divides. I am not sure it would be possible to attend classes on Freud in an English department here! Moreover, speaking as someone who studied first English and German, then European literature and thought, to go on to write a thesis on a German philosopher and a poet in English, it confuses people. Neither the Germanisten nor the Anglisten, or, of course, the “philosophers,” tend to accept one as one of them. In England, things are somewhat freer than that, at least in my experience. One thing comes to mind already, however, which is tipping the scales for Germany again: Nietzsche scholars can usually read the original texts. I just find it amazing how many self-proclaimed “experts” out there cannot even do that! Just now I am thinking of the Bloomian “misunderstanding” of Nietzsche I spoke of earlier, on which he based an entire, and very influential, book. At least at a German university, if you study English, you are required to understand, speak, and write the language in class. Although that has been slipping lately, now that German universities are becoming self-marketed companies too who need to focus on their turnover.

AH: Where lie, according to you, interesting aspects of a contemporary or future engagement with Nietzsche’s work?

KB: I would spontaneously argue for taking Nietzsche more seriously, and that can mean to be allowed to laugh with him again, for example: “And may each truth be false to us which didn’t involve laughter!” (“Und falsch heisse uns jede Wahrheit, bei der es nicht Ein Gelächter gab!”) In general, he can help with the much-needed rehabilitation of the emotions within a science-dominated academic discourse. Mostly, however, for letting his writing be what he intended: dynamite. Something which has an actual, immediate effect on those who read it critically and attentively, and which has the power to help bridge the huge gap we have, in this country at least, between our “high” and “low” cultures. (On a side note, I have even founded a literary society akin to the Nietzsche Circle to that end which will be online very soon at www.apodio.de.)

That, however, would entail the death of the critic (as described in the second Untimely Meditation) and the re-birth of the author, the human being, behind any given text. The philologists have had their way with Nietzsche to the point of fragmenting him to death, as have the philosophical interpreters—especially those coming from his postmodern appropriation by Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault. Mostly, those discourses have very much remained incestuously within the ivory towers. Let people re-appropriate their own Nietzsches, with the focus on the richly performative, artistic and literary qualities of his texts, and above all: let the focus be on Nietzsche more. Maybe especially on those of his writings that have been most neglected so far, for their refusal to be categorized or compartmentalized: Zarathustra, today clearly a book for no-one, out of scholarly fashion, is an obvious choice—as is The Gay Science, which is so vibrantly hopeful and possibly shows Nietzsche at his sanest.

AH: What are you currently working on?

KB: OK, here comes a generous helping of URLs with a side dish of shameless self-promotion! I have been a postdoc for the ITEM (CNRS/ENS, Paris), working on the Discovery project (www.discovery-project.eu/), as well as HyperNietzsche.org, for the past year. At HyperNietzsche, I worked on an electronic edition of Nietzsche’s works, which is an important project as it will be the first truly complete Nietzsche edition ever—we are co-operating with the Klassik-Stiftung Weimar on it. Currently, I am searching for a teaching and research job, as I have realised I need to be working alongside other people. Too much of the vita contemplativa is not for me!

That is also why my “leisure time” is devoted to making music with my band, and to my research, which I pursue with a group of friends. Right now, it focuses on Nietzsche and popular culture with a series of talks and events at Naumburg, Weimar, and a big concert/conference in Berlin to take place from 12-14 September 2008. Planning is under way and the call for papers, songs, and pictures is available in English and German on www.nietzschepop.org—a website still very much work in progress. The organization behind it is ApoDio, which generally encourages the cross-fertilization of “high” and “sub” cultures and will stage a similar event each year from now on.

Meanwhile, my mid- to long-term goal is still that book about Salomé, if not (that really would be a dream come true!) a long-overdue critical edition of her works. I’ll probably get round to that by the time I’m 80! Before that, though, I will come to New York City in late March to answer any remaining questions in person. I am much looking forward to that and hope the Nietzsche Circle won’t regret their invitation!

AH: Good luck with your future undertakings, and thank you for this rich and engaging interview!

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, February 2008)

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