‘And so i will tell myself the story of my life’. Nietzsche in his last letters (1885–1889)

The volume closes with Maria Cristina Fornari’s essay on Nietzsche’s last letters (1885–1889). These letters are “a sort of autobiography” that reveals the personal experiences behind the ideas expressed in the published writings and the notebooks. Most importantly, the letters are an important part of Nietzsche’s effort to “recapitulate”, that is, to look back “over the experience of his past writings, with the aim of making himself understandable for action on the present”. In the letters he clearly sketches “a personal development of which he can only become aware himself with hindsight”. The retrospective reading of his own works allows him to find coherence in them, but also to give them a new meaning in the light of the philosophical ideas that they prepared but could only emerge later. However, Nietzsche’s reinterpretation of his previous works also makes him reinterpret his whole “task”. It changes his assessment of the posthumous effect of his work and, therefore, they create the need for new forms of expression. Thus, in the letters, we can see Nietzsche constantly searching for new “masks” of self-expression, new “masks” which are in the end different styles that he wants to imprint on his writings. Such styles aim to adequately express not only his new philosophical ideas, but also the personal experiences that lie at their origin. We believe it is wonderfully fitting to end this introduction with a quotation from one of the letters analysed by Fornari: My writings are difficult because rarer and more unusual states of mine prevail over normal ones. I am not boasting about this, but that is how it is. I search for signs of similar emotional situations that are not yet understood and often hardly understandable; my inventive capacity seems to me to be revealed in this. […] Is it not perhaps true that a work’s intention must always create first of all the law of its style? I require that when this intention changes, the whole stylistic procedure must change too (Bf. an Josef Viktor Widmann 04.02.1888, KGB III/5, Bf. 986) [From the Introduction.