REVIEW -- Henning Ottmann (ed.), Nietzsche-Handbuch. Leben-Werk-Wirkung (Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, 2000), in Modern Language Review, 98 (2003), 770–771.

Nietzsche-Handbuch. Ed. by H . Stuttgart: Metzler. 2000. xiii + 561 pp. 949.90. ISBN 3–476–01330–8 (hbk). This impressive reference work will be welcomed by students of Nietzsche familiar with German. The Nietzsche-Handbuch is the first attempt to treat the thinker’s life, work, concepts, metaphors, sources, and manifold influence in a systematic and clearly referenced manner. It is a Herculean task. No volume, let alone a 500-page handbook, could hope to survey the mountains of paper devoted to Nietzsche. Yet, by any reasonable standard, the editor, Henning Ottmann, has largely succeeded. His method is to allow chronological and thematic approaches to run in parallel, and is consciously modelled on Colli’s and Montinari’s reliable, chronological Kritische Gesamtausgaben of Nietzsche’s works and correspondence. References throughout the Nietzsche-Handbuch are to the paperback versions of these now standard editions. Entries in the handbook are the work of some seventy scholars, and are divided into five principal sections. The first is devoted to Nietzsche’s life and times, paying particular attention to the ways in which his encounters with Schopenhauer’s ideas and Wagner’s personality fuelled his intellectual passions. The second section presents and summarizes, chronologically, the principal ideas contained in Nietzsche’s writings. In addition to considering the comparatively well-known published works o (from Die Geburt der Trag• die of 1872 to Ecce homo, written in 1888 but not published until 1908), this section also includes welcome analysis of Nietzsche’s poetry, musical compositions, philological writings, unpublished notes, and correspondence. In the third section, the most extensive and most useful in the volume, Ottmann presents a lexicon of Nietzsche’s concepts, theories, and metaphors, from ‘Apollinischdionysisch’ to ‘Zuchtung’, ‘Antisemitismus’ to ‘Wille zur Macht’, each accompanied • by a brief essay and select bibliography. Nietzsche’s own reading, sources, and pantheon of intellectual heroes are treated in similar fashion in the penultimate section. The concluding section attempts to do justice to the bewildering variety of uses and abuses to which Nietzsche’s thought has been subject. As well as reconsidering the more notorious appropriations of Nietzsche’s philosophy, there are helpful discussions of its impact on fields as diverse as the cinema, pedagogical theory, naturism, and Marxism-Leninism. Various contributors also assess the nature of Nietzsche’s reception outside the German-speaking world. A further merit of the Nietzsche-Handbuch is that, while contributors assess Nietzsche’s ideas as they emerge from the primary texts, they also discuss the mutations these ideas have undergone by considering relevant aspects of the vast secondary literature. The critical apparatus of this volume is also laudable: the table of contents, the alphabetical lists of entries, and the indexes enable the reader to locate informed discussion of almost any aspect of the Nietzsche phenomenon, by theme, work, date, or concept. The bibliographical information appended to each section and subsection is an extremely helpful and well-organized guide to further reading. In a more general sense, this invaluable volume makes an important contribution to the contextualizing and historicizing of Nietzsche the man and the thinker. U    ⁿ  (c) Modern Humanities Research Assn