The philosopher and the lagoon city – Nietzsche expert Renate Müller-Buck set out in search of clues.
Between 1880 and 1887, Friedrich Nietzsche spent a total of five extented
visits in Venice. It was the only city he loved, a »consecrated place« for him and, as a place of »100 deep solitudes« an »image for the people of the future«. He was welcomed and cared for by the musician Heinrich Köselitz, whose teacher he had been at the University of Basel.
Based on Nietzsche‘s letters as well as reports and memories of friends and companions, Renate Müller-Buck conveys a picture of the philosopher’s everyday life in Venice and the significance that the lagoon city had in his thinking. We accompany him through the shady alleyways with their »regular trachyte cobblestones«, which he particularly liked as a »three-quarter blind man«. We follow him to the Calle nova, where Köselitz spent whole morning playing music for him in his room. And we leaf through his Venice readings with him: Lord Byron, George Sand, Stendhal.
Renate Müller-Buck, a proven expert on Nietzsche, takes a knowledgeable and intimate look at Nietzsche as a person and at the same time offers a special picture of Venice at the end of the 19th century.
Renate Müller-Buck, studied German and American studies in Tübingen and Berkeley. From 1980 to 1985, she was a lecturer in German language and literature at the German Department of the University of Florence, then a research assistant at the Technical University of Berlin for the preparation of the post-report volumes for the historical-critical edition of Nietzsche’s correspondence by Colli and Montinari. She also works as a translator from Italian and French, has written radio essays and in 2017 was involved in a documentary about Nietzsche and his sister’s forgeries.
Except for translation rights into Italian.
