Nietzsche: A Novel

by David Farrell Krell

This historical-biographical novel fleshes out the facts of Nietzsche's life with fictional treatment. Using untraditional narrative techniques and interweaving medical reports, actual letters, and original new text, the novel takes the last years of Nietzsche's life, the years of insanity, as a frame for the entire life.

"A radical philosopher deserves a radical biography, and Krell has provided such a radical presentation of Nietzsche's life and death. By telling this story from the perspective of Nietzsche's insanity Krell gives the account a Dionysian and excessive quality that I have found nowhere else in the literature on Nietzsche. This is an original and powerful work that is conceived in a remarkable intimacy with Nietzsche as a philosopher. It is a demanding, disturbing book, a creative accomplishment of the first order.

"This masterfully conceived work effectively uses Nietzsche's letters translated with clarity and verve. Krell gives expression in the style and structure of this book to many of Nietzsche's thoughts about time, madness, order, love, tragedy, and character. In its broken narrations the book achieves what is probably impossible to achieve in discursive a performance of the ideas and movement whereby Nietzsche put in question many of the leading principles of order in western civilization." -- Charles Scott, Penn State University

Krell offers a fictional account of the last ten years of Nietzsche's life, the years of his paralysis and madness. Nietzsche's regression during those years, from one of Europe's leading intellectual lights to a passive mascot for his sister's "Nietzsche Archive," provides the frame for a narrative of his entire life.

The author uses all the available medical documentation and the entire collection of works and letters in order to paint his portrait. While Nietzsche has been the object of several attempts at fictional biography, no attempt to date has been based on such careful even the highest flights of imagination in this work are based on scrupulous reading and reflection.

"The biographical scholarship and literary erudition behind Krell's Nietzsche are awe-inspiring. Anyone interested in Nietzsche's life and art will be pleasurably instructed by reading this rare book--rare in that novels by scholars seldom work so beautifully." -- Graham Parkes, University of Hawaii

364 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1996

About the author

David Farrell Krell is an American philosopher and professor emeritus at DePaul University, specializing in Continental Philosophy. He earned his Ph.D. from Duquesne University, where he focused on Heidegger and Nietzsche, two figures central to his scholarly work. Krell has taught at various universities in the United States and Europe, contributing extensively to the study of German Idealism, Romanticism, and deconstruction.
He has authored numerous books, including Daimon Life: Heidegger and Life-Philosophy (1992), Infectious Nietzsche (1996), and The Tragic Absolute: German Idealism and the Languishing of God (2005), examining themes of mortality, time, and finitude. His work also explores the intersections of philosophy, literature, and aesthetics, as seen in Lunar Voices (1995) and Archeticture: Ecstasies of Space, Time, and the Human Body (1997). Krell has been a key translator of Heidegger’s lectures on Nietzsche and edited Basic Writings (1977), a widely used collection of Heidegger’s essays.
Influenced by Jacques Derrida, Krell has engaged with deconstructive approaches to Nietzsche and Heidegger, shaping contemporary discussions on these thinkers. His later works, such as Ecstasy, Catastrophe (2015) and The Sea: A Philosophical Encounter (2018), continue his inquiries into existential and aesthetic themes, cementing his reputation as a major voice in modern Continental thought.

Reviews

[Erik Graff · Rating 3 out of 5]

This 'novel' attempts to portray the last ten years of Friedrich Nietzsche's life through a combination of excerpted letters by the man from all periods and medical/psychiatric notes about him by physicians--the nonfiction part--as well as by sheer invention by author Krell consisting of interior monologues of Friedrich and others, in addition to conversations with predeceased family members after death.

Krell knows his man well. Nietzsche's psychotic ramblings are surfeit with Nietzscheisms. This display of erudition, however, doesn't prove he understands the philosopher and, indeed, I wonder what motivated this project. A full accounting of Nietzsche's health history, insofar as it might be documented, would be a valuable contribution to Nietzsche scholarship, but this business of taking only portions of the record, like taking only portions of the correspondence, makes the reader suspicious that the author is being self-serving as regards his interpretative theses, these being expressed, sort of, in the predominant fictional material.

I've read pretty much all of Nietzsche available in English as well as several biographies, enough to appreciate Krell's aforementioned 'erudition'. A reader new to the material would be wasting his or her time with this book.

PS Krell effectively promotes the notion that the Nietzsche's were Polish, a claim FN made which Kaufmann dismisses.

[Friedrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's different alright, but I was fascinated and engrossed by this biography qua "novel". I disagree with Mr. Bloom, who found it to be nearly incomprehensible and unreadable. However, I recommend that you read conventional critical biographies of Nietzsche, especially Ronald Hayman's, first.

[Mr. · Rating 2 out of 5]

David Krell's avant-garde biography of the great philosopher is borderline incomprehensible as it is steeped in an impenetrable post-modern litany of obscurantist literary techniques. However, the novel is truly ambitious, as Krell attempts to tell the Nietzsche's story from the point of view of his late insanity. The result is extraordinarily unreadable and esoteric. Perhaps the one notable achievement of the work is that Krell has reproduced many of Nietzsche's original letters to friends and family and all of his medical documents recorded during his years in mental institutions. The reader is provided with a rich insight into the poor man's regression. Still, one is left with a broken storyline, undeveloped characters and scenarios, and prose that is entirely too derivative of Joyce's Ulysses.