Date of Award

8-16-2024

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Department

Comparative Literature

First Advisor

Agnes Mueller

Abstract

The relationship between Friedrich Nietzsche and Ralph Waldo Emerson has been a matter of rumor, surprise, and denial for over a century. This dissertation sets out to provide the first complete and concise account of Emerson’s influence on Nietzsche’s texts throughout the German’s intellectual life. Additionally, it does not limit itself to just Nietzsche but places his readings of Emerson into the larger context of the American’s German readership. The project’s methodology uses 19th century and early 20th century sources of Emerson’s reception in Germany, such as newspaper reviews and journal essays, the German translations of Emerson’s works, Nietzsche’s personal copies of Emerson’s texts, including his marginal notes, and Nietzsche’s posthumously published private notes to reconstruct Emerson’s reception in Germany and Nietzsche’s incorporations of Emerson’s texts into his own texts. As a result, this dissertation shows that Emerson’s texts were appropriated by German authors and critics in the 19th and early 20th century in many, even contradictory ways, and that Nietzsche appropriates Emerson’s texts throughout his life (1862-1888), while simultaneously masking this appropriation. Furthermore, appropriation itself is a key aspect of Emerson’s texts, part of his “American” experimentalism, that Nietzsche takes over and forms into an integral part of his entire later body of thought, especially his Gay Science and Zarathustra. These findings indicate that Nietzsche’s reliance on Emerson outweigh previous estimations by far and the need for a future critical writing of American-German intellectual history.

Rights

© 2024, Maximilian Gindorf

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