English translation of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s Einleitung to Der Wille zur Macht (1906 edition)
Already in the spring of 1883, when I was with my brother in Rome, he said that once Zarathustra was finished he wanted to write his theoretical-philosophical main prose work; and when in the autumn of 1884 in Zurich I returned to this conversation and asked him about it, he smiled mysteriously and indicated that the stay in the Engadin had been very fruitful in this regard. We already know from the introduction to the eighth volume how significant that summer was precisely for this main prose work. However, one must by no means assume that the fundamental thoughts of this work first arose at that time; no, they are already all contained in poetic form in Zarathustra, which is shown especially by the fact that plans and trains of thought from the end of 1882, that is, from the time before the origin of the first part of Zarathustra, have the greatest similarity with the intellectual content of The Will to Power.
But it goes without saying that the world of new thoughts in Zarathustra could not be exhausted and demanded a theoretical-philosophical prosaic presentation, while at the same time growing from year to year and becoming clearer. We therefore encounter in the plans of the summer of 1884 always the same problems as in Zarathustra and later in The Will to Power. All the writings from this time onward are explanations and presentations of those main thoughts, so that one can well say of The Will to Power the same thing that my brother writes to Jacob Burckhardt about Beyond Good and Evil: “that it says the same things as Zarathustra, but differently, very differently.”
That the author wanted to allow himself several years (he speaks of six and also of ten years) before thinking of the final working-out of this enormous work, and first only collected the precious building-stones and made the most comprehensive studies for it, is only too understandable. For the rest, it can be seen from the plans of the summer of 1884 that at that time he was not yet decided which of his main thoughts—whether the eternal recurrence or the revaluation of all previous highest values, whether the order of rank up to its summit, the overman, or the will to power as the principle of life, growth, and wanting-to-be-master—he wanted to give precedence to, to place at the center of this work. The insight, however, that the enormously complicated fabric of life can best be summarized in the will to power seems to have become clearer to him from year to year.
Here is probably the place where we may ask when this thought of the will to power as embodied will to life may first have appeared to the philosopher. Such questions are extraordinarily difficult to answer, since with my brother we always have to seek the germ of his main thoughts in a very distant time. As with a healthy, vigorous tree, it took many years before his thoughts gained their final form and emerged, with the exception of a single one: the eternal recurrence, which first arose for him in the summer of 1881 and came to presentation a year later. Perhaps I may be permitted here to bring a recollection that could give a pointer to the first origin of the thought of the will to power. In the autumn of 1885, before I went with my husband to Paraguay, my brother and I took wonderful walks in the surroundings of Naumburg in order to see once more the places of our childhood.
Thus we also once went over the heights between Naumburg and Pforta, which offer a magnificent, wide view, and precisely on that evening in especially beautiful lighting: the sky had a yellow-reddish coloring with deep-black clouds, which produced a remarkable color-mood in nature. My brother suddenly remarked how strongly this cloud-formation reminded him of an evening of that time (1870) when he had been a medical orderly on the battlefield (neutral Switzerland did not allow its university professor to go along as a soldier). After his training as an orderly in Erlangen he was sent by the local committee as a trusted person and leader of a medical column to the theater of war.
Larger sums were entrusted to him and a wealth of personal commissions given him, so that he had to make his way from lazaretto to lazaretto, from ambulance to ambulance, across battlefields, interrupting himself only to give help to the wounded and dying and to receive their last greetings.
What the compassionate heart of my brother suffered in that time cannot be described; for months afterward he still heard the moaning and the plaintive cries of the poor wounded. In the first years it was almost impossible for him to speak about it, and when Rohde once complained in my presence that he had heard so little of his friend’s experiences as a medical orderly, my brother broke out with the most painful expression into these words: “One cannot speak of that, it is impossible; one must try to banish these memories!” Also on that autumn day of which I just spoke he related only how one evening after such terrible wanderings, “the heart almost broken by pity,” he had come into a small town through which a military road led.
As he turns around a stone wall and goes a few steps forward, he suddenly hears a roaring and thundering, and a wonderful cavalry regiment, magnificent as the expression of the courage and high spirits of a people, flew past him like a luminous storm-cloud. The noise and thunder grows stronger, and there follows his beloved field artillery at the fastest tempo—ah, how it pained him not to be able to throw himself onto a horse but to have to remain inactive standing by this wall! Finally came the infantry at the double: the eyes flashed, the even tread sounded like mighty hammer-blows on the hard ground. And as this whole procession stormed past him, toward battle, perhaps toward death, so wonderful in its vital strength, in its fighting courage, so completely the expression of a race that wants to conquer, to rule, or to perish—“then I well felt, my sister,” my brother added, “that the strongest and highest will to life does not find its expression in a miserable struggle for existence, but as a will to fight, as a will to power and overpower!”
“But,” he continued after a while, while he looked out into the glowing evening sky, “I also felt how good it is that Wotan puts a hard heart into the breast of the commanders; how else could they bear the enormous responsibility of sending thousands to their death in order to bring their people and thereby themselves to dominion.”—Many, infinitely many, experienced something similar at that time, but the eyes of the philosopher see differently from other people and find new insights in experiences that lead others to opposite results.
When my brother later thought back on these events, how differently and how manifoldly the feeling of pity so praised by Schopenhauer must have appeared to him in comparison with that wonderful sight of the will to life, struggle, and power. Here he saw a state in which the human being feels his strongest drives, his good conscience, and his ideals as identical, and he saw this state not only in those carrying out that will to power, but above all also in the state of the commander himself. At that time the problem may first have arisen for him how frightfully and ruinously pity as weakness can work in the highest and most difficult moments that decide the destinies of peoples, and how right it therefore is that the great human being, the commander, is granted the right to sacrifice human beings in order to reach their highest goals. How moving the thought of the will to power first appears in the poetic form of Zarathustra; when reading the chapter “On Self-Overcoming” a faint recollection of the experiences just described always rises in me, especially at the following words:
“Wherever I found a living thing, there found I Will to Power; and even in the will of the servant found I the will to be master.
“That the weaker should serve the stronger, thereto persuades its will which would be master over still weaker ones: this delight alone it is unwilling to forgo.
“And as the lesser surrendereth itself to the greater that it may have delight and power over the least of all, so doth even the greatest surrender itself and staketh—for the sake of power—life itself.
“That is the surrender of the greatest, that it is hazard and danger, and a casting of dice for death.”
In the spring of 1885, after the completion of the fourth part of Zarathustra, my brother already seems, according to the notes, to have been resolved to make the will to power as the principle of life the center of his theoretical-philosophical main work. We find the title: “The Will to Power, an Interpretation of All Events.” In the winter of 1885/86, however, he first wanted to put together a small writing about it, for which we have a whole series of notes. He calls it: “The Will to Power. Attempt at a New World-Interpretation.” It is so understandable that he shuddered before the enormous task of presenting the will to power in nature, life, society, as will to truth, religion, art, morality, down into all consequences. Ah, how often he must have said to himself in despair: “an individual! ah only an individual! and this great forest and primeval forest!” Thus he repeatedly tries, in order to make the task somewhat easier and more surveyable for himself, to divide the great work into smaller, less extensive writings. He plans, for example, in the spring of 1886 to compose ten new writings and perhaps to publish them as new “Untimely Meditations.”
But during his stay in Leipzig, May–June 1886, while he was negotiating with the publisher about the printing of Beyond Good and Evil, he nevertheless came to the firm resolution, besides Beyond Good and Evil, which was to be a preparation for the great work (but in truth is a piece of it), to devote the next years entirely alone to the working-out and printing of The Will to Power. I may perhaps rightly express the conjecture that this stay of May–June 1886 in Leipzig robbed him of the last hope that it would be possible for him to find collaborators and comrades for this great work. This hope of collaborating friends, which was doubly seductive given the weakness of his eyes, and which kept arising again and again despite the great disappointments, had from youth on been the enchanting dream of his soul—a dream that was never to be fulfilled. He writes:
“The problems before which I am placed seem to me of such radical importance that almost every year I a few times fell into the illusion that the intellectual people to whom I made these problems visible would have to lay aside their own work in order for the time being to devote themselves entirely to my affairs. What then happened each time instead was in so comic and uncanny a way the opposite of what I had expected that I, old knower of men, learned to be ashamed of myself and had to relearn again and again in the beginner’s school that people take their habits a hundred thousand times more importantly than even—their advantage…”
All capable people, former friends and acquaintances, he found occupied with their own works; even Peter Gast, the only helping friend, nevertheless, according to my brother’s own wish, laid the main accent of his life and activity on his music. Other collaborators than the most capable ones he could not use. Thus the painful certainty seized him that he would never find a comrade for his most difficult works, that he would have to do everything, everything alone and go his hard way in absolute solitude.
During the corrections of Beyond Good and Evil, summer 1886, which he managed from Sils-Maria, he used every free hour to sift the already existing material for the main work planned in four volumes. He put together the whole plan of the enormous work, with a train of thought that encompasses the entire work and has essentially been retained with small shifts. (The content of the third book later passed into the fourth and an entirely new third book was inserted.) The plan of the summer of 1886 runs as follows:
“The Will to Power.
Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values.
In four books.
First Book: The Danger of Dangers (Presentation of nihilism as the necessary consequence of the previous valuations). Enormous forces are unleashed: but contradicting one another; the unleashed forces mutually destroying one another. In the democratic community, where everyone is a specialist, the For-What? For-Whom? is lacking; the condition in which all receive the thousandfold stunting of all individuals (into functions).
Second Book: Critique of Values (to show the disharmony between the ideal and its individual conditions (e.g., honesty among Christians, who are continually forced to lie).
Third Book: The Problem of the Lawgiver (History of solitude). The unleashed forces to be newly bound…
[The plan continues in the same vein; the text then moves into further discussion of later plans, the March 1887 outline that was finally used for the arrangement, the manuscript sources, editorial decisions, and the division of the material between volumes.]
The closing section of the Einleitung (Weimar, August 1906) ends with remarks on terminology, misunderstandings of words such as “herd,” “malice,” and “evil,” a note that more on Nietzsche’s relation to Christianity will appear in the introduction to the volume containing The Antichrist, and the practical necessity of splitting the work across two volumes.
GROK, despite several efforts, was unable to supply the remaining text, despite asserting that it had done so.
+++++
German text of the Nachbericht (Afterword) from the 1906 canonical edition
Die erste Ausgabe des »Willens zur Macht« enthielt 483 Aphorismen, die vorliegende hat 570 Aphorismen mehr. Dieses Mehr stammt hauptsächlich aus dem Convolut W XIII, das mein Bruder im August 1888 ausdrücklich für sein großes Hauptprosawerk zusammengestellt hat, und welches leider für die erste Ausgabe des »Willens zur Macht« fast unbeachtet geblieben ist. Peter Gast schreibt darüber in der Vorrede zum XIV. Band der großen Gesammtausgabe: »Das Convolut XIII enthält 96 engbeschriebene Blätter meist aus dem Jahr 1887, zum Theil aber auch aus früheren Jahren bis zu 1883 zurück; diese Blätter sind von Nietzsche inhaltlich geordnet, im Pichi zu 5–10 Blättern zusammengelegt, in dieser Schichtung quer gebrochen und mit Capitelüberschriften aus dem Willen zur Macht versehen. Es unterliegt keinem Zweifel, daß diese Stücke nach Nietzsche’s Willen in dieses Werk mit hineinzunehmen sind…« So gilt also dieser Nachbericht nicht nur für den IX. sondern auch für den X. Band. Der Nachbericht zum X. Band wird nur die Weiterentwicklung einiger Theile des »Willens zur Macht« zu einem weniger umfangreichen Werke bringen, das sich nur nach dem Untertitel »Umwerthung aller Werthe« nennt. Die erste Ausgabe des Willens zur Macht erschien im Jahre 1901; die vorliegende neue Ausgabe ist vollständig neu bearbeitet und zusammengestellt: das erste und dritte Buch von Herrn Peter Gast, das zweite und vierte Buch von der Unterzeichneten. Alle Correcturen sind von Herrn Peter Gast mit dem Originaltext sorgfältig verglichen worden.
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
Weimar, September 1906.
English translation
The first edition of The Will to Power contained 483 aphorisms; the present one has 570 more. This additional material comes mainly from the fascicle W XIII, which my brother expressly compiled in August 1888 for his great main prose work and which unfortunately remained almost unnoticed for the first edition of The Will to Power. Peter Gast writes about it in the preface to Volume XIV of the large collected edition: “Fascicle XIII contains 96 closely written leaves, mostly from the year 1887, but partly also from earlier years going back to 1883; these leaves were arranged by Nietzsche according to content, gathered in the portfolio into groups of 5–10 leaves, broken crosswise in this layering, and provided with chapter headings from The Will to Power. There is no doubt that these pieces are to be included in this work according to Nietzsche’s will…”
This afterword therefore applies not only to Volume IX but also to Volume X. The afterword to Volume X will only present the further development of certain parts of The Will to Power into a less extensive work that bears solely the subtitle “Revaluation of All Values.”
The first edition of The Will to Power appeared in the year 1901; the present new edition has been completely reworked and compiled: the first and third books by Mr. Peter Gast, the second and fourth books by the undersigned. All corrections have been carefully compared by Mr. Peter Gast with the original text.
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche
Weimar, September 1906.
Already in the spring of 1883, when I was with my brother in Rome, he said that once Zarathustra was finished he wanted to write his theoretical-philosophical main prose work; and when in the autumn of 1884 in Zurich I returned to this conversation and asked him about it, he smiled mysteriously and indicated that the stay in the Engadin had been very fruitful in this regard. We already know from the introduction to the eighth volume how significant that summer was precisely for this main prose work. However, one must by no means assume that the fundamental thoughts of this work first arose at that time; no, they are already all contained in poetic form in Zarathustra, which is shown especially by the fact that plans and trains of thought from the end of 1882, that is, from the time before the origin of the first part of Zarathustra, have the greatest similarity with the intellectual content of The Will to Power.
But it goes without saying that the world of new thoughts in Zarathustra could not be exhausted and demanded a theoretical-philosophical prosaic presentation, while at the same time growing from year to year and becoming clearer. We therefore encounter in the plans of the summer of 1884 always the same problems as in Zarathustra and later in The Will to Power. All the writings from this time onward are explanations and presentations of those main thoughts, so that one can well say of The Will to Power the same thing that my brother writes to Jacob Burckhardt about Beyond Good and Evil: “that it says the same things as Zarathustra, but differently, very differently.”
That the author wanted to allow himself several years (he speaks of six and also of ten years) before thinking of the final working-out of this enormous work, and first only collected the precious building-stones and made the most comprehensive studies for it, is only too understandable. For the rest, it can be seen from the plans of the summer of 1884 that at that time he was not yet decided which of his main thoughts—whether the eternal recurrence or the revaluation of all previous highest values, whether the order of rank up to its summit, the overman, or the will to power as the principle of life, growth, and wanting-to-be-master—he wanted to give precedence to, to place at the center of this work. The insight, however, that the enormously complicated fabric of life can best be summarized in the will to power seems to have become clearer to him from year to year.
Here is probably the place where we may ask when this thought of the will to power as embodied will to life may first have appeared to the philosopher. Such questions are extraordinarily difficult to answer, since with my brother we always have to seek the germ of his main thoughts in a very distant time. As with a healthy, vigorous tree, it took many years before his thoughts gained their final form and emerged, with the exception of a single one: the eternal recurrence, which first arose for him in the summer of 1881 and came to presentation a year later. Perhaps I may be permitted here to bring a recollection that could give a pointer to the first origin of the thought of the will to power. In the autumn of 1885, before I went with my husband to Paraguay, my brother and I took wonderful walks in the surroundings of Naumburg in order to see once more the places of our childhood.
Thus we also once went over the heights between Naumburg and Pforta, which offer a magnificent, wide view, and precisely on that evening in especially beautiful lighting: the sky had a yellow-reddish coloring with deep-black clouds, which produced a remarkable color-mood in nature. My brother suddenly remarked how strongly this cloud-formation reminded him of an evening of that time (1870) when he had been a medical orderly on the battlefield (neutral Switzerland did not allow its university professor to go along as a soldier). After his training as an orderly in Erlangen he was sent by the local committee as a trusted person and leader of a medical column to the theater of war.
Larger sums were entrusted to him and a wealth of personal commissions given him, so that he had to make his way from lazaretto to lazaretto, from ambulance to ambulance, across battlefields, interrupting himself only to give help to the wounded and dying and to receive their last greetings.
What the compassionate heart of my brother suffered in that time cannot be described; for months afterward he still heard the moaning and the plaintive cries of the poor wounded. In the first years it was almost impossible for him to speak about it, and when Rohde once complained in my presence that he had heard so little of his friend’s experiences as a medical orderly, my brother broke out with the most painful expression into these words: “One cannot speak of that, it is impossible; one must try to banish these memories!” Also on that autumn day of which I just spoke he related only how one evening after such terrible wanderings, “the heart almost broken by pity,” he had come into a small town through which a military road led.
As he turns around a stone wall and goes a few steps forward, he suddenly hears a roaring and thundering, and a wonderful cavalry regiment, magnificent as the expression of the courage and high spirits of a people, flew past him like a luminous storm-cloud. The noise and thunder grows stronger, and there follows his beloved field artillery at the fastest tempo—ah, how it pained him not to be able to throw himself onto a horse but to have to remain inactive standing by this wall! Finally came the infantry at the double: the eyes flashed, the even tread sounded like mighty hammer-blows on the hard ground. And as this whole procession stormed past him, toward battle, perhaps toward death, so wonderful in its vital strength, in its fighting courage, so completely the expression of a race that wants to conquer, to rule, or to perish—“then I well felt, my sister,” my brother added, “that the strongest and highest will to life does not find its expression in a miserable struggle for existence, but as a will to fight, as a will to power and overpower!”
“But,” he continued after a while, while he looked out into the glowing evening sky, “I also felt how good it is that Wotan puts a hard heart into the breast of the commanders; how else could they bear the enormous responsibility of sending thousands to their death in order to bring their people and thereby themselves to dominion.”—Many, infinitely many, experienced something similar at that time, but the eyes of the philosopher see differently from other people and find new insights in experiences that lead others to opposite results.
When my brother later thought back on these events, how differently and how manifoldly the feeling of pity so praised by Schopenhauer must have appeared to him in comparison with that wonderful sight of the will to life, struggle, and power. Here he saw a state in which the human being feels his strongest drives, his good conscience, and his ideals as identical, and he saw this state not only in those carrying out that will to power, but above all also in the state of the commander himself. At that time the problem may first have arisen for him how frightfully and ruinously pity as weakness can work in the highest and most difficult moments that decide the destinies of peoples, and how right it therefore is that the great human being, the commander, is granted the right to sacrifice human beings in order to reach their highest goals. How moving the thought of the will to power first appears in the poetic form of Zarathustra; when reading the chapter “On Self-Overcoming” a faint recollection of the experiences just described always rises in me, especially at the following words:
“Wherever I found a living thing, there found I Will to Power; and even in the will of the servant found I the will to be master.
“That the weaker should serve the stronger, thereto persuades its will which would be master over still weaker ones: this delight alone it is unwilling to forgo.
“And as the lesser surrendereth itself to the greater that it may have delight and power over the least of all, so doth even the greatest surrender itself and staketh—for the sake of power—life itself.
“That is the surrender of the greatest, that it is hazard and danger, and a casting of dice for death.”
In the spring of 1885, after the completion of the fourth part of Zarathustra, my brother already seems, according to the notes, to have been resolved to make the will to power as the principle of life the center of his theoretical-philosophical main work. We find the title: “The Will to Power, an Interpretation of All Events.” In the winter of 1885/86, however, he first wanted to put together a small writing about it, for which we have a whole series of notes. He calls it: “The Will to Power. Attempt at a New World-Interpretation.” It is so understandable that he shuddered before the enormous task of presenting the will to power in nature, life, society, as will to truth, religion, art, morality, down into all consequences. Ah, how often he must have said to himself in despair: “an individual! ah only an individual! and this great forest and primeval forest!” Thus he repeatedly tries, in order to make the task somewhat easier and more surveyable for himself, to divide the great work into smaller, less extensive writings. He plans, for example, in the spring of 1886 to compose ten new writings and perhaps to publish them as new “Untimely Meditations.”
But during his stay in Leipzig, May–June 1886, while he was negotiating with the publisher about the printing of Beyond Good and Evil, he nevertheless came to the firm resolution, besides Beyond Good and Evil, which was to be a preparation for the great work (but in truth is a piece of it), to devote the next years entirely alone to the working-out and printing of The Will to Power. I may perhaps rightly express the conjecture that this stay of May–June 1886 in Leipzig robbed him of the last hope that it would be possible for him to find collaborators and comrades for this great work. This hope of collaborating friends, which was doubly seductive given the weakness of his eyes, and which kept arising again and again despite the great disappointments, had from youth on been the enchanting dream of his soul—a dream that was never to be fulfilled. He writes:
“The problems before which I am placed seem to me of such radical importance that almost every year I a few times fell into the illusion that the intellectual people to whom I made these problems visible would have to lay aside their own work in order for the time being to devote themselves entirely to my affairs. What then happened each time instead was in so comic and uncanny a way the opposite of what I had expected that I, old knower of men, learned to be ashamed of myself and had to relearn again and again in the beginner’s school that people take their habits a hundred thousand times more importantly than even—their advantage…”
All capable people, former friends and acquaintances, he found occupied with their own works; even Peter Gast, the only helping friend, nevertheless, according to my brother’s own wish, laid the main accent of his life and activity on his music. Other collaborators than the most capable ones he could not use. Thus the painful certainty seized him that he would never find a comrade for his most difficult works, that he would have to do everything, everything alone and go his hard way in absolute solitude.
During the corrections of Beyond Good and Evil, summer 1886, which he managed from Sils-Maria, he used every free hour to sift the already existing material for the main work planned in four volumes. He put together the whole plan of the enormous work, with a train of thought that encompasses the entire work and has essentially been retained with small shifts. (The content of the third book later passed into the fourth and an entirely new third book was inserted.) The plan of the summer of 1886 runs as follows:
“The Will to Power.
Attempt at a Revaluation of All Values.
In four books.
First Book: The Danger of Dangers (Presentation of nihilism as the necessary consequence of the previous valuations). Enormous forces are unleashed: but contradicting one another; the unleashed forces mutually destroying one another. In the democratic community, where everyone is a specialist, the For-What? For-Whom? is lacking; the condition in which all receive the thousandfold stunting of all individuals (into functions).
Second Book: Critique of Values (to show the disharmony between the ideal and its individual conditions (e.g., honesty among Christians, who are continually forced to lie).
Third Book: The Problem of the Lawgiver (History of solitude). The unleashed forces to be newly bound…
[The plan continues in the same vein; the text then moves into further discussion of later plans, the March 1887 outline that was finally used for the arrangement, the manuscript sources, editorial decisions, and the division of the material between volumes.]
The closing section of the Einleitung (Weimar, August 1906) ends with remarks on terminology, misunderstandings of words such as “herd,” “malice,” and “evil,” a note that more on Nietzsche’s relation to Christianity will appear in the introduction to the volume containing The Antichrist, and the practical necessity of splitting the work across two volumes.
GROK, despite several efforts, was unable to supply the remaining text, despite asserting that it had done so.
+++++
German text of the Nachbericht (Afterword) from the 1906 canonical edition
Die erste Ausgabe des »Willens zur Macht« enthielt 483 Aphorismen, die vorliegende hat 570 Aphorismen mehr. Dieses Mehr stammt hauptsächlich aus dem Convolut W XIII, das mein Bruder im August 1888 ausdrücklich für sein großes Hauptprosawerk zusammengestellt hat, und welches leider für die erste Ausgabe des »Willens zur Macht« fast unbeachtet geblieben ist. Peter Gast schreibt darüber in der Vorrede zum XIV. Band der großen Gesammtausgabe: »Das Convolut XIII enthält 96 engbeschriebene Blätter meist aus dem Jahr 1887, zum Theil aber auch aus früheren Jahren bis zu 1883 zurück; diese Blätter sind von Nietzsche inhaltlich geordnet, im Pichi zu 5–10 Blättern zusammengelegt, in dieser Schichtung quer gebrochen und mit Capitelüberschriften aus dem Willen zur Macht versehen. Es unterliegt keinem Zweifel, daß diese Stücke nach Nietzsche’s Willen in dieses Werk mit hineinzunehmen sind…« So gilt also dieser Nachbericht nicht nur für den IX. sondern auch für den X. Band. Der Nachbericht zum X. Band wird nur die Weiterentwicklung einiger Theile des »Willens zur Macht« zu einem weniger umfangreichen Werke bringen, das sich nur nach dem Untertitel »Umwerthung aller Werthe« nennt. Die erste Ausgabe des Willens zur Macht erschien im Jahre 1901; die vorliegende neue Ausgabe ist vollständig neu bearbeitet und zusammengestellt: das erste und dritte Buch von Herrn Peter Gast, das zweite und vierte Buch von der Unterzeichneten. Alle Correcturen sind von Herrn Peter Gast mit dem Originaltext sorgfältig verglichen worden.
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
Weimar, September 1906.
English translation
The first edition of The Will to Power contained 483 aphorisms; the present one has 570 more. This additional material comes mainly from the fascicle W XIII, which my brother expressly compiled in August 1888 for his great main prose work and which unfortunately remained almost unnoticed for the first edition of The Will to Power. Peter Gast writes about it in the preface to Volume XIV of the large collected edition: “Fascicle XIII contains 96 closely written leaves, mostly from the year 1887, but partly also from earlier years going back to 1883; these leaves were arranged by Nietzsche according to content, gathered in the portfolio into groups of 5–10 leaves, broken crosswise in this layering, and provided with chapter headings from The Will to Power. There is no doubt that these pieces are to be included in this work according to Nietzsche’s will…”
This afterword therefore applies not only to Volume IX but also to Volume X. The afterword to Volume X will only present the further development of certain parts of The Will to Power into a less extensive work that bears solely the subtitle “Revaluation of All Values.”
The first edition of The Will to Power appeared in the year 1901; the present new edition has been completely reworked and compiled: the first and third books by Mr. Peter Gast, the second and fourth books by the undersigned. All corrections have been carefully compared by Mr. Peter Gast with the original text.
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche
Weimar, September 1906.
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