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(More customer reviews)At first sight, it would seem to the reader that Nietzsche's biographers have finally run out of things to say. We've had the French Nietzsche, the Positivist Nietzsche, The Existential Nietzsche, the Postmodern Nietzsche, ad nauseum. And now the Gay Nietzsche? But hild on here; not so fast. While I may not agree with many of Kohler's arguments, he has still managed to write one hell of an entertaining book without insulting my intelligence in the process.
When I first began reading this tome, I thought to myself that this may well be another of those works in which anyone in history who was anyone was, of course, gay. But then I remembered Siegfried Mandel's "Nietzsche and the Jews," in which Mandel made many of the same assertations. Kohler, however, wants to pursue the issue of possible homosexuality as the centerpiece of his biography, instead of leaving in on the sidelines as Mandel does.
It is a difficult task, as Nietzsche was one of the most open philosophers in terms of private life, but one who had his life heavily edited by his manipulative sister after madess rendered him helpless. Anything that went against the ideal she had made for her brother was rewritten to have its meaning changed, or was simply discarded it to the dustbin. Because of this huge gap in out knowledge, Kohler can only rely on information rescued from the scrap-heap, and to this addes a great deal of speculation. Granted, some of it is learned speculation, and some of it appears dead on target, but it is speculation, nonetheless and must always be viewed with the proverbial grain of salt.
Ther author is also aided greatly in this effort by reference to the definitive three-volume biography of Nietzsche by Curt Paul Janz. Published in Munich in 1978, it appears never to have been translated into English and is, alas, now out-of-print in Germany. Much of Kohler's biographical information comes from this book, which helps explain why it blows away all English biographies in terms of depth. I have learned many more facts about Nietzsche's life from this book than I have from, say, the biography of Ronald Heyman, which itself adheres to the familiar paradigm about the life of Nietzsche.
Does Kohler prove his point? Sadly for him, no. Most of his evidence is purely circumstantial and some second-hand. But he gives the reader enough good information for many evenings of argument until those documents that will prove the argument one way of another are found. As that day is not very likely to come, at least not soon, the speculations in this book should serve to entertain and provide ammo for countless future arguments. And sometimes there is no greater intellectual fun to be had.
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