Maggs Bros.

The rare first edition of Nietzsche’s first book and his first major foray into the field of philosophy.

Written at the age of 28, The Birth of Tragedy was the result of several early intellectual enthusiasms: the author’s academic studies in philology, his excitement at Schopenhauer’s philosophy, his acquaintance and intense relationship with Wagner, and his disappointment with the contemporary ‘official’ German culture. All these components led to the composition of this seminal work. In contrast with Johann Winckelmann’s prevailing view of ancient Greece’s culture and art, which celebrated the simplicity and the ‘rational serenity’ of the Attics, Nietzsche, whose thought was at that stage profoundly marked by the German Romantic movement and the ‘pessimistic’ Schopenhauerian approach, maintained that non-rational, instinctive, wild and amoral forces are the source of creativity. The ‘Dionysian’, pre-Socratic stage in Greek culture was therefore at the core of ancient greatness, not the ‘Apollonian’ forces of sober and logical order. On the contrary, these rational superimposed forces had weakened the original health and creativity of the Greek nation and had played a dominant, disruptive role in the shaping of the subsequent Western cultures. The only hope for the resurrection of European artistic genius was to be found in the contemporary German music, whose praise concludes the work. The book was heavily criticised by the young philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, which marked the reception of the books among scholars for decades.

Schaberg, 20.