Mazzino Montinari

Mazzino Montinari (born April 4, 1928 in Lucca , † November 24, 1986 in Florence ) was an Italian historian and Germanist . He is considered one of the most important Nietzsche researchers.

Life

Studies and political activity

From 1945 to 1949 Montinari studied at the philosophical faculty ( classe di Lettere ) of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa . His most important teacher was the historian Delio Cantimori , with whom he received his doctorate in 1949 on the Protestant Reformation in Lucca .

In the first half of the 1950s Montinari was an active functionary in the cultural organizations of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) , where he was mainly engaged in translating German writings, including Franz Mehring's History of Social Democracy . During a research visit to East Berlin in 1953, he witnessed the uprising of June 17 . After the suppression of the Hungarian people's uprising in 1956 , he finally turned away from orthodox Marxism and a political career, but remained committed to the ideals of socialism throughout his life and was also a member of the PCI.

Cooperation with Colli

In 1957 Montinari met Giorgio Colli again, who had already been his teacher in the 1940s. He gave up his activity in the party and moved to Florence in 1958 to work on the series Enciclopedia di autori classici supervised by Colli . For this he translated and edited texts by Goethe , Schopenhauer , Burckhardt , Freud and Nietzsche.

Nietzsche

From the late 1950s he worked with Colli to prepare an Italian translation of Nietzsche's works. The work of Karl Schlechta and Richard Roos made them aware of the problems of previous Nietzsche editions, so that Montinari himself traveled to Weimar in April 1961 to sift through the manuscripts. He also met the critical Nietzsche researcher Erich Friedrich Podach in the Goethe and Schiller Archives of the National Research Centers and Memorials of Classical German Literature in Weimar , which kept the holdings of the former Nietzsche Archives . After reviewing the manuscripts, Montinari and Colli decided to start a new, critical Nietzsche edition , which was published as an Italian edition by Adelphi Edizioni in Milan, as a French edition by Gallimard in Paris and as a German edition by Walter de Gruyter . Originally Podach was also supposed to contribute to this edition, but because of irreconcilable differences in Nietzsche's interpretation, it did not come to that.

Working on the Nietzsche edition became Montinari's life's work: in 1965 he moved to Weimar, where he also met his future wife Sigrid Oloff. Montinari's ability to decipher Nietzsche's late, almost illegible handwriting was helpful , something that only Heinrich Köselitz, who died in 1918, had been able to do before .
See also: Nietzsche edition # The Colli Montinari edition

Together with others, Montinari founded the Nietzsche Studies , which have been published since 1972, and played a key role in it until his death. He advocated an interpretation of Nietzsche's works based on a philologically correct basis without premature speculation . He also made a point of seeing Nietzsche in the context of his time; the critical complete edition of Nietzsche's correspondence, also begun by Colli and himself, should serve this purpose. He never carried out a truly philosophical interpretation of Nietzsche, his essays, some of which were published in the anthology Read Nietzsche , should rather be philological-historical preparatory work, warnings and adjustments for a philosophical debate. Most likely he sympathized with the “enlightening” Nietzsche of the “free-spirited” period.

Other activities and awards

In the 1970s and 1980s Montinari commuted between the two German states and Italy. As a Germanist, he taught at the universities of Urbino , Florence and Pisa . In 1980/81 he was visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin , 1981/82 Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin , with whose founding rector Peter Wapnewski he was friends. In Weimar he was a member of the board of the Goethe Society . He worked on the Italian Marx-Engels edition and the Weimar Heine secular edition . In 1985 he was awarded the Friedrich Gundolf Prize of the German Academy for Language and Poetry .

Montinari died of a heart attack on November 24, 1986 in Florence . The burial took place in the church of the Florentine district of Settignano .

plant

• Read Nietzsche . de Gruyter, Berlin and New York 1982. ISBN 3-11-008667-0 (Collection of essays on different topics of Nietzsche research.)
• Friedrich Nietzsche: an introduction . de Gruyter, Berlin and New York 1991. ISBN 3-11-012213-8 . (Depiction of Nietzsche's life and work with approaches to interpretation and discussion.)

literature

• Giuliano Campioni: Mazzino Montinari in the years from 1943 to 1963 , in: Nietzsche Studies 17 (1988), pp. XV – LX
• Nietzsche Studies 18 (1989), commemorative volume for Mazzino Montinari. In this:
  • Giuliano Campioni: “The art of reading well”: Mazzino Montinari and the craft of the philologist , pp. XV – LXXIV.
  • Cesare Cases: The Grand Duke of Weimar. Remembering Mazzino Montinari , pp. 20–26
  • Karl Pestalozzi: Laudation for Mazzino Montinari , pp. 27–31
  • Wolfgang Müller-Lauter: Constant challenge. On Mazzino Montinari's relationship with Nietzsche , pp. 32–82
• Paolo D'Iorio (Ed.): Mazzino Montinari: L'arte di leggere Nietzsche. Ponte alle grazie, Florence 1992. (Italian, content )

Web links

• Literature by and about Mazzino Montinari in the catalog of the German National Library
• Writings by Montinari and writings on Montinari in the Weimar Nietzsche bibliography
• Biography (Italian) and photo