Friedrich Nietzsche - On the genealogy of morals: a polemic

Translated by

MICHAEL A. SCARPITTI

With an introduction and notes by

ROBERT C. HOLUB

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in German as Zur Genealogie der Moral: Eine Streitschrift 1887
First published in Great Britain by Penguin Classics 2013

Translation and Note on the Translation copyright Michael A. Scarpitti, 2013
Editorial materials copyright Robert C. Holub, 2013

Cover: Golgotha, by Edvard Munch, in the Munch-museet, Oslo

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author and translator has been asserted

Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes

ISBN: 978-0-141-19538-4

PENGUIN CLASSICS

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE was born near Leipzig in 1844, the son of a Lutheran clergyman who died when Nietzsche was four. He attended the famous Pforta School, then went to university at Bonn and at Leipzig, where he studied philology and first became acquainted with Richard Wagner. When he was only twenty-four he was appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basel University; he stayed there until his health forced him into retirement in 1879. While in Basel, he participated as an ambulance orderly in the Franco-Prussian War and published The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Untimely Meditations (18736) and the first part of Human, All Too Human (1878). From 1880 until his final collapse in 1889, except for brief interludes, he divorced himself from everyday life and, supported by his university pension, lived mainly in France, Italy and Switzerland. Works published in the 1880s included The Dawn, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals and The Case of Wagner. In January 1889, Nietzsche collapsed on a street in Turin and was subsequently institutionalized in Basel and Jena. He spent the remaining years of his life in a condition of mental and physical paralysis, cared for by his mother and later his sister Elisabeth. The last works published during his lifetime were Twilight of the Idols (1889), The Antichrist (1895) and Nietzsche contra Wagner (1895). After Nietzsches death in 1900, Elisabeth assembled Will to Power, based on her brothers notebooks, and published it the following year; a greatly expanded edition appeared in 1906. Ecce Homo, Nietzsches autobiography, was published in 1908.

MICHAEL A. SCARPITTI is an independent scholar of philosophy whose principal interests include English and German thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as exegesis and translation theory.

ROBERT C. HOLUB is currently Ohio Eminent Scholar and Professor of German at the Ohio State University. From 1979 until 2006 he taught in the German Department at the University of California, Berkeley. He was Dean of the Undergraduate Division at Berkeley (20036), Provost at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (20068), and, from 200812, Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His scholarship has focused on nineteenth- and twentieth-century intellectual, cultural and literary history. Among his published works are monographs on Heinrich Heine, German realism, Friedrich Nietzsche, literary and aesthetic theory, and Jrgen Habermas.