The Good European: Nietzsche's Work Sites in Word and Image

This biographical study of Nietzsche (1844-1900) focuses on the places where he worked and lived. Krell, a philosophy professor at DePaul University, and Bates, a photographer and architect who runs an architectural studio in London, traveled in 1994-95 to take snapshots of where Nietzsche worked and traveled. The result approaches a visual portrait of the buildings and landscapes known by the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra, Ecce Homo, The Birth of Tragedy and The Gay Science, among others. The book's title, from a letter Nietzsche wrote to his mother, is a little misleading, for, as the authors point out, Nietzsche was an ever-quirky traveler, never seeing many of the principal European cities such as Paris, London, Barcelona or Brussels. He did, however, get to Rome, Venice, Turin, Pompeii, Bayreuth, Basel and Nice, among other cities. This is a valuable chronicle of a writer who was never quite comfortable in his own skin. Nietzsche was always dreaming of someplace else, someplace not plagued by excessive heat, noise, glare (Nietzsche apparently found the glare of Lago Maggiore harder on the eyes than that of the lakes at Sils) or humans--he scorned other mountain climbers who ""clamber up the mountain like animals, silent and sweaty."" For Nietzsche, travel was a stimulus to thought, through solitude. With its extensive use of Nietzsche's letters and 174 b&w and 65 color illustrations of landscapes, cities and hotels, this is a valuable reminder, not just of Nietzsche's writings, but also of another era of travel. (Nov.)