Mazzino Montinari

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Mazzino Montinari (4 April 1928 in Lucca - 24 November 1986 in Florence) was an Italian scholar of Germanistics. He became regarded as one of the most distinguished researchers on Friedrich Nietzsche, and harshly criticized the edition of the Will to Power, which he regarded as a forgery.

After the end of fascism in Italy, Montinari became a member of the Italian Communist Party, with which he was occupied with the translation of German writings. During 1953, when he visited East Germany for research, he witnessed the Uprising of 1953. Later, after the suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, he drifted away from Marxism for good.

At the end of the 1950s, with Giorgio Colli, who was his teacher in the 1940s, Montinari began to prepare an Italian translation of Nietzsche's works. After reviewing the contemporary collection of Nietzsche's works and the manuscripts in Weimar, Colli and Montinari decided to begin a new, critical edition of Nietzsche's works. This edition became the scholarly standard, and was published in Italian by Adelphi in Milan, in French by Éditions Gallimard in Paris, and in German by Walter de Gruyter. Of particular help for this project was Montinari's ability to decipher Nietzsche's nearly unreadable handwriting, which before had only been transcribed by Peter Gast (born Heinrich Köselitz).

In 1972, Montinari and others founded the international journal Nietzsche-Studien, to which Montinari would remain a significant contributor until his death. Through his translations and commentary on Nietzsche, Montinari demonstrated a method of interpretation based on philological research that would forego hasty speculations. He saw value in placing Nietzsche in the context of his time, and to this end, Colli and he began a critical collection of Nietzsche's correspondence.

[edit] Works

• Reading Nietzsche, trans. Greg Whitlock, University of Illinois Press, 2003, ISBN 0-252-02798-1
• "'The Will to Power' does not exist" with Paolo d'IorioSigrid Oloff-Montinari original italian edition Centro Montinari (Italian) (a book criticizing the forgeries which is The Will to Power, ill-assembled by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche,its antisemitic sister)
• The Stanford University Press, with collaboration from the University of Washington, will publish 'the first complete, critical, and annotated English translation' of Nietzsche's works, which will be based on the Colli-Montinari edition. [1]