The Corrections

The eKGWB is the first version of the Colli/Montinari edition which integrates directly into the digitized text all the about 6,600 philological corrections contained in the various commentary volumes of the print endition. The corrected passages are highlighted and, upon mouse click, readers can see the previous uncorrected passage of the print edition. The goal is to make available the most correct version of the Colli/Montinari edition.

Every print edition has to face the problem of errors that are discovered only after the publication date. Typically, such errors are published at the beginning of each volume of an edition in the form of a loose page  of ‘errata’. However, if errors are too numerous or are discovered only later, errata are commonly published in additional commentary volumes. The latter is the case for the Colli/Montinari edition. The corrections (in German, Berichtigungen) are published in long lists in the so-called Nachberichte, the excellent commentary volumes that exist for many of the text volumes of the print edition. Unfortunately, the text volumes are not commonly updated thereafter. As a result, scholars work with texts that do not fully reflect the state of the art. Naturally, many corrections are what one might call ‘minor’, such as a word that is underlined in the manuscript twice instead of once, or a paragraph mark that is missing or that was mistakenly added. But this is not all there is. Sometimes a comma was moved, or one letter of a word has been wrongly deciphered, or a few words were omitted, and suddenly the meaning of the entire passage changes significantly.

The following table provides the bibliographical references to the commentary volumes of the print edition (KGW and KGB):

Also included are the four pages published in 1981 by Mazzino Montinari on a loose sheet as errata to the first edition of the Kritische Studienausgabe (Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1980). At the time, Mazzino Montinari thanked his colleagues for their hard work collecting these corrections. We would like to thank all editors and scholars who were so strongly committed to the goal of an accurate critical edition of Nietzsche’s writings.