Digital Facsimile Edition of the Nietzsche Estate (DFGA)

The Digitale Faksimile-Gesamtausgabe (DFGA) edited by Paolo D’Iorio and published by Nietzsche Source aims to provide for the first time a digital reproduction of the complete Nietzsche Estate, including first editions of works, manuscripts, letters and biographical documents. These are the primary sources for the study of Nietzsche’s works and life and for the interpretation of his philosophy. The facsimile edition will allow scholars to verify, for example, the genuineness of the different text editions, which are the basis of any subsequent philosophical interpretations. If Nietzsche’s manuscripts had been freely available, it would not have been possible to compile “The Will to Power”, a book that Nietzsche never wrote. The DFGA will also allow scholars to embark upon new research enterprises like, for example, reconstructing the genesis of Nietzsche works or analysing the development of his philosophical thinking through his notebooks (what is known as “genetic criticism”).

The readers will be provided with high-resolution colour facsimiles and will be able to browse, enlarge, print or download them. The DFGA relies on a specific digital classification system providing each page with a unique and stable internet address. In realizing this classification, the DFGA wanted to be compatible as much as possible with the standard critical edition and existing scholarship. Therefore, instead of providing a different classification, we decided to adapt the most widely used classification realised in 1933 by Hans Joachim Mette. The DFGA completes the Mette classification by correcting errors and filling in numbering gaps. The sigla used in the URLs correspond to Mette’s abbreviations followed by page numbers. For example, page 194 of the manuscript M II 1 can be found at the following address: www.nietzschesource.org/DFGA/M-II-1,194.

This makes the DFGA one of the first electronic editions that can be quoted and referred to easily in academic research. In the future, a concordance will ensure compatibility with all previous classifications of Nietzsche’s manuscripts as well as with the standard critical edition, enabling exact retrieval of the manuscript page in which Nietzsche wrote what the Colli-Montinari edition classified as a “posthumous fragment”.