Eliza asked:

Could you please tell me a few things about "Zukunftsphilologie" of Wilamowitz, how and why he
attacks Nietzsche's first philosophic work?

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Wilamowitz was a German philologist of roughly the same era as Nietzsche. In the 19th century,
Germans dominated this subject, especially classical philology, and Wilamowitz was one of its
brightest stars. However, Nietzsche was trained in the same profession and had in fact begun
teaching at Basel University a few years prior to the contretemps with Wilamowitz. It could be argued
that if Nietzsche had not become a philosopher, he would probably have achieved equally great
reknown as a philologist.

Yet in 1872, as a result of his friendship with the composer Richard Wagner, he wrote The Birth of
Tragedy,which contained the first public exposition of his idea of the Apollonian and Dionysian
elements in man. The philological and philosophical arguments he advanced in this book were a bit of
hot potato in his day, because it was widely perceived that he had written an apologia for Wagner's
"Zukunftsmusik", i.e. the music of the future, which in turn was the title of one of Wagner's own, very
provocative pamphlets on the state of music in the Germany of his time. In one sentence, Wagner
condemned all opera as mere amusement and claimed that his work would restitute the old Greek
practice of "sacred" entertainment (Aeschylus). Hence the allusion in Wilamowitz' critique: all his
readers would have understood even without reading the rest that the article about Nietzsche would
be dealing with a highly questionable aesthetic (Wagner's) and condemning the pollution of philology
by Nietzsche in becoming a slave of Wagnerian propaganda.

Jurgen Lawrenz

Sydney