Grove's First Canadian Publication
«Rousseau als Erzieher» (1914)
FPG's Model Nietzsche in Munich & on
the Prairies
a Power-Point
Presentation [44sl]
by
Gaby Divay, UM, Winnipeg
FPG's very first Canadian publication was the Nietzsche-like
essay "Rousseau als Erzieher" which appeared in four
parts from November to December 1914 in the German-Canadian
newspaper Der
Nordwesten. "Fred Grove", a teacher in Winkler,
signed for the rambling account discovered by Margaret
Stobie in preparation for her 1973 Twayne's
World Authors book on Frederick Philip Grove.
Also in 1973, D. O. Spettigue published his seminal FPG:
The European Years, where he documented his discovery
of Grove's identity with Felix Paul Greve. His findings
included young Greve's first known publication in
1901, a review about Nietzsche's posthumous works
in a Munich newspaper. Neither Grove scholar was
aware of the other's FPG-Nietzsche connection, nor
did they draw pertinent conclusions from their respective
interesting finds.
Although flagged in several unpublished papers and presentations
since 1986, and in at least two publications since
1992, the obvious, but sly reference to Nietzsche's Third
Untimely Meditation "Schopenhauer als Erzieher" (1874) in Grove's 1914 title had largely gone unnoticed. Then, on occasion of the 1995 exhibition about German-Canadian culture in Manitoba in the Winnipeg Legislative Building's "Pool of the Black Star", welcome public attention was drawn to it. The FPG panel had referred to Greve/Grove's keen reception of the German philosopher. When The Right Honorable Ed Schreyer, in his Opening Address, questioned the presence of Nietzsche's portrait on the FPG display, he could be duly enlightened about Greve's 1901 Nietzsche review, and the multi-layered Nietzsche reference in Grove's 1914 publication "Rousseau als Erzieher".
Combining his early admiration for Nietzsche, who had been
a student at Bonn University where Greve also studied
classical philology since 1898, with a real-life "back
to nature" experience after leaving Europe
in 1909, Grove's first essay sets a life-long trend
manifest in all his subsequent English works. Key concepts
like CHANGE being the nature of all things, LIFE, the
TRAGIC, DECADENCE, etc. find expression from his earliest
landscape sketches of 1922 & 1923, his novels since
1925, his poetry and essays around 1930 to his late
autobiography in 1946.
Of particular interest is a fragment of sixty-one manuscript
aphorisms entitled The
Life of Saint Nishivara, a transparent imitation of Nietzsche's Thus
spoke Zarathustra (1888ff). It has confessional character and can be
internally dated to 1939, when Grove turned sixty and started composing
his autobiography.
Grove's essays, with their pronounced cultural criticism
and titles like Rebels All, Of the Interpretation of History, Of
the Interpretation of Science, and Civilization, bear a
strong resemblance to Nietzsche's Unzeitgemäßen
Betrachtungen (1873ff), the
second of which, for instance, dealt with "Vom Nutzen
und Nachteil der Historie für das
Leben" (Of the Advantage or Disadvantage of History
for Life) .
Greve's essays about Oscar Wilde, art and life, and
decadence, drew heavily on Nietzsche's Birth of
Tragedy (1872), and in his
1902 poetry collection called Wanderungen,
Nietzsche is hailed as one of four "Meister" [next
to the painter Böcklin, Beethoven, and the poet Stefan
George).
With the UM Archives' recent acquisition of a remarkable collection
of early bound manuscript poems by Greve, the importance
of Nietzsche in FPG's intellectual development has
come into sharp focus: completed in November 1901,
Das Jahr der Wende starts out with no less than
four poems devoted explicitly to the late philosopher,
including the one printed some three months later in
Wanderungen. While the published collection
adheres to the "George-Mache" both
in form and in content throughout, the manuscript shows
the marked influence of Nietzsche's often unrhymed
"Dionysos Dithyramben", which Nietzsche added to his Zarathustra in
late 1888, shortly before the psychotic break-down
that ended his career. As late as in his In Search
of Myself in
1946, two years before his death, Grove acknowledged
a great admiration for Nietzsche when he says namely
of the Unzeitgemäßen Betrachtungen, the Morgenröte and
the Fröhlichen Wissenschaft: "Even today I consider
(them) as of the greatest importance". Obscuring his
debt with regard to the Zarathustra, though,
he claims to have disliked this most literary late
work of Nietzsche's because of its violence and German
focus (ISM, 146). And yet, it is precisely on the Zarathustra
that FPG drew on the most.
Note
For much of the information related to Nietzsche, I am indebted to some
great websites, notably, M. Brown's Nietzsche Chronicle,
de.wikipedia.org's & the online Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy's excellent Nietzsche
articles, or geocities' Nietzsche Channel, to mention
just a few. For some of the texts, I have used the
Spiegel Gutenberg.de site. -- Many of FPG (Greve/Grove)
texts & documents,
including Wanderungen (1902), are available
at his archival website at:
http://www.umanitoba.ca/libraries/units/archives/collections/fpg/
Bibliography
Brown, Malcolm. Nietzsche Chronicle [website]. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College,
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~fnchron/
"Friedrich Nietzsche". In: Wikipedia,
Die freie Enzyklopädie.
http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Friedrich_Nietzsche&oldid=59694287
"Friedrich Nietzsche" / R. Wicks. In: The
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [online]
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/
Greve, Felix Paul. Das Jahr der Wende,
Nov. 1901. Facsimile e-Edition by Gaby Divay. Winnipeg:
UM Archives & Special Collections, ©2008.
http://www.umanitoba.ca/libraries/units/archives/collections/fpg/PEd/1gre1901JahrDWende_mar08
Greve, Felix Paul. "Nachgelassene Werke von Friedrich Nietzsche, Bd. XI und XII." Beilage
zur Allgemeinen Zeitung. (München), 1901.
Greve, Felix Paul. Wanderungen (Feb. 1902).
e-Edition, Gaby Divay. Winnipeg: UM Archives & Special Collections, ©2007.
http://www.umanitoba.ca/libraries/units/archives/collections/fpg/pEd/1wan/
Grove, Fred. "Jean Jacques Rousseau als Erzieher". Der
Nordwesten, November 25 to December, 1914.
Grove, Frederick Philip. "The Life of Saint Nishivara" [60 Aphorisms]. Ms. Notebook, Grove Collection, UMArchives & Special Collections.
Grove, Frederick Philip. "Of the Interpretation of Life, History, & Science: Three Related Unpublished Essays on Art in A. L. Grove's Possession". In: H. Makow, An
Edition of Selected Unpublished Essays and Lectures
by Frederick Philip Grove, [Toronto: Ph.D. Thesis, 1982].
Grove, Frederick Philip. A Search for
America.
Ottawa: Graphic Publishers, 1927.
Grove, Frederick Philip.
In Search of Myself. Toronto: Macmillan, 1946.
Knönagel, Axel. Nietzschean Philosophy
in the Works of Frederick Philip Grove. Frankfurt: P. Lang, 1990.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. "Dionysos-Dithyramben" (1888).
http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/?id=5&xid=1938&kapitel=1#gb_found
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Die Geburt der
Tragödie: Versuch einer Selbstkritik.
http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/?id=5&xid=1955&kapitel=1#gb_found
Nietzsche, Friedrich. "Schopenhauer als Erzieher" (Dritte
unzeitgemässe Betrachtung), In Nietzsche, Werke,
v. 1, 287-365.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Werke in sechs
Bänden. Hrsg., K. Schlechta, München:
Hanser, 1980.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Also sprach Zarathustra.
In: Nietzsche, Werke, Bd. 3, pp. 275-561.
Spettigue,
Douglas O. F.P.G.: The European Years.
[Ottawa]: Oberon Press, 1973.
Stobie, Margaret. Frederick
Philip Grove. New York: Twayne, 1973. |