On the Uses and Abuses of History

The work forms part on an ongoing archive of Friedrich Nietzsche’s 1874 essay ‘Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben’, roughly translated to mean ‘On the Uses and Abuses of History for Life’. Original editions have been sourced from Germany and Austria dating from 1924 until the present day.

The editions are shown parallel to The Nietzsche Memorial Hall Interview, the building seemed to me to be enacting out alot of the propositions within Nietzsche’s essay. The frequency of the published essay is a reminder of Nietzsche’s own difficult relationship to history. For instance over half of the editions were published between 1924 and 1931, whilst almost no new editions were published until the early nineteen sixties.