Dice, Drawings, and War: Young Nietzsche and the Experience of the Crimean Conflict

Abstract This article examines Nietzsche’s early notebooks (1854–56), focusing on his engagement with the Crimean War as a formative moment in the development of his historical imagination. Through an analysis of drawings, maps, games, musical fragments, and poetry, it reconstructs the gradual transformation of his interest from imaginative play to increasingly precise forms of historical representation. Particular attention is devoted to notebooks DFGA/Mp-V-1 to DFGA/Mp-V-5, whose chronology can be established through internal evidence and contemporary newspapers. Read alongside theatrical performances, cartography, and other forms of popular visual culture available in mid-nineteenth-century Naumburg, these materials reveal how the young Nietzsche actively appropriated the media through which contemporary warfare was experienced and interpreted. The article argues that the Crimean notebooks document the emergence of a distinctive historical imagination, in which play, visual culture, and documentary inquiry converge. In doing so, it offers a new perspective on the cultural processes through which Nietzsche transformed contemporary events into objects of historical reflection.