Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Röcken, a small town near Lützen, in the Prussian part of Saxony. His father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, had only recently arrived in Röcken, having been appointed pastor through the personal recommendation of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, King of Prussia, who had recognized Karl Ludwig's talents while serving as tutor in the ducal court at Altenberg. In his new position as pastor for Röcken and several surrounding villages, Karl Ludwig recognized the need to settle down. Forthwith, he met and married Franziska Oehler, the daughter of a pastor from a neighboring village. Franziska was eighteen years old; Karl Ludwig was thirty. Since their first child was born, a year later, on the King's birthday, he was named Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Within the first few years, Friedrich was joined by two siblings --- his sister Elizabeth (July 1846) and a brother, Joseph, who died at an early age.
Both sides of Nietzsche's family had long and extensive connections with the Lutheran Church. Nevertheless, they were quite different kinds of people culturally. Karl Ludwig grew up in a conservative urban Lutheran household. His own father had achieved considerable status in the bureaucracy of the Lutheran Church --- was a pastor, supervised other regional pastors, and had written widely. While Karl Ludwig lost his father at the early age of twelve, his influence remained strong, perhaps strongly reinforced by his widowed mother, also the child of a Lutheran pastor. Franziska, on the other hand, grew up in a very different family, one among eleven children. Her father, David Oehler, while a pastor, lived a family life that was distinctly rural and profane. The Oehler household, far from being rigid and conservative, was filled with music, poetry, theater, and guests. In the Nietzsche household, Franziska was an untamed and uncultivated eighteen year old. Karl Ludwig's mother and two sisters, Rosalie and Augusta, all of whom lived with him, took it upon themselves to train the young woman to become a Nietzsche.
When Friedrich Nietzsche was not quite five years old, his father died (July 1849) after an extended illness that seemed to have begun with a fall and consequent head injury, perhaps a concussion. His terminal condition was reported simply as "softening of the brain," and there is little telling, after the fact, what kind of condition this actually was. However, there is no doubt at all that the loss of his father had profound consequences in Nietzsche's life. The family immediately lost its status and income connected with the pastorate. Nietzsche's grandmother was a widow herself so there was no grandfather Nietzsche on whom the family could fall back. With three small children, Franziska was left dependent on the grandmother and Karl Ludwig's sisters. In April 1850, the entire family moved to the small city of Naumburg, on the River Saale, near Jena, where the grandmother had some friends. The removal from a small town in which they had been known with respect as the pastor's family to a city where they had no reputation at all left the Nietzsches even more isolated than before. For Friedrich the isolation included the fact that it was an entirely female household with no male influence whatsoever. He had only occasional contact with his grandfather Oehler, through visits to the country. Nietzsche was left to idealize and model himself after a father whom he could only vaguely recollect. In many respects, Nietzsche spent much of his life seeking male models -- Goethe and Schopenhauer, whom he could only idealize through their writings, and Ritschl and Wagner, whom he actually knew personally.
During the Naumburg years (1850-1858), Nietzsche engaged himself with two close friendships --- Wilhelm Pinder and Gustav Krug --- both of Nietzsche's own age and both from families well connected in provincial government. The relationships lasted, by correspondence at least, throughout Nietzsche's life. Beyond these associations, Nietzsche was apparently a shy boy who did not make friends easily. He spent only one year in public school and then was placed in a private preparatory school, also attended by the Pinder and Krug boys. From there, the three entered the Naumburg Domgymnasium, or secondary school, in 1854. Nietzsche was invited into both the Pinder and Krug households and this had a great influence on him. At the Pinder household he heard literature seriously read and discussed, including especially Goethe. At the Krug household he heard music -- especially on the Krug's fine piano -- and met Felix Mendelssohn. Meanwhile, at the private school, he was learning Greek and Latin from the Director, Dr. Weber. Thus, classics, literature, and music were exciting parts of Nietzsche's life, from his earliest years.
By the age of twelve, Nietzsche was already missing school days because of his health, complaining of headaches and pains in his eyes. As we shall see, these were problems that followed him throughout his life. Nietzsche was decidedly intellectual and mixed little with other youths. Wilhelm, Gustav, and his sister Elizabeth were his only companions; and "play" was mostly an expression of a growing intellectual and artistic life. His diary, in 1856, proudly reviews his musical and literary accomplishments.
The culmination of Nietzsche's early education was a six year period at Schulpforta, from 1858 to 1864. Schulpforta was the most famous Protestant boarding school in Germany at the time. Its emphasis was on the classics, though it had recently begun to undertake excellence in the sciences as well. Nietzsche was given what was called a "free place" -- that is, what we would call a full scholarship. While life in a boarding school was unexpectedly difficult for him, he did eventually make two new friends that, again, would continue with him through most of his later life; these were Paul Deussen and Carl von Gersdorff. At Schulpforta, Nietzsche continued to develop his intellect and quickly outstripped most of his own teachers. When he took his final examination in 1864 -- the so-called arbiturium which would qualify him for admission to the university -- he received the rare commendation "extraordinary" in Greek. At this point, family tradition aimed Nietzsche toward theology and early school experiences aimed him toward classics; but a potential life in the arts also lurked confusedly in Nietzsche's mind.
Nietzsche's university education began at the University of Bonn, in October 1864, a choice that was largely dictated by coming out of Pforta and proceeding ahead with interests in theology and classical philology. His friend Deussen attended Bonn as well. But university life in Germany was very different from the structured, strictly intellectual life at Pforta; it was rather completely libertarian. Nietzsche joined a fraternity (Franconia) and attempted to embrace a rich social life, unknown to him before. It is during this period, so the story goes, that he was taken to a Cologne brothel by his fraternity brothers, with the hope of introducing him to the pleasures of company-with-women, an experience that left Nietzsche traumatized and that he reportedly met by sitting at the piano and playing through the night. [The suggestion is that this is where Nietzsche contracted syphilis, if indeed he ever had syphilis. Others, close to Nietzsche, suggest that he never had any sexual experiences, in his life.] At any rate, Nietzsche's attempts at socialization and his involvement in regional politics of the time intruded on his studies and set him back a year. Within the same environment, he grasped the fact that he no longer believed in god, making theological studies pointless but also creating the first of many disappointments for his family.
In October 1865, he moved to the University of Leipzig in order to follow his classics professor, Friedrich Ritschl. Another student of classics, Erwin Rohde, left Bonn for Leipzig in order also to follow Ritschl; and Rohde proved to be one of Nietzsche's lifelong friends. In Leipzig, quite by coincidence, Nietzsche found Schopenhauer's book The World as Will and Idea and it had a deep impact on him. This was to seal any thought of theology behind him and create a confusion of interests between philosophy and classics that would last through the next decade. Nevertheless, by 1866, he was already writing essays on classical literature, and an approving Ritschl was publishing them in his own prestigious journal.
Nietzsche's education was interrupted for a year, beginning in October 1867, when he had to serve a mandatory year of military duty and was unable to arrange to do it in Leipzig. Instead, he lived at home in Naumburg and served in the mounted artillery reserve. In the spring, he fell from his horse, broke a couple ribs, and wound up suffering an extended illness due to consequent infections. He returned to Leipzig in the fall of 1868, and he left Leipzig for good (as we will see) in less than a year. In all, Nietzsche spent only four years at the university level.
The period in Naumburg away from the university proved to be very important in Nietzsche's life. It gave him a long time in which to read and to write. Trying to put together a festschrift for Ritschl moved him further into relations with professional philologists and these, far from being satisfying, proved frustrating and irritating. Nietzsche was beginning to see professional philologists as narrow, picky, and unimaginative scholars. Meanwhile, he read more of Schopenhauer and found a satisfying breadth and freedom of ideas. In a very important way, Nietzsche was attracted to Schopenhauer as a person, partly as a male model but partly, also, as the model of a lonely genius. [Schopenhauer's works were not well received during most of his lifetime and he overtly struggled with the question of his writing in relation to those who could read him, an issue that became powerful in Nietzsche's own creative life.] Carl Pletsch argues, in Young Nietzsche, that this is an important period for Nietzsche in the evolution of an overt self-identification with the archetype of genius --- Schopenhauer being a genius with whom Nietzsche could identify, at least in the ideal, as directed through his works.
It was not long before Nietzsche, now 24 years old, had his second great brush with genius. On November 8, 1868, Nietzsche was invited to the home of Otilie Brockhaus, Richard Wagner's sister and best friend of Ritschl's wife, Sophie. Wagner was visiting Leipzig, where he had grown up, and Sophie was aware of Nietzsche's interest in music. In fact, Nietzsche had a significant relationship with Ritschl's wife who shared Nietzsche's passion for the arts and music in particular. Nietzsche and Sophie had been playing portions of Wagner's Die Meistersinger on the Ritschl's piano, earlier that fall. Years before, in fact, Nietzsche and his friends Wilhelm and Gustav had secured a piano score for Wagner's opera, Tristan and Isolde. Now, Tristan had finally just been produced, in 1865, and Die Meistersinger had been produced, on recently, in Dresden. On this occasion, Wagner played some portions of Meistersinger on the piano and discussed both Schopenhauer and music with the young student. Nietzsche was overwhelmed and wrote to Erwin Rohde that "Wagner was the very incarnation of what Schopenhauer had written on the genius." Always quick to identify an admirer, Wagner was very warm toward Nietzsche and expressed an interest in seeing him again, perhaps having him visit Wagner's home, Tribschen, in Switzerland.
In the late fall of 1868, a young professor of classical philology at the University of Basel (Switzerland) resigned, causing the university to begin a search for his replacement. Several distinguished philologists in Germany recommended Nietzsche for the position, though Nietzsche had not yet completed a dissertation. Ritschl was especially glowing in his praise of Nietzsche, suggesting that he was the best philology student he had supervised in his 39 years of work. By February 1869 Nietzsche was offered the position of Extraordinary Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basel; he was only 24 years old. In March, the University of Leipzig awarded him a doctorate on the basis of his articles, published in Ritschl's journal. And, on April 19th, he arrived in Basel. Nietzsche had been feeling extremely ambivalent about philology up to this time and he deeply suspected that there was no opportunity in this sphere for creative work. The main outlets for creativity, in Nietzsche's mind, were philosophy (as with Schopenhauer) or the arts. Until Basel had appeared on the scene, Nietzsche had intended to move to Paris and follow one of these directions. Nevertheless, having arrived in Basel, Nietzsche fell to work with enthusiasm and discipline. Virtually all testimonials, from the summer of 1869 until 1872, describe Nietzsche as an excellent teacher, well loved by his students, and possessing a fine style of lecturing. Throughout these years, Nietzsche seems to have applied himself very seriously as a professional philologist. After only a year, he was promoted and tenured as Ordinary Professor of Classical Philology and received a raise in salary.
While he was slow to make new friends at Basel, he did make two friends who remained significant throughout the rest of his life. Jakob Burckhardt was a famous historian of Greece and the Renaissance; and Franz Overbeck (seven years older than Nietzsche) was a liberal minded theologian and church historian. Like Nietzsche, Overbeck had lost faith in Christianity, though he continued as Professor of New Testament Theology at the University. Of all his friends, Overbeck was to remain true to Nietzsche to the very end.
In Basel, Nietzsche had hastened to renew his acquaintance with Richard Wagner, who was living in Tribschen, near Lucerne, and not far removed from Basle. Wagner was exactly the age that Nietzsche's father would have been, had he lived. Culminating a scandalous period in Munich when Wagner had pursued an intimate relationship with Cosima von Bülow, the wife of Hans von Bülow, a great conductor, with whom Wagner was working, Wagner now lived with Cosima, who was the daughter of Franz Liszt, in Tribschen. Cosima was 36 years younger than Wagner and a bright, intellectual woman. She and Wagner virtually adopted the young Nietzsche. His visits increased to the point where he was spending every weekend in Tribschen. In his letters, he made it clear that life at Tribschen was independent and free, beyond ordinary moral codes, and incredibly stimulating, musically and intellectually. The impact of this period with Wagner and Cosima cannot be underestimated. They were people, artists and intellectuals, far removed from the Prussian Lutheran world of Nietzsche's youth, people who were pushing at the very limits of what was possible in human life. Nietzsche was doing work on Greek tragedy and he was beginning to draw comparisons between Wagner and the Germanic Spirit, on one hand, and Aeschyllus, Sophocles, and Hellenism, on the other.
Nietzsche's teaching career at the University of Basel lasted from its inception in the fall of 1869 until the end of spring term in 1879. In reality, however, it was much shorter than ten years, being interrupted by numerous leaves of absence for personal and health reasons. It was not only Nietzsche's health that interferred with his work at Basel; it was also his rapidly growing disillusionment with classical philology. Even while being promoted to Ordinary Professor of Classical Philology, in 1870, he was coming to the realization that "no radical truth is possible [in the universities]" and that his real goal was a "scientific and ethical education of [his] nation."
The period from 1869 through 1872 was interrupted by military service as an ambulance driver in the Franco-Prussian War and by periods of sick leave, mostly spent in the Swiss Alps. Nevertheless, by January 1872, his first major book was in print. It was called The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music and, as we will see, it was deeply confused with his spiritual and emotional relationships with Richard Wagner, Cosima von Buelow, and the so-called Wagnerites. In approaching the Greeks, Nietzsche had decided to free himself from the standard, indeed orthodox, assumption that the Greeks were a happy, simple people; and instead he assumed that they were suffering from pessimism and distrust of life. These were views of interest to Burckhardt and clearly related to Schopenhauer, but antithetical to classicists, like Ritschl. At first the work was entirely ignored by the scholarly world; then it was publicly censured by a philologist colleague at Bonn; Ritschl remained silent. Nietzsche himself, in later life, made reference to this book "dropping stillborn from the press." Meanwhile, the university began to take sanctions against him, restricting his teaching and advising students to study with others.
1872 begins the period of Nietzsche's productive life which was to end in late 1888 with his complete mental collapse. In very important ways, its beginning with The Birth of Tragedy was supremely important. First, this book developed themes and ideas that Nietzsche never left, which is not to say that he failed to redirect or revise them. Second, the book brought him firmly into engagement with the whole Wagnerian circle, an exciting and heady experience, though, again, something that he would have to dispose of eventually. And third, the critical treatment that he received at the hands of the university community, a community whose imagination and creativity he already doubted, set him off toward his own intellectual program, like a rocket escaping the earth's gravitational field.
Throughout the period from 1872 to 1888, Nietzsche's health continued to deteriorate. He was plagued by the severest of headaches, bad vision, fever, and diarrhea. He met these complaints with isolation, medications, treatments at spas, and long sojourns into the warmer climates of Italy or to the high-altitude air of Switzerland. In 1876, in fact, he was on leave of absence for the entire year. By 1879, he resigned his chair.
Meanwhile, from 1872 to 1876, he wrote four powerful essays, called Thoughts Out of Season, and established two more great friendships --- Peter Gast, a musician, and Paul Ree, a philosopher and writer on psychology. Both men eventually helped Nietzsche, whose eyesight was ever poorer, by taking dictation. Of greatest importance during this period, however, was the gradual dissolution of his relationship with Richard Wagner. In 1872, Wagner had moved from Tribschen to Bayreuth where he planned to build an opera theater that would become a worthy tribute to his life's works. In May Wagner's dreams were realized and he planted the cornerstone of the Bayreuth Theater. Nietzsche visited him, and it was then that he first met Malwida von Meysenbug, a truly amazing, revolutionary thinker in her own right, who remained a faithful friend to Nietzsche through the rest of his life.
In Nietzsche's mind, Wagner spent less and less time in Tribschen and more and more in Bayreuth, and that made all of the difference. Wagner's mind passed from the great ideals of Germanic myths and the saving power of music into the collective, wealthy world of German Christendom, where he expected to raise the necessary funds for this monument to his career. When Nietzsche met Wagner in Sorrento, in the fall of 1876, Wagner was full of his new composition "Parsifal," except that, from Nietzsche's point of view, Wagner was converting a fine classic myth of moral and psychological recovery into a pedestrian Christian extravaganza. Meanwhile, Nietzsche himself had been going in quite a different direction and was already working on his next major book, Human, All-Too-Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Nietzsche never saw Wagner again. Wagner died in 1883 and Nietzsche wrote to friends both that "Wagner was by far the fullest man I have ever known" and that "it was hard to be for six years the enemy of the man one most reveres." During Wagner's life, Nietzsche never published a critical word about him.
Human, All-Too-Human, I was published in 1878 and Nietzsche added to it in 1879 and 1880. In 1879 his health had become so poor and his resolve to free himself from all encumbrances had become so great that he resigned his position at the University of Basel, accepting a small pension on which he lived for the rest of his life. Part II of Human, All-Too-Human was appropriately subtitled "The Wanderer and His Shadow." The Nietzsche that we find in this book is really very different from the Nietzsche of Birth of Tragedy or of Thoughts. Schopenhauer's pessimism and metaphysics and Wagner's musical aesthetics and heroic mythology are gone. Nietzsche has turned to realism and science, to careful and scrupulous analysis and criticm of human life and institutions. What is man really? How do we uncover what man really is?
In 1881 came The Dawn: Thoughts on Moral Prejudices and, in 1882, The Gay Science. Nietzsche's thought was developing in an obvious path and it rang with increasing confidence. It is in the fourth book of The Gay Science that Nietzsche first pronounced the vision that "God is dead!"
However, in 1882 Nietzsche's life took a dramatic turn that was destined to send his thought in even new directions and with even more violent resolve. Nietzsche fell in love, perhaps for the very first time, certainly for the last time. The woman was a young Russian aristocrat, Lou Salomâ. Lou was attending school in Rome and was an occasional visitor to Malwida von Meysenbug's home. Nietzsche's friend Paul Reemet her and fell in love with her. Eventually Nietzsche went to Rome to meet her. Nietzsche also found her brilliant and enchanting, a very different kind of woman, definitely more reminiscent of the Cosima von Buelow who he had known at Tribschen. Nietzsche, too, fell in love and awkwardly proposed marriage (through Ree). None of these proposals were accepted seriously by Lou; nevertheless, Nietzsche and Lou pursued a plan of living together through several months in the summer of 1882. It was during this time that Nietzsche posed his two friends in an amazing picture --- Lou standing in a cart holding a small whip and Nietzsche and Ree pulling the cart. The summer together, however, was not to be. It may, of course, be that Lou's interest in living with Nietzsche was only marginal, but Nietzsche himself never had the chance to find that out. When his sister Elizabeth heard about the plans, she and Nietzsche's mother did everything possible to make it completely impossible. In the end, Lou wound up living with Nietzsche's friend Paul Ree, for a period of time, and Nietzsche wound up completely alienated from his mother and sister. Combined with his alienation from Wagner, this left Nietzsche without emotional support, clinging desperately to his correspondents --- Burckhardt, the Overbecks, Gast, etc. --- and bordering on suicidal depressions.
Amazingly, Nietzsche's recovery from this terrible period was coincident with the creation of his most imaginative and, perhaps, forceful work, the poetic Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The first part of the book alone was written in just one month (January 1883) while Nietzsche was in isolation; it appeared in print by April. In February, Wagner died; Nietzsche's isolation was increased. The book was subtitled "A Book For All and None."
Work on Zarathustra, Part 2, began in the spring and continued through early summer, while Nietzsche was residing in Sils-Maria. It was sent off for publication in mid-July 1883. In the fall, he began to work on Part 3, which he finished in late January 1884. At this point, Nietzsche believed Zarathustra to be finished, and he devoted himself to other projects through the remainder of the year. It was not until December of 1884 that he began to work on a continuation of Zarathustra which would come to be Part 4. This was finished by April 1885 and privately printed (40 copies); Zarathustra was not published as a whole work until after Nietzsche's death.
Isolation and seasonal movement had now become a way of life for Nietzsche. In fall of 1883 he visited his mother and sister at Naumburg but found relations very difficult and required a period of recovery with the Overbecks in Basil. Elizabeth attempted a visit and reconciliation in fall of 1884, in Zürich. Along with his ever deteriorating health, he was also plagued by the fact that his books, while published, were not getting distributed and, hence, were not getting attention. Nietzsche struggled to keep his thought moving and wrote to his few friends. But his letters of the period are full of unhappiness and frustration. His own appraisals of his work become increasingly moody --- sometimes it is trash and other times it is distilled brilliance.
In the balance of 1885, Nietzsche began to put together notes for Beyond Good and Evil, initially conceived as a sequel to Daybreak. At the same time, however, he began to prepare a second edition of his Human, All-Too-Human. During this time, he regained rights to all his previously published works, and began new editions and new prefaces. Nietzsche was consolidating his thought. It was at this point, for instance, that he added Part V to The Gay Science. Beyond Good and Evil itself was finished by April of 1886, with some followup work extending throughout the summer. In the summer of 1886, he began laying out the structure of a large work which he called The Will to Power: Attempt at a Transvaluation of All Values. He never completed this work but did leave extensive, though confusing notes.
Nietzsche's productivity was increasing at a phenomenal rate throughout this period. In 1887, he finished The Genealogy of Morals. And finally, in 1888, he finished no less than five books --- The Wagner Case, The Antichrist, The Twilight of the Idols, Ecce Homo, and Dionysos Dithyrambs.
The dizzy spiral of revolutionary thinking and terrible health ends. Nietzsche's mind has begun to break by summer 1888; his appearance begins to drag and his letters begin to show incoherence. A final letter to Burckhardt says, "In the end I would have much preferred being a Basle professor to being God. . ." On January 3, 1889, Nietzsche wandered into a square in Turin, Italy, and embraced a horse, standing attached to a cart. His lifelong friend Overbeck rushed to rescue him and conveyed him, in a state of complete mental collapse and incoherence, to his mother, in Jena. Nietzsche's care eventually fell to his sister and he lived with her until his death on August 25, 1900.
Nietzsche's sister Elizabeth had been married to a Nazi and had lived, for a short while, with him in Argentina. While he died there and Elizabeth returned alone to Germany, she continued some associations with his colleagues and was absorbed by much of the nationalistic and anti-semitic thinking of the era. Wagner and his associations had been somewhat infected with Nazi society. To make matters worse, all of Nietzsche's work, notes, and letters fell into Elizabeth's hands. While she prided herself as becoming the steward of Nietzsche's message and struggled to bring his greatest work, The Will to Power, to fruition it is doubtless that she misunderstood most of his thought and corrupted it with her own Nazi sentiments. Thus, even though The Will to Power had been outlined during Nietzsche's life and even though he wrote notes for extensive portions of it, it remains difficult to place its real significance in his life. It was more than ironic that the Third Reich adopted Nietzsche practically as their state philosopher on the basis of this book. Nietzsche had nothing but contempt for Germany and German nationalism, by the end of his mental life, and never subscribed to German anti-semitism either.
[Note: This essay is based on accounts of Nietzsche's life given by J. P. Stern, in Friedrich Nietzsche (Penguin, 1978) and also on a more extensive biographical study of Nietzsche by Janko Lavrin, in Nietzsche: A Biographical Introduction (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971). The early part draws heavily from Carl Pletsch, Young Nietzsche: Becoming a Genius (The Free Press, 1991). Nietzsche's own most extensive self-appraisal is in his book Ecce Homo.]
Copyright 1995, 1998 by Tad Beckman, Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, CA 91711
