Friedrich Nietzsche

By Curtis Cate

“An accessible, anecdotally rich” biography of the profoundly influential 19th century philosopher, author of Beyond Good and Evil and The Will to Power (Kirkus Reviews).
 
Friedrich Nietzsche was the most fearlessly provocative and original thinker in Western history. The protean diversity of his writings make him one of the most influential of modern philosophers, yet his often paradoxical statements can be properly understood only within the context of his restless, tragic life. Physically handicapped by weak eyesight, violent headaches and bouts of nausea, this Nietzsche made short shrift of self-pity and ostentatious displays of compassion. The son of a Lutheran clergyman, whom he adored, he became a fearless agnostic who proclaimed, in Thus Spake Zarathustra that “God is dead!”
 
Curtis Cate’s refreshingly accessible new biography brilliantly distills and clarifies Nietzsche’s ideas and the reactions they elicited. This book explores the musical and philosophical influences that inspired his thought, the subtle workings of his creative process, and the acute physical suffering he combated from his adolescence until his final mental collapse of January 1889.
 
Cutting through the academic jargon and clearing away the prejudices that have become associated with Nietzsche’s name, Cate reveals a man whose ideas continue to have prophetic relevance and incredible vibrancy today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 6, 2005
• ISBN: 9781468304763

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Copyright

First published in the United States in 2005 by

The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.

New York

141 Wooster Street

New York, NY 10012

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Copyright © 2002 by Curtis Cate

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

ISBN 978-1-46830-476-3

To the Memory

of

my unforgotten, unforgettable

Elenochka

and of my father

Karl Springer Cate

who loved her dearly

CONTENTS

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Illustrations

Preface

Chapter 1   A Strongly Pastoral Tradition

Chapter 2   Naumburg

Chapter 3   A Formidable Scholastic Fortress

Chapter 4   Three Naumburg Bards

Chapter 5   The Final Years at Pforta

Chapter 6   With the Beer-drinkers of the Rhine

Chapter 7   Arthur Schopenhauer’s Fateful Spell

Chapter 8   Philologist and Cannoneer

Chapter 9   A Momentous Encounter

Chapter 10   From Leipzig to Basel

Chapter 11   Tribschen

Chapter 12   An Intoxicating Friendship

Chapter 13   A Bitter Taste of Warfare

Chapter 14   Wild Hopes and Fantasies

Chapter 15   The Birth of Tragedy

Chapter 16   The End of an Idyll

Chapter 17   Future-Philosophy and After-Philology

Chapter 18   A First Essay in Polemics

Chapter 19   The Uses and Abuses of History

Chapter 20   Forging a Philosophical Hammer

Chapter 21   A Tense Apotheosis

Chapter 22   Winter in Sorrento

Chapter 23   A Book for Free Spirits

Chapter 24   The Wanderer and His Shadow

Chapter 25   From Morgenröte to Messina

Chapter 26   Lou Salomé

Chapter 27   Incipit tragoedia

Chapter 28   Storm and Stress

Chapter 29   Finita è la commedia

Chapter 30   The Birth of Zarathustra

Chapter 31   ‘Oh, My Son Zarathustra!’

Chapter 32   ‘Midday and Eternity!’

Chapter 33   Knights and Ladies of the Gaya Scienza

Chapter 34   ‘Very Black and Squid-like’

Chapter 35   The Genealogy of Morals

Chapter 36   The Marvels of Turin

Chapter 37   The ‘Cave-bear’ of Sils-Maria

Chapter 38   The Collapse

Chapter 39   The Aftermath

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About Friedrich Nietzsche

Acknowledgements

If punctuality, as Louis XVIII of France is reported to have said, is the courtesy of kings, then gratitude towards their predecessors or those who facilitated their task should surely be the courtesy of biographers. Let me therefore begin by expressing my thanks to the Italian scholars, Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, who, working under anything but easy conditions, when the ‘Nietzsche Archives’ at Weimar, like the rest of Thuringia and Saxony, were placed under the administrative control of an outspokenly proletarian régime, achieved quite remarkable results. The multiple edition of Nietzsche’s published works, of his letters and the often fascinating answers they elicited, constitute a monument of painstaking scholarship for which they deserve the highest praise. As do their chief assistant for the preparation of the 8-volume paperback edition of Nietzsche’s letters – Sämtliche Briefe Studienausgabe – Helga Anania-Hess, and the trinitarian team – Bettina Schmidt-Wahrig, Rüdiger Schmidt, and Federico Gerratana, who compiled its invaluable index.

Invaluable too, for all German-reading persons deeply interested in Nietzsche and the often dramatic tensions and vicissitudes of his physically and psychologically tortured life, is Curt Paul Janz’s 3-volume biography, the work of a Swiss scholar who, having played the violin in Basel’s Symphony Orchestra, was supremely qualified to appreciate Nietzsche’s piano-playing talents and the vital role played by music in his life. Nor should I, in this brief catalogue of merits, overlook the significant contribution made by Ernst Pfeiffer in assembling an invaluable collection of letters – remnants, alas, of a double work of feminine destruction intended to obscure the complex truth – concerning the extraordinary ‘trinitarian’ embroglio into which Nietzsche, like his friend Paul Rée and the audacious Lou Salomé, plunged with (for a while) such headlong relish. (I say this in all fairness, notwithstanding the ‘hard time’ that Pfeiffer apparently gave Rudolph Binion during his research work on ‘Frau Lou’.) And to this list of ‘benefactors’ one can add the name of Sander Gilman who, assisted by Ingeborg Reichenbach, compiled a priceless collection of reminiscences written by all sorts of persons who had the good fortune to meet, to befriend, or to talk with Friedrich Nietzsche.

On a more personal level I would like to thank Dr. Jochen Golz, director of the Nietzsche-Stiftung, at the Goethe-und-Schiller Archiv in Weimar, for granting me permission to do some valuable research in the Foundation’s spacious library. Indebted I also am to his library assistants, and in particular to Karin Ellermann, who helped me to assemble most of the photo illustrations in this book; to Dr. Roswitha Wollkopf, of the Stiftung Weimarer Klassik, and to Elke Schwandner, of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach-am-Neckar.

For having helped to make my sojourn in Weimar, in May 1998, so enjoyable, I would like to thank Frau Marikka Hüttman, the enterprising manager of her charmingly named ‘An den Altenburg’ pension.

I also owe special thanks to Professor Manfred Riedel, of the Martin Heidegger Gesellschaft in Halle, and to Professor Glenn Most, of Heidelberg and Florence, for the kindness they showed me during a visit I made to Naumburg in October 1994, at a meeting of philologists assembled to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Nietzsche’s birth. I am also indebted to Frau Klee, of Naumburg’s Fremdenverkehrsamt, to Suzanna Kröner, of the town’s Stadtarchiv, and to Dr. Siegfried Wagner, director of Naumburg’s Stadtmuseum, who managed to send me a photocopy of the nineteenth-century lithograph of the picturesque Marktplatz, which figures among the illustrations.

Among those to whom I owe a special debt of thanks, for having encouraged me to write this biography are the now deceased James O’Donnell (who had already helped with a book about the Berlin Wall crisis of 1961), and the likewise much regretted Michael Ivens, as witty a poet as he was an inspired defender of liberty in many fields; Melvin Lasky, the former editor of Der Monat and Encounter; my fellow Wykehamist and Magdalen College friend, Christopher Johnson, who took the trouble to read and even to approve my controversial Preface; my even older and no less valued friend Joseph Frank, author of a monumental work on Dostoevsky, who has shown the world what the art of biography can be in the hands of a master-craftsman of stupendous erudition; Austin Olney and Robie Macauley, enlightened editors at Houghton Mifflin, Boston, who were kind enough to offer me my first contract; and not least of all, Rob Cowley, one of the ablest red-pencil-wielders it has been my good fortune to encounter in the increasingly rare art of manuscript editing.

And how could I forget the cordial hospitality so often shown to me and my wife by Robert von Hagemeister, a rare model of Pomerian gentility, in whose lovely home near Bern entire chapters of this book were written; the kindness of his wife Annette, who once accompanied me to Lucerne for a memorable visit to the Wagner Museum at Tribschen; the generosity of his son Peter who, at a time when I was more than usually penniless, gave me a badly needed word-processor; and the charming cooperation offered to me by his vivacious daughter, Viviane, who, as an informal ‘travel agent’ and interpreter (for ‘switzerdütch’ contacts), helped me to organize my two visits to Thuringia and Saxony, and to establish fruitful contacts with Frau Jäger, of the Richard Wagner Museum at Tribschen – as also with the Lucerne photographer, Georg Anderhub, Maya Klopstein and Daniel Egloff, of Sils-Maria’s Tourist-and-Information Bureau, and the equally cooperative Max Weiss, director of the Montabella photo publishing company in Saint-Moritz. Nor should I forget Joseph Gwerder, an inhabitant of Lucerne, who most kindly sent me a photcopy of an 1869 timetable for steamboat trips around the Lake of the Four Cantons, which helped me greatly in my description of Nietzsche’s first trip around this beautiful lake.

For their valuable advice in matters of German semantics I am indebted to George and Beate Bailey, to Frauke Stuart, to my old Oxford friend, Rüdiger von Pachelbel, and, not least of all, to the veteran New York editor, Fred Jordan, a fine product of Viennese ‘high culture’ who had already helped me greatly with my biography of André Malraux. I also owe thanks to Professor Robert Harding, of the University of Pennsylvania, for valuable information in his chosen field of Anthropology.

For having had the courage to approve my initial synopsis and to obtain a contract for this book, I am most indebted to William Hamilton of A.M. Heath, as I am to his ‘colleague’ in New York, my old friend Tom Wallace. I would also like to express my thanks to Annie Lee for her intelligent copy-editing work on the typescript, to James Nightingale for his painstaking help in correcting galley and page-proofs and to Anthony Howard, for having inadvertently aroused me from my ‘dogmatic slumbers’ as to the kind of useful Index a book of this kind should have. As for their ‘boss’, Anthony Whittome, my long-suffering Hutchinson editor, no compliment I could possibly invent would adequately describe what I owe him for his comprehensive, gentlemanly patience.

Finally and once again, I extend my heart-felt thanks to my step-son, Professor Michael Aminoff, whose generosity over the years was quite simply boundless, to his wife Jan, who so often made us happy during our stays in San Francisco, and to my darling Elena who, with psychic prescience and the age-old wisdom of Central Asia, often said that she would never live to see the day this biography was published.

List of Illustrations

Nietzsche, aged 13, at the time of his confirmation (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Karl Ludwig Nietzsche (Nietzsche’s father) (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Vicarage at Röcken (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Franziska Nietzsche (Nietzsche’s mother) (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Elisabeth Nietzsche (Nietzsche’s sister) (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Wilhelm Pinder (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Rudelsburg Castle (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Naumburg’s Marktplatz (Markt) (photo of lithograph courtesy of Naumburg Stadtmuseum)

Carl von Gersdorff (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Nietzsche, as student graduating from Pforta (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Nietzsche holding sabre, striking military pose (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Three friends in Leipzig – Nietzsche, Gersdorff, Rohde (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Nietzsche as student at Leipzig (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Arthur Schopenhauer (photo Roger-Viollet, Paris)

Friedrich Ritschl, Nietzsche’s favourite Professor of Philology (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Nietzsche, with members of his Leipzig Philological Club (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Cosima Wagner, drawing by Franz von Lenbach (photo Roger-Viollet, Paris)

View from Wagner’s house at Tribschen (photo Georg Anderhub, Lucerne)

Richard Wagner (photo Roger-Viollet, Paris)

View of Wagner’s house at Tribschen (photo courtesy of Wagner Museum, Lucerne)

Malwida von Meysenbug (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Heinrich Köselitz (alias ‘Peter Gast’) (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Franz Overbeck (Professor of Theology) (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Ida Overbeck (his wife) (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Franziska Nietzsche’s corner house on Weingartenstrasse in Naumburg (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Lou Salomé (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Friedrich Nietzsche in 1882 (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Paul Rée (photo taken by Ferreti in Naples) (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Elisabeth Nietzsche (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Photograph taken in Lucerne in August 1882 of Lou Salomé (holding whip and ‘reins’), Paul Rée, F. Nietzsche (as two ‘workhorses’) (GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Nietzsche’s bedroom in grocer-mayor’s house at Sils-Maria (photo Max Weiss, Montabella Verlag, St. Moritz)

Sils Baseglia (village with steeple, next to Sils-Maria) (photo courtesy of Verkehrsverein Sils-Engadin)

View of Sils Lake, looking Southwest (photo Max Weiss, Montabella Verlag, St. Moritz)

Nietzsche with his mother in May 1892, after his mental collapse (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Nietzsche in 1899, etching by Hans Olde (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche in late middle-aged widowhood (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Chancellor Adolf Hitler visiting Elisabeth Förster -Nietzsche in Weimar, 1934 (photo GSA Stiftung Weimarer Klassik)

Preface

– Woe to the thinker who is not the

gardener, but merely the soil of

the plants that sprout within him!

Friedrich Nietzsche, a gifted writer of prefaces, once wrote to a Leipzig publisher that, whereas the use of the ‘I’ in the main body of a philosophical work is a violation of the rules of propriety, it is forgivable in an introduction. Typically enough, Nietzsche repeatedly broke this rule, as he did so many others. His philosophy is with little doubt the least objective, the most intensely personal, the most egotistically subjective (as George Santayana once noted) that the Western world has so far seen. However, in accordance with the rule he so often flouted, I have decided to begin this preface with a negative confession. This biography has not been written for ‘professionals’, for university professors or teachers of philosophy. Not, I hasten to add, because I share the scorn Nietzsche felt for academic bookworms, for rut-minded professors of philology, for those whom his first great inspirer and ‘model’ as an iconoclastic thinker, Schopenhauer, liked to call ‘chair’ or ‘bread-and-butter’ philosophers. No, I have written this book, in what might be called an ecumenical spirit, for non-specialists and ‘laymen’. I have written it for the benefit of those who may never have read a single book of his and for whom Nietzsche is little more than a name: that of a blasphemer who had the gall to proclaim that ‘God is dead!’ I have written it to clear away some of the stereotypic prejudices that have, like barnacles, incrusted themselves around his name – like the naive notion that he was viscerally anti-religious – and because the existential problems he boldly tackled – how can Man find spiritual and intellectual solace in an increasingly godless age? How can the desire to be free, and not least of all, a ‘free-thinker’, be reconciled with the notion and practice of Authority needed to save society from collective anarchy, how can the egalitarian virus endemic in the very nature of Democracy be prevented from degrading what remains of ‘culture’, and ultimately of civility – are fundamental questions that we twenty-first centurians have yet to solve in an increasingly confused, unsettled, and congested world.

Certain readers, after picking up this book, may wonder why a historian who has devoted much of his life to writing biographies of literary figures should now have branched off into the realm of philosophy. The answer is that this is not a sudden aberration. If serious, mind-wracking meditation about fundamental human problems – philosophical ‘nut-cracking’, as Nietzsche once called it – is an intellectual illness, then I must admit that I succumbed to this malady while still an adolescent. The ‘shock of recognition’ Nietzsche experienced at the age of twenty-one when, while browsing in a Leipzig bookshop, he accidentally discovered Schopenhauer, was one which, in a far less violent form, I myself experienced at the age of seventeen at Harvard. Thanks to three remarkable teachers: Professor Crane Brinton, who had me read the first part of The Genealogy of Morals in order to understand the psychological phenomenon of revolutionary resentment; the omnivorous Paul Peter Cram, a walking encyclopedia of facts and dates covering two thousand years of European history, who first introduced me to the Spanish philosopher, Ortega y Gasset; and an eccentric Englishman, Arthur Dobby Nock, whose opening words, in an enthralling course on the History of Religions – ‘God is the name we give to the Great Unknown’ – made me realize that to claim to ‘know’ the precise nature of this Divinity in any meaningful sense is a sacrilegious presumption on the part of mortal beings.

Because he suffered from intense eye-aches and painful attacks of migraine, often culminating in fits of vomiting which could go on for hours, Nietzsche was a thinker whose changes of mood displayed a meteorological variability – ranging from a feeling of creative jubilation under clear blue skies to the most sombre, ‘raven-black’ thoughts when his ‘enemies, the clouds’ were gathered overhead. For years he was persuaded that, like his father, who had died prematurely of ‘softening of the brain’, he too would not live beyond the age of thirty-six. He felt that he lacked the time to write ‘orderly’ books, and since his thinking kept evolving and he was constantly bombarded by new ideas, he chose to present them more or less as they occurred to him, during the process of gestation, rather than in the carefully elaborated form of a ‘system’. He was subject, moreover, to extraordinary fits of inspiration – each of the first three books of Thus Spake Zarathustra was composed in just two weeks – which descended on him like cloudbursts, particularly during his long walks through woods and well-shaded areas, and which he feverishly recorded in the notebook he usually carried with him, along with an umbrella to shade his weak eyes.

None of these factors made for an ‘orderly’ philosophy, and cetainly not for the kind of impressive philosophical systems that had been erected by Kant and Hegel. The works of Nietzsche’s early maturity – Human, All Too Human, The Wanderer and his Shadow, Morgenröte (Morning Glow), and The Joyous Science – are all of them disorderly works. But this logical weakness is also their strength and their charm: the charm of refreshing spontaneity. Nietzsche was not going to cheat or deceive his readers by concealing the bitter truths he had discovered or the blackest thoughts that occurred to him. The intrepidity he displayed in entitling the fifth and final book of The Joyous Science – ‘We Fearless Ones’ – was no literary pose. He had a horror of tepid thinking, even going so far as to declare, in an essay on Schopenhauer, that books that had no fire in them deserved to be burned; and the chapter he devoted in Zarathustra to those who ‘write with their blood’ was profoundly autobiographic.

That there are subtle, and sometimes even glaring, contradictions in Nietzsche’s philosophy is evident to anyone who has studied it with any care. But what these flaws attest is not a love of falsehood or self-deception, but rather an unending battle to deal with the myriad enigmas, puzzles, and contradictions inherent in the mystery, or more properly, the mysteries of human Life. Indeed, it was precisely because so many varying points of view were therein expressed, so many novel ‘perspectives’ opened up that Nietzsche’s protean philosophy began, even before his death, to exercise such an extraordinary fascination on readers and ‘enthusiasts’ from the most diverse walks of life. Among the seven thousand ‘aphorisms’ and short essays contained in a score of published books there was something for every taste and opinion – from the most conservatively and snobbishly inclined (those whom the Viennese wit Karl Kraus sarcastically dubbed the ‘super-apes of the coffee-house’) to the most radically-minded. Nietzsche himself was amazed to discover in 1887, one year before his mental breakdown, that among his most enthusiastic ‘fans’ were to be found the kinds of persons he most distrusted and abhorred: ‘left-wing’ socialists, revolutionary Marxists, atheistic nihilists, who, blandly disregarding everything else he had written, felt that he was one of their own kind because of his pitiless assaults on Christian hypocrisy. As Steven Aschheim noted a few years ago in his admirably researched The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany – 1890–1990: ‘Those who predicted a quick disappearance did not realize that it was precisely the fact that there was no uniformity of opinion or binding authoritative organization that ensured Nietzscheanism’s long and varied life. Its elasticity and selective interpretive possibilities constituted its staying power and facilitated its infusion into so many areas of cultural and political life.’

Many of the ‘contradictions’ in Nietzsche’s philosophy were the consequences of his deliberately ambivalent attitude towards what is all too casually called the ‘truth’. ‘The truth, to be sure,’ he once wittily put it, ‘can stand on one leg; but with two it will walk and get around.’ He was persuaded that there is no such thing as an absolute Truth, and that even in dealing with limited ‘truths’ the philosopher’s first task is to lift each one up and turn it around, like a stone, to see what might be lurking underneath. And it was what lay below, in the nether depths of each spoken or written ‘truth’, that interested Nietzsche far more than the patent, superficial, often deceptive surface.

The trenchant tone of so many of his affirmations should not lead one to conclude that Nietzsche enjoyed ‘laying down the law’. Dogma of any kind was something he detested, as meat for the indolent priest, poison for the genuine thinker. As he wrote in Morgenröte (Morning Glow), in a section (507) entitled, ‘Against the Tyranny of the True’: ‘Even if we were mad enough to regard all of our opinions as true, we would still not want them to exist alone: I would not know why the autocratic domination and omnipotence of the truth would be desirable; it would suffice for me to know that it possessed great power. But it must know how to fight and have antagonists, and one must from time to time be able to find relief from it in untruth – otherwise it will become boring, powerless and tasteless to us, and thus make us the same.’ This was one of the most succinct statements Nietzsche ever made of the ‘resistentialism’ that lies at the very core of his philosophy: it is not what assists Man that strengthens and ennobles him, but, quite the contrary, what resists his slothful inclinations and prejudices.

It was Nietzsche’s constant endeavour to be ‘multidimensional’ in his thinking, his unflinching readiness to see both sides, to tackle the unpleasant con as well as the beguiling pro of every problem he examined, which so often makes his thinking seem contradictory. The man who, towards the end of his sane life, defiantly declared, ‘God is a crude, two-fisted answer, an indelicacy towards us thinkers’ was also the man who declared, in the magnificent opening section of The Joyous Science, that from time immemorial human beings had heeded the founders of moral codes and religions, even though these had repeatedly kindled religious wars, simply because in getting people to believe that they were serving the interests of God or gods, they were reinforcing a belief in the value and significance of human life and thus helping to preserve the species, which might otherwise have yielded to the suicidal extremes of pessimistic despair.

Not long ago, in a delightful book entitled Nietzsche in Turin, which, as she explained in her preface, was an ‘attempt to befriend’ him, the British author and literary critic, Lesley Chamberlain, declared that this ‘strained, charming, malicious and misunderstood thinker … was perhaps the most original European philosopher of the nineteenth century.’ We can, I think, dispense with the ‘perhaps’. For good or ill, Nietzsche has proved to be the most influential philosopher since Hegel, casting his ever-lengthening shadow over the entire length of the twentieth century and beyond. I do not make this claim because of the intellectual role he is supposed to have played in promoting Nazism: a fashionable myth exploded years ago in Peter Viereck’s Metapolitics, where German romanticism in all of its complex forms was placed in the dock and found guilty, along with its great pamphleteering poet-prophet-and-composer, Richard Wagner. I make it because no major thinker of modern times has more prophetically dissected the deepest and most dangerous ‘drifts’ in the permissive laisser-aller that has increasingly become the modus vivendi et pensandi, the effective, day-to-day religion – more exactly irreligion – of ‘modern’ men and women in the West.

If, at the risk of being simplistic – all too easy in discussing such a complex, many-sided, and subtle philosophy – one can say that the first half of Nietzsche’s intellectual development (up to Thus Spake Zarathustra) was a desperate attempt to give written substance to his proudly proclaimed Freigeisterei (free-spiritedness) – essentially reserved for the ‘happy few’ who are brave enough to face the terrifying reality of man’s cosmic insignificance in a gigantically expanding universe – the second part of his philosophical quest can be regarded as an even more desperate attempt to fill the resultant void, inasmuch as social stability, and with it civilization and culture, cannot ultimately be maintained without an instinctive, not to say atavistic, respect for Authority. Perhaps nowhere in all of Nietzsche’s writings was the bitter awareness of the civil war that was raging in the darkest depths of his philosophy more poignantly expressed than in this pathetic protest, contained in a letter written (in November 1882) to Lou Salomé, the quick-witted, brilliant, precociously erudite young lady whom he had wanted to make his chief disciple: ‘Surely you don’t believe that the "Freigeist" is my ideal?’

It is one of the signal merits of Nietzsche’s philosophy that he courageously recognized the inherent limitations of Freigeisterei, of ‘free-spiritedness’, free thinking. If the human mind is to be truly free and unfettered, if it is not to suffer from Kettenkrankheit – intellectual ‘chain-sickness’ – it must free itself from the ultimate and most crippling of illusions: the naive notion (so common among contemporary ‘liberals’ and devout admirers of the French Revolution) that Freedom or Liberty is an absolute value to which every other must pay homage. How can something as insubstantial, as a mere form of possibility be regarded, in any meaningful sense, as an absolute value? When what really matters is the substance. As with an empty glass or cup, it is above all else what one pours into it that counts. Freedom, by its very nature, cannot be an end in itself. It means freedom to be benevolent or nasty, brave or cowardly, generous or selfish, truthful or mendacious, magnanimous or petty-minded, honest or dishonest, polite or rude, rational or irrational.

No one understood this better than Thomas Mann who, in The Magic Mountain – the very title of which (Zauberberg, in German) he had ‘lifted’ from the third section of The Birth of Tragedy – ‘personalized’ these two antagonistic forces in Nietzsche’s thinking by giving them human form in the persons of Professor Settembrini, the advocate of ‘progress’, free speech, and democracy, and Naphta, the Jesuitical apologist of Authority and Autocracy. Nothing, indeed, could have been more appropriately Nietzschean, at the conclusion of their epic debate, than Settembrini’s despair over Naphta’s suicide – as symbolizing the futility of dispassionate ‘free-thinking’ in solving the intractable problems of the modern world.

Now this, quite simply, is the situation in which we find ourselves today. The debate is as fierce and as far from being resolved as ever. It has even assumed a geopolitical dimension, as the American historian, Samuel P. Huntington, has suggested in his The Clash of Civilizations, and, in a purely American context, Gertrude Himmelfarb in One Nation, Two Cultures. And what has not changed, as Nietzsche presciently foresaw, has been the predominance in all ‘Western’ societies of an essentially descensional, downward-dragging gravitational force.

It can be argued that in an increasingly democratic age it was wishful thinking to imagine that one could reverse the trend, since the ‘realistic’ morality Nietzsche desperately strove to formulate was based first and foremost on aristocratic canons of good taste. As he once wrote to his sister Elisabeth, ‘in this rabble-and-country-bumpkin age’ he valued ‘good manners’ more than ‘virtue’, ‘wit’, and ‘beauty’.

An intransigent enemy of egalitarianism in all of its insidious forms, Nietzsche was convinced that the democratic ‘acid’ at work in all Western societies was relentlessly corroding all forms of authority, respect, and veneration, and thus contributing as much as scientific rationalism to subvert religious faith. The ‘democratization’ of Christian belief, liturgical language, and practice – triumphantly proclaimed seven decades after his death as the Catholic Church’s guiding ideal in the Vatican II Council of 1965 – far from being a form of religious ‘progress’, was, he believed, one more sickly symptom of a tendency to desacrilize the sacred, to demean the very notion of the Divine. Where there is no awe and mystery – as embodied, for example, in a sacred, uncolloquial language – all sense of what is sacred vanishes. Where nothing is sacred any more, there is no respect. And where there is no respect, there is no authority.

We touch here on something absolutely fundamental in Nietzsche’s aristocratic attitude in judging not only religion, but so much else in daily life. This was the vitally important element of ‘distance’, the very foundation of awe, respect, veneration. Nothing was more repugnant to him than all forms of divine ‘proximity’, which he regarded as inescapably demeaning for God as well as man. In its negative form, that of divine vigilance, an omniscient, omnipresent, forever watching God becomes in effect a keyhole-peeper, a divine voyeur, an intrusive Big Brother. (In Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche amused himself by citing an objection once made by an innocent young girl who asked her mother, ‘Is God everywhere?’ When the mother answered unthinkingly, ‘But yes, of course,’ the young daughter said, ‘But don’t you think that’s indecent?’)

Equally repugnant to Nietzsche was the positive notion of a friendly, helpful, cooperative God, ever ready to help the devout believer in moments of crisis. He rightly foresaw the grotesque absurdities to which the naive Gott mit uns (God is on our side) tendency in Protestantism was bound to lead. As has been dramatically proved over the past half-century – particularly in the United States, where Protestantism is still a force to be reckoned with – by the ludicrous promises made by super-salesmen of high-octane faith, such as Norman Vincent Peale (author of The Power of Positive Thinking), who has a cooperative God helping the ‘positively-minded’ believer to sell vacuum-cleaners, to run a beauty parlour, to enable a football team to win, a golfer to mashie his way out of a sandy bunker, a tireless deity who is above all super-active in the businessman’s office, helping the enterprising to get ahead in the world – since there is no better recipe for success, the good Doctor assured us, than ‘effecting a merger with God’. Or one could cite the no less ineffable Dr. Samuel Shoemaker, who used to cheer up members of the Pittsburg Golf Club by assuring them that ‘God loves snobs as well as other people.’ Or again, that arch-optimist, the Baptist faith healer, Oral Roberts, who liked to reassure his possibly worried listeners that ‘Christ has no objection to prosperity’. The list of such spiritual ‘boosters’ could be almost indefinitely extended – in keeping with the prescription for success formulated fifty or sixty years ago by Dean Inge, the ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury, who once declared: ‘A religion succeeds not because it is true but because it suits its worshippers.’

It was precisely because Christianity had ceased to be harsh and exacting, as it could still be at the time of Pascal (1623–1662) – one of his ‘heroic antagonists’ – and had instead grown smug, complacent, soft and flabby, that Nietzsche held it in such withering contempt. Like so much else in the modern world, it had been riddled and eaten through and through by the wood-worm of democratic optimism and its categorical imperative: Christianity too must be tailored to popular wishes. Ground under in the process was the very notion of the sacred, of something to be revered precisely because it is not on our level but higher, nobler, and in the sublimest sense beyond Man’s reach.

What makes a society healthy, Nietzsche believed, is an ascensional or aspirational force, exerting its upward pull towards an ideal of improvement or perfection, towards something higher and better, and not merely more ‘successful’ – success being, as he once noted, ‘the greatest of liars’. Where this upward-pulling attraction (a form of respect or veneration) has lost its force or no longer exists, the prevailing social force becomes inverted and descensional. Those who should be exercising authority become demoralized and conscience-stricken at the mere thought of having to lead and to direct, for fear of becoming ‘unjust’, ‘unfair’, or, worst of all, ‘unpopular’. The healthy notion of ‘authority’ is tarred and feathered and takes on the sickly hue of ‘tyranny’. The result is a general flight from responsibility, a universal abdication.

This, Nietzsche foresaw with prophetic clarity, is what is happening today all over the Western world. Parents abdicate before their undisciplined children, teachers before their lawless pupils, priests before their restless, time-rationed congregations, politicians before their assiduously flattered voters – in a modus operandi that was codified, already a century and a half ago by the exemplary French damagogue, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, who, when once asked where he and his party were headed, candidly replied: ‘I do not know, but I am their leader, so I must follow them.’ Everyone ends up giving way before something or someone, in a vertiginously descending spiral. No area of life is spared. All ‘traditional’ values are challenged, any trace of ‘élitism’ becomes instantly suspect. Ugliness, precisely because it is the opposite of the traditionally ‘beautiful’, is accorded an honourable status, just as what is incomprehensible (the opposite of the all-too-easy-to-understand – what the great art historian, Ernst Gombrich, had the courage to denounce as ‘rubbish’ or ‘anti-art’) – receives the stamp of profound ‘significance’ by cultural snobs in frantic search of ‘originality’. The once elegant ‘art’ of haute couture is dragged down to the sordid level of basse couture, with transparently clad model-girls – the new idols of our sensation-seeking age – being forced to indulge in various forms of titillating strip-tease. The strident development of an aggressively crude ‘rap’ singing is another characteristic symptom of a ‘mish-mash’ culture which, having lost its roots and all sense of aristocratic restraint, has become ‘nomadic’ – another Nietzschean prediction – and reduced to importing its inspiration from other climes and continents.

It is easy to reproach Nietzsche for having, in his anathemas against pulpit preachers, contributed to the deluge by weakening the flood-gates of traditional morality. But the troubling question remains: what will happen to the Western world if the present drift cannot be halted, and to what sordid depths of pornographically publicized vulgarity will our shamelessly ‘transparent’ culture, or what remains of it, continue to descend, while those who care about such matters look on in impotent dismay? Perhaps, indeed, the day is not too distant when, new post-modern norms having imposed themselves through a process of Nietzschean ‘transvaluation’, marriage (even between ‘heterosexuals’) will be declared abnormal as well as deplorably ‘old hat’.

Nietzsche, who was painfully aware of how much dynamite his destructive-constructive philosophy contained (‘we must destroy the old before we can rebuild the new’) once wrote to his friend Malwida von Meysenbug that his soul was weighed down by apprehensions ‘that are one hundred times heavier to bear than la bêtise humaine (human foolishness). It is possible that for all forthcoming human beings I am a calamity, that I am the calamity …’ And again, in another letter to his ‘Aunt’ Malwida: ‘the thought still terrifies me as to how totally unsuited people will one day invoke my authority. But this is the agony of every great teacher of mankind; he knows that under certain circumstances and accidents he can become a calamity as well as a blessing for mankind. Well, I will do everything to avoid facilitating at least all too crude misunderstandings.’

This turned out to be a pious wish. Driven on by his restless inner demon – that of an enfant terrible – he brought out a ‘very black and squid-like’ book, Beyond Good and Evil, in the final chapter of which he trenchantly asserted that genuine culture had always been created by a powerful, self-confident aristocracy, imbued with a hardy Herren-Moral (‘master morality’), and that the raison d’être of their subjects was to provide the necessary social foundation for the dominant Herren-Caste (‘master caste’). In his next book, The Genealogy of Morals, he went even further by contrasting the healthy, positive, creative character of a ‘master-morality’ with the negative, reactive, morbidly resentful character of a ‘slave-morality’, which, thanks to Christianity and its bastard offspring, the French Revolution, was now becoming the dominant political religion in Europe.

That there was something foolhardy about this ‘fearless’ temerity, there can be no doubt. What happened, and was bound to happen, given the bombastic, bellicose ‘Deutschland! Deutschland über Alles!’ super-patriotism that had fastened its grip on most of the citizens of the second Germanic Reich after Prussia’ victory over France in 1870, was that Nietzsche’s most uncompromising statements were seized upon by the ‘unsuited followers’ he had described in his letter to Malwida von Meysenbug and twisted into vicious stereotypes by a number of sub-intellectual admirers of Adolf Hitler. The aristocratic notion of a Herren-Caste was vulgarized and socially massified into a Germanic Herren-Rasse (master race); his condemnations of the cult of Christian compassion encouraged a pitiless campaign against all forms of Untermenschen (the sub-human opposites of the Nietzschean Übermensch, or superior ‘overman’, extolled by Zarathustra), beginning with the Slavs and the Jews; while the rampaging ‘blond beast’, torn out of context, provided a philosophical justification for the bestiality of the anti-Bolshevik and anti-Semitic storm-troopers of the SA and the SS. The climactic result was the triumph of four forms of tyranny Nietzsche had never ceased to denounce: the tyranny of ideology, the tyranny of the State, the tyranny of the rabble-rousing demagogue (Adolf Hitler), the tyranny of the mob.

The history of philosophy is, among other things, the history of intellectual betrayals, or, let us say, of intellectual ‘twisting’ performed by zealous disciples who, by concentrating on a particular strand in the Master’s thinking, end up radically transforming his original intent. A classic case is that of René Descartes. In his battle against scholastic empiricism and Aristotelian ‘physics’, which for fifteen centuries had crippled scientific thinking and had allowed intelligent Europeans to go on assuming that the sun revolves around the earth, Descartes imprudently advocated a régime of mental cleansing, which he likened to a blackboard erasing: a tabula rasa. This term, used in his Discourse on Method as an elementary recommendation of intellectual hygiene, was intended to clean his contemporaries’ brains of the cobwebs of scholastic logic-chopping which had been preventing them from thinking clearly. But in the hands of his disciples the tabula rasa formula was extended to cover everything. The old, qua old, was condemned in the name of the ‘new’, and Descartes’s first great disciple, the fanatically Catholic Malebranche, went as far as to outlaw History as a useful guide for human beings (compared to mathematics and geometry) and as little more than a compendium of errors and superstitions: the attitude adopted by Europe’s first great ‘encyclopedist’, Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). The past, being by definition old, had to be scrapped – the result eventually being the French Revolution, a social upheaval which would have appalled Descartes, who in matters political and religious was essentially a conservative.

Another classic case of ‘intellectual betrayal’ is that of Hegel. The extraordinary ‘logical’ system Hegel invented in order to provide a rational explanation for mankind’s intellectual development – with a thesis generating an antithesis, itself superseded by a synthesis, this constituting a new thesis, etc. – was intended among other things to justify the emergence and definitive triumph of constitutional monarchy. Had Hegel, struck down by cholera in 1831, lived twenty or thirty years longer, he would almost certainly have been dismayed to see what some of his zealous disciples were bent on doing with his philosophy. In his fascinating book, From Hegel to Nietzsche – The Revolution in 19th Century Thought, Karl Löwith has shown how each of his principal admirers – Bruno Bauer, David Strauss, Arnold Ruge, Max Stirner, Ludwig Feuerbach – selected one particular tendency in Hegel’s thought and proceeded to weave it into something radically different from what the Master would have wished to see accomplished. The most famous of these ‘adapters’ was Karl Marx, who took Hegel’s dialectic and stood it on its head, dethroning intellectuals and making impersonal, ‘scientifically’ discoverable social and economic forces the real prime movers of human history.

The case of Friedrich Nietzsche is even more pathetic. To begin with, he foresaw this very process of intellectual betrayal. After noting, in the 281st ‘aphorism’ of Human, All Too Human, how difficult it is for one-track-minded pedants to understand a thinker who plays on several strings, he added: ‘It lies in the very nature of the higher, many-stringed culture that it will always be falsely interpreted by the lower one’ – a prediction which, if one changes ‘lower’ into ‘lowest’, was more than fulfilled by his Nazi admirers. What Nietzsche did not foresee, however, was that the person who became in many ways the most influential of his intellectual betrayers, who posed for years as the ‘supreme authority’ on his writings, who used left-over notes to concoct a posthumous ‘crowning work’ with the inflammatory title The Will to Power (ready-made to encourage ‘misreaders’ to regard it as an apologia for the political ‘will to power’ of a dangerously militaristic Germanic Reich), and who took it upon herself to write a 3-volume biography about him, would be … his sister Elisabeth! A sister who had already infuriated her brother by marrying a notorious anti-Semitic agitator, and who, with the same pig-headed disregard and disrespect for everything he had so profoundly thought and fought for, transformed Nietzsche into an apologist of totalitarian tyranny by courting Mussolini (‘Zarathustra’s most splendid disciple’) and, later, by welcoming to her home in Weimar an authentically Teutonic Übermensch named Adolf Hitler.

CHAPTER 1

A Strongly Pastoral Tradition

– ‘Ah, our good, pure Protestant air!’

History, and not least of all the history of philosophy, is full of subtle ironies. One of the strangest is the fact that the most iconoclastic of modern philosophers, the one who did more than anyone since Martin Luther to challenge the established Church, should have been born in a village of Saxon Thuringia, in the Lutheran heartland of Germany – a mere seventy kilometres from the great Reformer’s birthplace at Eisleben, eighty kilometres from Erfurt, where he began his university studies, and less than 120 kilometres from the castle of Wittenberg, on whose chapel door the anti-papal rebel posted up his ninety-five theses in October 1517, 327 years before Friedrich Nietzsche’s appearance on the scene.

Even if, as the familiar dictum has it, no one is more apt to become an ardent atheist than a once ardent believer, no one can reasonably claim that Luther’s most uncompromising modern critic could have been born only in this particular part of Germany, and that he should necessarily have been a Protestant vicar’s son. Nietzsche himself regarded these ‘accidents’ as due to ‘blind’ chance or fortune, or what he later called ‘Fatum’. He will always remain an enigma for neo-Freudians, since contrary to the standard X-pattern of attraction, he adored and idolized his father and never suffered from a mother complex. His rebellion against Christianity and all anthropomorphic religions was an intellectual, not a psychological phenomenon.

Geography may, however, have played a role in Friedrich Nietzsche’s intellectual development in a more subtle way. The Saale river valley, where he spent fourteen decisive years of youth and adolescence, happens to be the northernmost wine-growing region of Germany. Konrad Adenauer, a man of dry wit, once remarked that there were three distinct Germanies: the Germany of the schnapps-drinkers of Prussia, the Germany of the beer-drinkers of Bavaria, the Germany of the wine-drinkers of the Rhineland. Of the three, only the wine-drinkers were sober enough to rule the country. Would Nietzsche have agreed? Possibly. At the age of twenty this disillusioned scholar decided that beer-drinking was an uncouth, mind-clouding, ego-inflating pastime collectively indulged in by raucous super-patriots and an impediment to clear thinking. It was thus perhaps not altogether an accident that this abstemious devotee of Dionysos, who developed an admirable clarity of style, should have been brought up in a pleasant valley whose relatively sober, thrifty, hard-working inhabitants paid temperate homage to Bacchus.

With its vaguely Japanese sound and its distinctly un-Japanese spelling, the name Nietzsche strikes us as a bit exotic. The letter combination ietz, which links it to other Middle-German or Saxon names like Leibniz, Choltitz, Tirpitz, suggests a Slavic origin (comparable to the ice – pronounced itze – combination one finds in Czech names), while the final sche is unmistakably Teutonic. The most illustrious bearer of the name was proudly persuaded that his was not only a hybrid but also an aristocratic genealogy. During the winter of 1883–4, when the thirty-nine-year-old philosopher was hibernating on the French Riviera, he met a Pole who showed him a document entitled, ‘L’Origine de la famille seigneuriale de Nietzke’. Nietzsche, who had by then developed a virulent abhorrence of many aspects of German life and culture, needed no further persuading that his father’s family was of Polish origin. His cousin, Max Oehler, who later investigated his parental genealogy, clambered back 200 years without finding a trace of Polish ancestry in the family tree, but this in itself means little; for, like neighbouring Silesia, this part of Saxony was inhabited by indigenous Slavs long before the Germanic tribes began their colonizing Drang nach Osten (push towards the east) in the ninth and tenth centuries AD. The name is anything but rare; and variations like Nitsche, Nitzke or Nitze abound all over central Germany.

Far from being of noble stock, Friedrich Nietzsche’s ancestors on his father’s side were modest Saxon townsfolk – butchers and cottagers who lived in and around Bibra, some eleven miles north-west of the cathedral city of Naumburg. The first to achieve any prominence was Christoph Nietzsche (1675–1739), a public notary who got himself appointed tax inspector for the Kurfürstentum (elector-principality) of Saxony. The decisive step in this slow social ascension was taken by his son, Friedrich August Ludwig, who was Nietzsche’s grandfather. Instead of serving the state, he decided to serve God, an even surer way for a person of humble origin to move up in the world. In Protestant Germany the pastor was usually the most important person in any village community, having to act as teacher for the young as well as spiritual guide for adults. Those who displayed unusual promise could even climb out of their rural rut. By publishing several dissertations on moral and religious subjects, Friedrich August Nietzsche earned himself an honorary degree in theology from the university of Koenigsberg and, a little later, a promotion to the rank of Superintendent for Eilenburg, an important town situated some fifteen miles north-east of Leipzig, on the main high road towards the Elbe.*

Friedrich August Nietzsche’s first wife died in 1805, seven weeks before the battle of Austerlitz, which put a final end to the first Germanic Reich (or Holy Roman Empire). She left seven children behind her, as well as a husband who was in no mood to remain single for the rest of his days. Four years later he married a widow named Erdmuthe Krause. The ecclesiastical connection was thus notably strengthened; for her father had been an archdeacon, while her eldest brother, after occupying a chair in theology at Koenigsberg, succeeded the celebrated philologist-philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder as Superintendent of the Stadtkirche in Weimar.

The times were not propitious for peaceful family life, for Saxony, in 1812–13, was again invaded by foreign troops, who emptied the wine-cellars and lecherously fondled the womenfolk, as first Prussian and then French soldiers had done in Goethe’s Weimar before and after the Battle of Jena, seven years before. Erdmuthe Nietzsche, who had already given birth to two daughters (Rosalie and Auguste), was pregnant once again in October 1813, when the great Battle of the Nations near Leipzig sealed Napoleon’s doom. A few days before this historic clash, she gave birth to her third child, an infant son named Karl Ludwig. The father was already a ripe fifty-seven, whereas the mother was only thirty-three and destined to live long enough to be able to tell her grandson Friedrich many dramatic stories about those tumultuous times.

Like his father, Friedrich August, the young Ludwig Nietzsche was brought up to be a clergyman. At the age of seventeen he was sent to Halle, an old salt-mining town situated twenty-one miles north-west of Leipzig which had made a name for itself as a seat of religious learning. Most German priests, in the early nineteenth century, could boast a rigorous intellectual training, and German universities were second to none in Europe in the thorough grounding they offered in theology, Greek and Hebrew history, classical philology and biblical exegesis. Although not as famous as Jena, where Fichte, Hegel and Schelling had taught philosophy during the twelve golden years (1794–1806) which had preceded the Napoleonic invasion, Halle’s university had also known a period of greatness at the turn of the century thanks to Germany’s foremost theologian, Schleiermacher, and to two extraordinary scholars, Friedrich August Wolf and his disciple Philipp August Boeck, who between them had founded the science of classical philology.

At Halle Ludwig Nietzsche was a pious, hard-working student who won a prize for eloquence after preaching an inspiring sermon. His subsequent career might well have been nondescript but for a stroke of luck which later greatly impressed his son, the future philosopher. After her husband’s death in 1826, Ludwig’s mother went to live with one of her brothers at Altenburg, some twenty miles south of Leipzig. The town’s most notable landmark, aside from a Renaissance town hall, was a fortress perched on top of a mass of outjutting porphyry rock which had long belonged to the Wettin family, the hereditary rulers and Prince-Electors of (Upper) Saxony. The forbidding castle had received a baroque facelift in the 1720s, enabling its princely owners to assume the gracious mode de vie of an eighteenth-century court – one of the umpteen princely courts which made the map of Germany resemble a harlequin patchwork costume of proud, semi-independent sovereignties.

When the twenty-one-year-old Ludwig Nietzsche returned from Halle to Altenburg, the little principality had officially ceased to be Saxon and had been incorporated into the powerful kingdom of Prussia, along with most of Saxon Thuringia. This was the punishment that the victorious Prussians, at the Congress of Vienna, had imposed on the irresolute Saxon ruler, Frederick Augustus III, who had rashly sought to aid Napoleon during the Leipzig campaign of 1813. Too small to pose a threat, the diminutive duchy of Altenburg was allowed to retain its ducal court and its Landwehr (local militia). Asked to tutor the children of a Landwehr captain, Ludwig Nietzsche soon attracted the attention of the reigning Duke Joseph, who decided that this accomplished young man who knew Latin, Greek, some French, and played the piano well was ideally suited to supervise the education of his three daughters, Therese, Elisabeth and Alexandra.

After seven years of princely tutoring, Ludwig Nietzsche decided to strike out on his own. In 1842 he was appointed by the Royal Chancellery in Berlin to be parish priest for Röcken, Michlitz and Bothfeld, three villages situated about fifteen miles south-west of Leipzig near the site of the historic battle of Lützen, where the Swedish warrior-king Gustavus Adolphus had met his death in 1632. The Röcken parsonage, a large three-storey house with a tall tiled roof and small, crocodile-lidded dormer windows, was big enough to accommodate a family, enabling the twenty-nine-year-old pastor to move into it with his mother, Erdmuthe, and his two unmarried sisters, Rosalie and Auguste.

On one of his routine visits to the parsonages in nearby villages, Ludwig Nietzsche drove his mother and two sisters down the Leipzig highway as far as the village of Pobles, where they called on the local priest. Still a robust, red-cheeked, energetic man for all his sixty-five years, David Ernst Oehler inhabited a hilltop house from which, looking out over fruit and vegetable gardens, one could view the rolling hills and plains across which had been fought the memorable Thirty Years War clash of Lützen and the more recent and even bloodier battles of Gross Görschen and Leipzig (May and October 1813). The front courtyard, framed by coach-houses, horse-stalls, cowbarns and a kiln for baking bread, looked more like a farm than a vicarage. For to feed his brood of eleven children the rural pastor of Pobles spent as much time hunting game, ploughing fields, milking cows and tending hogs as he did leading services, preaching sermons and giving Bible lessons to his flock.

The son of a master-weaver from the nearby town of Zeitz, David Ernst Oehler had improved his social status by marrying the well-to-do daughter of a landed squire, Wilhelmine Hahn, thanks to whose solid dowry the household could include a coachman and a cook. A spartan upbringing had kept the children in good health, and none more so than the seventeen-year-old Franziska. Why she, rather than one of her three older and still unmarried sisters, caught Ludwig Nietzsche’s fancy is not clear. She later told her mother that she reminded him of the Princess Elisabeth he had tutored at Altenburg. She was a pretty, dark-haired girl, with a somewhat angular forehead, protruding brows and large brown eyes. There was a disarming air of innocence about her which was enhanced by the unaffected liveliness of her speech. Her education, compared to that of the Altenburg princesses, was distinctly spotty. She had picked up some rudiments of Latin, geometry and logic, but her father’s efforts to teach her French – an ‘indispensable’ language, he kept repeating – had been conspicuously unsuccessful. She was a healthy, outdoor kind of girl who liked to get up early in the morning, who took her prayers and religious duties seriously, and who, as Ludwig Nietzsche soon discovered, had a sweet-sounding voice for poetry recitations and quite a good ear for music.

If the twenty-nine-year-old Ludwig Nietzsche was attracted by the seventeen-year-old Franziska Oehler, she was no less impressed by the visiting pastor and the unrustic elegance of his black attire. His years spent at the princely court of Altenburg had clearly left their mark – on his manners as on his mode of dress.

The Oehlers – and particularly the father, David Ernst, who liked to liven up the evenings with song-fests – were also impressed by the visiting pastor’s musical talents, which he exhibited by playing piano pieces and by fanciful improvisations on the keyboard. This too was a gift Friedrich Nietzsche was to inherit, and even to develop into an audience-astounding art.

Three months after their betrothal, Ludwig Nietzsche and Franziska Oehler were married at Pobles. The date chosen was his thirtieth birthday: 10 October 1843. At the Röcken parsonage it took the shy young bride some time to feel at home in her new surroundings. She felt awed in the presence of Ludwig’s mother Erdmuthe, a somewhat frail, quiet-mannered lady of sixty-three, whose pallid features were strikingly offset by handsome dark eyes and coal-black hair, two locks of which were curled over her temples under the rim of the ruffled bonnet she always wore. Although her word was law in all domestic matters, she left the daily chores to her daughter Auguste, who was assisted by a kitchen maid named Mine. This arrangement suited Ludwig’s other, slightly older sister, Rosalie, who, being of a more high-strung and intellectual cast of mind, preferred to devote her time to charitable causes, Church problems, and even politics, which she followed by subscribing to the Berlin newspaper Vossische Zeitung.

Franziska had not been in Röcken for more than five months when she realized that she was pregnant. She came close to presenting her husband with a rare birthday gift, but five days later she was finally delivered of an infant son. There was much rejoicing in the village, for the date – 15 October – was also the birthday of their sovereign, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. In honour of this auspicious coincidence, the newborn child was named Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche.

The young Fritz, or ‘Fritzschen’, as he was called, showed no early signs of being an infant prodigy. He had fair hair, was wilful, and, when thwarted in his desires, would roll over on his back and kick his little legs in the air. He was even slow to learn to speak. His most remarkable characteristic was an acute sensitivity to music. Whenever his father began to play the piano, little Fritz would drop whatever he was playing with and listen with rapt attention. That his father was the only person in the community able to extract such lovely sounds from this wondrous instrument raised him above ordinary mortals and enveloped him in a celestial aura of infant adoration.

In July 1846, twenty-one months after her first delivery, Franziska Nietzsche gave birth to a daughter. She was given three first names – Therese Elisabeth Alexandra – in honour of the three Altenburg princesses her father had tutored. The middle name – Elisabeth, or its diminutives, Lisbeth and Lieschen – quickly eclipsed the others, doubtless because Elisabeth von Altenburg had been Ludwig Nietzsche’s favourite charge.

The young Fritz does not seem to have been affected by the jealous ill-will many firstborn children show to the ‘invasion’ of a newcomer. Friedrich Nietzsche’s adolescent recollections of these golden years at Röcken dwell on other matters. He fondly recalls the old moss-covered church, the powerful impression made on him by the sound of Easter bells, the fright that overcame him each time he crept into the sacristy and was confronted by the superhuman figure of Saint George with his terrible spear, as portrayed in a wall-carving of the dimly lit chamber. He describes the elms and poplars, shading the neighbouring farmsteads and the grass-covered orchard, which, like the cellar, was often flooded when the winter snows began to melt. Inside the parsonage, the one room mentioned is the upstairs study with its rows of books, illustrated albums and learned tomes, where the little Fritz liked to tarry. Its principal occupant, his father, is portrayed in the stilted language of an adolescent as a model priest, ‘arrayed in all the virtues of a Christian … and respected and beloved by all who knew him. His fine manners and lively mind embellished the many social gatherings to which he was invited and made him everywhere liked at his very first appearance.’ About his mother and sister there is hardly a word. Yet we know, from a letter written to him on the occasion of Fritz’s seventh birthday, that his sister Elisabeth – who had been nicknamed ‘Plapperlieschen’ (‘Prattle-lisbeth’) by her godfather – grew up to be as garrulous as her slightly older brother tended to be fitful, meditative and withdrawn.

Theirs, on the whole, was a quiet life, like that of their peasant neighbours. Only once was their rustic peace disturbed: in March 1848, when carriages rolled dustily past on the Leipzig–Weissenfels highway filled with cheering travellers, who waved their hats and the black-red-gold banner which had become the symbol of Germanic unity and freedom. The ‘monstrous’ February Revolution in Paris had triggered dozens of similar uprisings all over Germany, not least in Berlin, where cannon-fire and cavalry charges were needed to overpower the barricades. Lacking artisans’ guilds and an urban proletariat, Röcken was spared these social upheavals and the heady cries of ‘Freiheit! Gleichheit! Brudersinn!’ (‘Liberty! Equality! Fraternity!’). A few Prussian hussars were briefly billeted in the village, before trotting on to hotter points of discord. But when Ludwig Nietzsche read a newspaper account of how, to appease the noisy crowds milling around in front of his royal palace in Berlin, the Prussian monarch had donned the red cockade of the revolutionaries, he broke down and wept. The former Altenburg tutor probably thought that King