Friedrich Nietzsche

A Pastor’s Son in Röcken

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in Röcken, a village near Lützen in Prussian Saxony, and named for King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, on whose birthday he was born. His father, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, was the Lutheran pastor of the village, as his father had been before him. In 1849 his father died of a brain ailment, and months later his younger brother died too.

The family moved to Naumburg, where the boy grew up among women, his mother Franziska, his sister Elisabeth, a grandmother and two aunts, and from 1858 to 1864 he studied at Schulpforta, the most rigorous classical school in Germany, where he learned the discipline of the ancient languages and began to write music and verse.

Philology, Schopenhauer, and Wagner

He began at Bonn in theology and classical philology, then followed his teacher Friedrich Ritschl to Leipzig, and abandoned theology for good. In 1865 he found Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation in a Leipzig bookshop and read it as a revelation; in 1868 he met Richard Wagner, and a friendship began that would shape his early life.

In 1869, at only twenty-four and before he had completed his doctorate, he was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel on Ritschl’s recommendation. He served as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, fell gravely ill, and returned to Basel and to the Wagners at Tribschen. His first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), read Greek tragedy as the marriage of two drives, the Apollonian and the Dionysian, and scandalized his fellow philologists.

The Break, and the Wandering Years

The first Bayreuth Festival of 1876 disillusioned him, and Human, All Too Human (1878) marked his break with Wagner and with his own romantic youth. Migraines, failing eyes, and stomach illness forced him to resign his chair in 1879, and he lived from then on on a modest pension, a wanderer without home or post.

For a decade he moved with the seasons: summers at Sils-Maria in the high Engadine, winters in Genoa, Nice, Rapallo, and at last Turin, writing in rented rooms. In 1882 he met Lou Salomé and hoped briefly for a companion of mind; the hope ended in grief. In those solitary years he wrote Daybreak (1881), The Gay Science (1882), and the book he considered his greatest gift to mankind, Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Zarathustra, and the Last Books

Thus Spake Zarathustra appeared in parts between 1883 and 1885, a prophetic book in the voice of a sage who comes down from his mountain to teach the overman. Beyond Good and Evil followed in 1886, and Nietzsche asked Jacob Burckhardt to read it, though it said the same things as his Zarathustra, only differently, very differently. On the Genealogy of Morals came in 1887.

In 1888, his last year of work, he wrote at astonishing speed: The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and his strange autobiography, Ecce Homo. He was beginning, at last, to be read.

Turin, and the Long Silence

On 3 January 1889 Nietzsche collapsed in Turin; the story told ever since is that he threw his arms around the neck of a horse being beaten in the street. In the days that followed he sent out letters signed “Dionysus” and “The Crucified,” and he was brought back to Germany, to asylums in Basel and Jena, and then into the care of his mother in Naumburg. He never recovered his mind.

After his mother’s death his sister Elisabeth took him to Weimar, where he died on 25 August 1900, and he was buried in the churchyard at Röcken beside his father. Elisabeth founded the Nietzsche Archive and assembled The Will to Power from his notebooks, bending his legacy toward the nationalism and antisemitism he himself had scorned, a distortion scholars would spend the next century undoing.

Zarathustra’s Eagle

At the close of the Prologue to Thus Spake Zarathustra, an eagle sweeps through the air in wide circles with a serpent coiled about its neck, not as prey but as a friend: Zarathustra’s two animals, the proudest and the wisest beneath the sun.

The press’s emblem carries that eagle above its flask, a mark of the vantage it tries to write from, and the crest that guides readers through the will toward the good is the eagle with its serpent. Pride of height, and the wisdom that stays close to the ground: the press would like to keep both.

Nietzsche in the Press’s Books

An History Beside Time speaks to Nietzsche’s reader directly: “If thou hast walked with Zarathustra through mountains of questioning, thou wilt not find thyself altogether in the unfamiliar; yet this work seeketh a different end than intoxication. It seeketh order.” The book borrows Zarathustra’s prophetic voice, its numbered, scriptural cadence, and turns it from the overthrow of old values to the building of an inner order that can hold.

The Wisdom of Catastrophe begins where Nietzsche leaves the modern reader: in the condition he named nihilism. Its reading of decadence is Nietzsche’s: a spirit that can no longer create values, still bowed beneath the old commands, and filling the silence with resentment and distraction. And its guiding idea is that nihilism, faced rather than fled, can become a passage rather than an ending: that meaning, once lost, can return.

The Sibling Masterworks

Nietzsche’s remark that Beyond Good and Evil said the same things as his Zarathustra, only differently, is the whole reasoning behind the Nietzsche Set: Zarathustra in Thomas Common’s translation, Beyond Good and Evil in that of Helen Zimmern, who had known Nietzsche at Sils-Maria, and a companion volume, On the Psychology of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Sibling Masterworks, reading the two side by side.