Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in Röcken, Prussia, the son of Lutheran pastor Carl Ludwig Nietzsche and Franziska Oehler. His father died in 1849, and the family later moved to Naumburg. A gifted classical pupil, Nietzsche attended the prestigious Schulpforta boarding school from 1858 to 1864. He then studied theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn before transferring to Leipzig in 1865. There he encountered Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, a book he later called decisive to his development. His philological research won exceptional notice from Friedrich Ritschl, his Leipzig teacher.

In 1869, aged twenty-four, Nietzsche became professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, despite not yet holding a doctorate. He renounced his Prussian citizenship and remained formally stateless thereafter. During the Franco-Prussian War, he served briefly as a medical orderly and contracted dysentery and diphtheria. At Basel he formed a close, ultimately ruptured friendship with composer Richard Wagner, whom he first admired. Nietzsche’s early book, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872), interpreted Greek tragedy through Apollo and Dionysus and defended Wagnerian cultural renewal. Its speculative method alienated many classicists and damaged his scholarly standing.

Chronic ill health, including severe headaches and failing eyesight, led Nietzsche to resign from Basel in 1879. With a pension, he lived itinerantly in Switzerland, Italy, France, and Germany, writing in rented rooms and mountain resorts. Human, All Too Human (1878) marked his break from Wagner and Schopenhauerian metaphysics. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), he introduced the prophetic teacher Zarathustra, who proclaims the Übermensch and the challenge of eternal recurrence. Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887) attacked inherited moral valuations, tracing “good” and “bad” to contrasting noble and slave value systems formed in conflict.

In 1888, while living in Turin, Nietzsche produced several major works: The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Nietzsche contra Wagner, and Ecce Homo. In January 1889, he collapsed in Turin and never recovered mental capacity. The precise cause of his breakdown remains disputed; the diagnosis of syphilis is not settled. He was cared for first by his mother, then by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. She controlled his literary estate after his death on 25 August 1900 in Weimar. Her nationalist and antisemitic associations later distorted his reception, although Nietzsche himself repeatedly condemned antisemitism and German nationalism.