Friedrich Nietzsche Biography and List of Works

German philosopher and critic of culture, who influenced most of the major writers and philosophers of 20th century Germany and France. Nietzsche's most popular book, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-1885) was ignored at the time of its appearance. Nietzsche has been very widely misrepresented as both an anti-Semite and a woman hater. He made a sport of being provocative and he often gave aphoristic expression to opinions he had not questioned critically.

"All beings hitherto have created something beyond themselves: and ye want to be the ebb of that great tide, and would rather go back to the beast than surpass man?
What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just the same shall man be to the Superman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame.
Ye have made your way from the worm to man, and much within you is still worm. Once were ye apes, and even yet man is more of an ape than any of the apes. "
(from Thus Spake Zarathustra)

Friedrich Nietzsche, the son of a Protestant minister who died -insane - in 1849, was a lifelong rebel against Christianity. "In truth, there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross", Nietzsche wrote in DER ANTICHRIST (1895). He studied classical philology at the universities of Bonn (1864-65) and Leipzig (1864-68), and in 1869 became a professor at the University of Basel, Switzerland. During the Franco-Prussian war he served briefly as a medical orderly with the Prussian army. Nietzsche's military career was short: he contracted dysentery and diphtheria.

In 1872 Nietzsche published his first book, DIE GEBURT DE TRAGÖDIE AUS DEM GEIST DER MUSIK (The Birth of Tragedy). In it he diagnosed human beings as subject to unconscious, involuntary, overwhelmingly self-destructive Dionysian instincts. According to Nietzsche, against this tendency the Greeks erected the sober, rational, and active Apollonian principle.

At Basel Nietzsche had become a close friend of Richard Wagner (1813-1883), and the second part of The Birth of Tragedy deals with Wagner's music. By the end of the decade, Nietzsche became interested in the French enlightenment, as a consequence his friendship with Wagner ended in 1878. The composer despised the French and searched acceptance in Germany. Also Nietzsche did not accept the rising Wagnerian cult at Bayreuth, especially with its anti-Semitism. "What did I never forgive Wagner?... that he became reichdeutsch," wrote a disillusioned Nietzsche. He renounced his Prussian citizenship in 1869 and remained stateless for the rest of his life. In 1879 Nietzsche resigned his professorship - or was forced to give up his chair -due to his poor health.

"When thou goest to woman, take thy whip."

Nietzsche respected that sincere and "genuine Christianity" which he considered "possible in all ages" - but Wagner's Parsifal with its sickly Christianity clearly did not seem to him belonging in that category. In Bayreuth Nietzsche had become increasingly aware of the impossibility of serving both Wagner and his own call. Rejected by Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937), to whom he had proposed marriage, Nietzsche withdrew into the existence of a tourist-scholar. He spent summers in Switzerland and winters in Italy and published his major works in a period of ten years. ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA (Thus Spake Zarathustra) appeared first in three parts in 1883-1884 and was formally published in 1892. Among his other works were JENSEITS VON GUT UND BÖSE (1886), ZUR GENEALOGIE DER MORAL (1887), GÖTZEN-DÄMMERUNG (1889), ANTICHRIST (1895), and ECCE HOMO (1908).

"I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are too venomous, too underhand, too underground and too petty - I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind."
(from The Twilight of the Idols, 1888)

In January 1889 Nietzsche suffered a mental breakdown in Turin, Italy. He lived first in an asylum and then in his family's care. His insanity was probably due to an early syphilitic infection. During his disease Nietzsche was almost invariably gentle and pleasant, and in lucid hours he engaged in conversation. Nietzsche spent his last decade in mental darkness and died in Weimar on August 25, 1900. After his death, his sister Elisabeth secured the rights to his literary remains and edited them for publication. In 1885 Elisabeth had married Bernhard Förster, a prominent leader of the German anti-Semitic movement, which Nietzsche loathed. "For my personal taste such an agitator is something impossible for closer acquaintance", he wrote in a letter to his mother. Förster killed himself when his hand was caught in the till.

Nietzsche believed that all life evidences a will to power. Hopes for a higher state of being after death are explained as compensations for failures in this life. The famous view about the 'death of God' resulted from his observations of the movement from traditional religious beliefs to a trust of science and commerce. Nietzsche dissected Christianity and Socialism as faiths of the 'little men', where excuses for weakness paraded as moral principles. His announcement of the death of God can be interpreted religiously or atheistically: "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him... What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?" (in Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, 1882)

According to Nietzsche, the other world is an illusion, and instead of worshipping gods man should concentrate on his own elevation, which Nietzsche symbolizes in the Übermench. The contrast of 'good and evil' as opposed to that of 'good and bad' Nietzsche associated with slave morality. He argued that no single morality can be appropriate to all men. The meaning of history was the appearance, at rare moments, of the exceptional individual. And by creating the figure of Zarathustra he presented the teacher of the coming superman.

"My first dose of Nietzsche shocked me profoundly. In black and white he had had the audacity to affirm: 'God is dead!' What? I had just learned that God did not exist, and now someone was informing me that he had died."
(Salvador Dali in Diary of a Genius, 1966)

Nietzsche's works first began to gain significant public notice by the Danish critic and scholar Georg Brandes, who lectured on Nietzsche at the University of Copenhagen in 1888. The philosopher's thoughts influenced among others Thomas Mann, Herman Hesse, André Malraux, André Gide, Albert Camus, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, Sigmund Freud, and Jean Paul Sartre. Although the Nazis used some of his ideas, Nietzsche was deeply opposed to the collective tendencies labelled as National Socialism. He rejected German nationalism and biological racism, but the Nazis welcomed Nietzsche's view of 'Herrenmensch', a new type of man who with his robber instincts was able to manipulate the masses and who was a law unto himself. Adolf Hitler kept a bust of him and in 1943 gave his works to Mussolini, who did not read them.

For further reading: The Madness of Nietzsche by Erich F. Podach (1931); Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist by W. Kaufmann (1950); International Nietzsche Bibliography by H.W. Reichert & K. Schlecta (1968); The New Nietzsche, ed. by David B. Allison (1977); Spurs: Nitzsche's Styles by Jacques Derrida (1979); Nietzsche: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. by Robert C. Solomon (1980); Nietzsche by Alexander Nehamas (1985); The Importance of Nietzsche by Erich Heller (1988); Nietzsche's Voice by Henry Staten (1990); Nietzsche contra Nietzsche by Adrian Del Caro (1989); by Robert Holub (1995) - Note 1: Lou Andreas Salomé became the lover of the poet Rilke and a friend of Freud. - Note 2: Nietzsche in his final years of sanity: "Carefully the myopic man sits down to a table; carefully, the man with the sensitive stomach considers every item on the menu: whether the tea is not too strong, the food not spiced too much, for every mistake his diet upsets his sensitive digestion, and every transgression in his nourishment wreaks havoc with his quivering nerves for days. No glass of wine, no glass of beer, no alcohol, no coffee at his place and no cigarette after his meal, nothing that stimulates, refreshes, or rests him, only the short meagre meal and a little urbane, unprofound conversation in a soft voice with an occasional neighbour..." (portrait by Stefan Zweig)

HOMER UND DIE KLASSISCHE PHILOLOGIE, (1869)