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Friedrich Nietzsche Richard Wagner

Crusade

against the Cross, 11

Cosima Wagner was already a determined Christian. In Bayreuth, during the quiet winter evenings of 1875, she and her husband Richard immersed themselves in August Gfrörer’s Geschichte des Urchristenthums (History of Early Christianity). Although the Wagners were wise on the Jewish question, like today’s white nationalists, the couple simply ignored David Strauss’s book that had helped Nietzsche so much to take an important step on the road to apostasy.

Gfrörer still presented the Bible romantically, and the modern criticism of the New Testament didn’t affect the Wagner couple in the least. In Cosima’s diary, one can even guess a sort of concordat of this pair in matters of religion: Christian faith and Schopenhauer’s philosophy. (Can you see why I am repulsed by those first two hundred pages of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, which a quarter of a century ago I bought in Manchester by the way, where the young philosopher presents the reader with the abstruse Kantian metaphysics—a neo-theology in my view?)

Richard Wagner would crown his life with a Christian work, Parsifal, about which I have written several posts on this site. The Parsifal project had been in Wagner’s mind since 1857, of which he wrote: ‘A warm, sunny Good Friday inspired me with Parsifal’, taken from the chivalric folklore about the mythical figure of Parzival. (Musically it is, of his operas, the one I like best: so much so that I used to listen to it when driving thanks to the compact discs of Georg Solti’s conducting the Vienna Philharmonic.)

Looking at the matter through Savitri Devi’s eyes, we discover that Wagner was ‘a man of his time’ and Nietzsche ‘a man against his time’. While the Wagners entertained celebrities in their home—the emperor’s son, several archdukes and beautiful ladies of high society—Nietzsche reluctantly followed his lessons.

For him, friendships were sacred. In Leipzig, he had befriended Heinrich Romundt (1845-1919), another classical philologist. Of his friends, Romundt was the closest to Nietzsche after Rhode and Gersdorff. But unlike Nietzsche, Romundt began to follow in Kant’s footsteps, got a professorship in Basel, and unexpectedly wanted to become a Catholic priest.

These were times when Pius IX had declared the Prussian anti-church law invalid! As one can guess from his correspondence with Rhode, Nietzsche was deeply hurt. Romundt had been a housemate in ‘the Basilian cave’, and had previously been in tune with these freethinkers.

After the loss of Romundt, as Gersdorff recounts in his letter of 17 April 1875, Nietzsche had a headache that lasted for thirty hours and repeated vomiting of bile. (It was the same nausea that the world gives me, but I avoid psychosomatic conversion by denouncing, in vindictive autobiographies,the people who have betrayed me.) Elisabeth, his sister, recounts that in the autumn of 1875, when they lived together, Nietzsche played the hymn to solitude on the piano almost every night. But in October Nietzsche met the musician Heinrich Köselitz, whom he nicknamed ‘Peter Gast’—literally Peter the Guest—and became close friends with him: a friendship that was to replace, in a way, the loss of Romundt.

Nietzsche found himself in a dilemma: mihi scribo, aliis vivo (do I write for myself, do I live for others?). Part of his being demanded that he belong to a group. On the other hand, the philosopher had already detected what, on this site, I have called the Christian question: the cause of German decline wasn’t only the Jewry that Wagner imagined. But if Nietzsche spoke his mind, he would suffer social ostracism. And if he didn’t say what he thought, the daimon that already lived in him would transmute into terrible ailments. He chose a third way: to begin to hint at what his inner daimon was whispering to him, albeit for the moment hermetically, in obscure aphorisms.

In one of the posthumous fragments from that period we can read a quotation from Voltaire, ‘Il faut dire la vérité et s’immoler’, to tell the truth is to immolate oneself. Stubbornly, he refused the Wagners’ generous invitations and went to meditate in the mountains and forests, on excursions where he felt freer. Above all, he had to avoid vomiting for hours on end that occurred without having eaten anything, and put aside the quackery cures of the time, such as those shameful enemas and leeches that a doctor had prescribed.

These were the times when the trumpets were already blowing for the opening of Bayreuth, and all his friends would gather there when the poor professor was still suffering from convulsions and stomach ailments: a morbus Wagneri. How could he proclaim the truth without aphorisms and in clear and transparent prose without self-immolation? Nietzsche wanted to surpass Wagner in stature, but that could only happen if another generation would recognise him as the originator of the new religion that was already brewing inside him. He was ‘a premature birth of a future not yet verified’, he would write. ‘Some are born posthumously’.

To be sure, Nietzsche had certain consolations in his existential loneliness. His time with Elisabeth brought back the happy memories of his early childhood, abruptly interrupted when he was cloistered for years in Schulpforta. He wanted, as he wrote to Gersdorff, ‘a simple home with a very orderly daily life’, although he also confessed to him that he had then spent the worst Christmas of his life.

In 1876 Nietzsche published the fourth of his Untimely Meditations, entitled Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. Thus the sick young man paid homage to the healthy old man, and to the Wagners he would send deluxe copies. While in search of freedom in Geneva, Nietzsche met the twenty-one-year-old Mathilde Trampedach. She was ‘blonde, slender, green-eyed and had a Renaissance figure’, writes Werner Ross. On 11 April Nietzsche made a sudden offer of marriage to her, whom he had met only five days earlier, but the nymph… refused.

In July the Bayreuth festivals began with The Ring of the Nibelung. Nietzsche was to arrive the following month.

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Friedrich Nietzsche Philosophy

Crusade

against the Cross, 10

Nietzsche was never entangled in the cobwebs of what, misleadingly, Bertrand Russell would later call ‘Wisdom of the West’ (in reality, the philosophy of the Christian era had only been mental darkness). Nietzsche knew this, as he wrote in On the Pathos of Truth about the true lovers of wisdom: ‘Such people live in their own solar system’. Such sovereign independence was the antithesis of the mental illness that Kant’s apotheosis had meant in Germany, a folie en masse that even Schopenhauer was infected by. The new philosopher ‘speaks in forbidden metaphors and unheard-of complexes of concepts in order at least to respond creatively, by destroying and mocking the old conceptual barriers’. This new ‘philosopher, insofar as he poeticises, knows; and insofar as he knows, poeticises’: a liberating vindication of the Id against the ogre of the neo-theologians’ Superego.

Thus, in Nietzsche’s mind, an innovation emerged: that of the philosopher-poet. And since one of his pillars was pre-Platonic philosophy, Heraclitus became his philosopher-artist. Years later, in Ecce homo, Nietzsche would come to confess that he felt more at home with Heraclitus: the philosopher of the burning of worlds from whom he would draw—oops!—his own metaphysics: that of the eternal return. It was already the time when Nietzsche was beginning to cultivate a thicker moustache than in his earlier years. And before he came up with the word Umwertuung (transvaluation), in his personal notebook we can read about the new philosopher: ‘If he found a word which, if uttered, would destroy the world, do you think he wouldn’t utter it?’ As Stefan Zweig would write in Der Kampf mit dem Dämon, this man, who was not yet thirty, already knew that he had a daimon inside him. Werner Ross comments:

Nietzsche found himself slowly and painfully. Decisions matured: separation from Wagner and separation from the university. Both measures were necessary to achieve full independence and to face what awaited him which he himself defined as ‘the sorrows of truthfulness’. But he was an anguished eagle [hence the title Der ängstliche Adler] and, equipped as he had long been with the weapons of a bird of prey, he preferred to return to the home nest [spend some time in Naumburg]. The heroic had been applied to his soft temperament with violence: with cold water and unheated rooms, with swimming trials [in a lake] and a lot of early rising, with a lot of study and sexual abstinence.

Nietzsche, who had no contact with young girls, suffered from bodily ailments, perhaps psychosomatic in that, until the onset of madness in later times, Christmas was a critical time for his depression. In an attempt to cure himself, he wrote to his friend Malwida: ‘Now I wish for myself, in confidence, a good woman very soon, and then I’ll consider the wishes of my life to be fulfilled’. Meanwhile, the visionary Wagner believed that the symphony was to be replaced by his musical drama (Wagner didn’t call his works ‘operas’). And he somewhat was right, for with the advent of cinema—musical dramas with new technology—soundtracks would replace the conventional symphony genre.

I don’t want to recount all the anecdotes about the eleven days Nietzsche later spent in Bayreuth, recorded lightly in Cosima’s diary, except that at one point Wagner ‘became very angry and spoke of his longing to find in music something about the superiority of Jesus Christ’, as Ross writes. Suffice it to say that Nietzsche had dared to have brought a Brahms score! Later, when Nietzsche sent them his essay Schopenhauer as Educator, the Wagners received the text with delight. Richard wrote to him: ‘I have thought that you should either marry or compose an opera; both would be useful to you. But marriage seems better to me’ and invited him once more to his home. Unfortunately, Nietzsche declined the invitation because he wanted to go on a pilgrimage to a high, lonely Swiss mountain. What he had in mind was to fulfil the role of the new philosopher: ‘When there is much to destroy, in times of the chaos of degeneration, it is most useful’.

But Nietzsche lamented that he didn’t yet know how to fly. For the moment the young eagle could only flap its wings, and he confessed that he was staggering backwards in the face of the immense free space, but that the day would come ‘to soar as high as a thinker has never soared before, to the pure air of the Alps and the ice’. And more telling still: ‘Or, to leave absolutely no doubt as to what I mean, when it matters unspeakably more the appearance of a philosopher on earth than the persistence of a State or a university’.

Shortly afterwards he would be thirty years old.

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Philosophy

Crusade

against the Cross, 9

David Friedrich Strauss

Between 1873 and 1876 Nietzsche published separately four major essays, David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life, Schopenhauer as Educator, and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (these four were later collected and entitled, together, Untimely Meditations). All four essays shared the orientation of a general critique of German culture in an attempt to change its course, which Nietzsche foresaw as wrong.

Since in this series on Nietzsche I am not trying to deal in depth with his complex legacy, but only to show how the anti-Christianity of Hitler’s private conversations in the 20th century had been brewing in his homeland since the previous century, I will only say a few words about the first of the Untimely Meditations: the attack on David Friedrich Strauss.

If we remember that Nietzsche had read Strauss’ magnum opus, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined, published in Tübingen in 1835-1836); that the book helped his apostasy; and that he even wanted to communicate this reading to his sister, it seems a mystery that in this first great essay after The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche should fiercely attack Strauss. But it must be understood that Nietzsche was attacking another book by Strauss that was selling like a bestseller, published decades after Das Leben Jesu. I refer to The Old and the New Faith: A Confession (1871).

So far I have based much of the biographical information in this series on Werner Ross’ book on Nietzsche, originally published in German under the title Der ängstliche Adler. But I am afraid to say that, as far as the acerbic satire of the ‘Straussiade’ is concerned, Ross is wrong in saying that Nietzsche’s essay was simply a commission from Wagner, whom Strauss had long before attacked mercilessly.

What prompts me to say a word about this Nietzschean diatribe is that, on this site, I have held Strauss in high esteem, in the sense that since 2012 and 2013 we have presented him as a pioneer of New Testament textual criticism (here, here, here and here). Critical exegesis aside, the normie Ross, who had a poor idea of Hitler, didn’t realise that Nietzsche’s concerns about Strauss’ bestseller were genuine and that they arose naturally from his point of view. (To use a vulgar analogy, it is as if in our century I were to attack Richard Carrier’s Wokism even though I accept the thesis of his book on the non-historicity of Jesus.) We must understand that Nietzsche had erected for himself an ideal of culture based on three pillars: pre-Platonic Greece, Schopenhauer and Wagner. Strauss’ book was in exemplary opposition to them, and its success indicated that the danger for Germany was more serious than could have been supposed.

In David Strauss: der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller (David Strauss: the Confessor and the Writer, 1873) Nietzsche presents Strauss as an example of the German thought of the time. He casts the Straussian ‘New Faith’, based on the ‘scientific’ progression of history, as a vulgar reading of history in the service of a degenerate culture. Throughout his essay Nietzsche uses the term ‘Philistine culture’. Philistinism was a pejorative term that, although of German origin, it was used from the 19th century onwards in the English language. By comparison with the ancient Philistines, in the cultural milieu of the Victorian era it was applied to vulgar, uneducated or insensitive people. Today the term is in disuse because vulgarity in the ‘culture’ of the masses, and even of the elites, is no longer seen as vulgar.

It is difficult to present Nietzsche’s critique of culture in a blog post because one must be immersed in the spirit of 19th-century Germany. Such an enterprise could only be of value to a scholar writing retrospectively. But for a taste of Nietzsche’s essay, I will quote a few passages from his heated polemic. After prefacing his critique with the sentence ‘There was once a Strauss who was a brave, rigorous scholar, not at all lightly clad, and we liked him just as much’, Nietzsche tells us:

What kind of people are these who must have attained dominion in Germany and who can forbid such strong and simple feelings and prevent their expression? That power, that kind of people I will call by their name—they are the cultiphilistine…

Because of this lack of self-knowledge, the Philistine has the firm and convinced feeling that his ‘culture’ is the full expression of true German culture: and since everywhere the Philistine goes he meets cultured people of his kind, and since all public institutions, all educational, cultural and artistic establishments are organised by the Philistine’s cult and needs, he wanders everywhere with the triumphalist feeling that he is the worthy representative of present-day German culture…

He finds everywhere the uniform imprint of himself, and from this uniform imprint of all ‘cultured’ people he derives a unity of style of German culture.

The posthumous fragments from the time of the composition of this first of the Untimely Meditations, such as one fragment from the spring-summer of 1873 (the time when Tolstoy was publishing Anna Karenina) are even more direct in probing Nietzsche’s thinking:

Strauss is not a philosopher. He lacks feeling for style. He is not an artist…

The horrendous dilapidation of Hegelianism! Not even those who have been able to save themselves from it, like Strauss, are ever completely cured.

Two misfortunes befell Strauss: firstly, Hegelianism took possession of him and made him dizzy at a time when he should have been guided by a serious philosopher. Secondly, his opponents made him fall into the mania that his cause was popular and that he was a popular author. As a result, it has never been possible for him to cease to be a theologian, and it has never been permissible for him to begin again to be a rigorous disciple of his science. Now he has done his utmost to eliminate Hegel and the theological ingredient as much as possible: but in vain. The former is evident in Strauss’ chatteringly optimistic way of looking at the world, in which the Prussian state is the ultimate goal of world history; the latter in the irritated invective he hurls against Christianity. Strauss lacks something to lean on and throws himself into the arms of the State and of success; his thinking is not at any point a thinking sub specie aeternitatis [in the perspective of eternity], but a thinking sub specie decennii vel biennii [from the standpoint of the decade or the biennium]. This is how he becomes a ‘classic populist’, just like Büchner…

The cultiphilistine ignores what culture-unity of style is. He agrees that there are classics (Schiller, Goethe, Lessing) and forgets that they wanted a culture, but that they are not a foundation on which to rest.

What to say about Nietzsche’s political ideas, would the philosopher have approved of the Third Reich had he lived lucidly and for as many years as his sister? What is certain is that more than one pundit answered his diatribe against Strauss. For example, ‘Herr Friedrich Nietzsche and German Culture’ from the pen of B.F., published in the Leipzig journal Die Grenzboten in October 1873 by the mysterious ‘B.F.’[1] rebuked Nietzsche for his lack of patriotism.

Politics aside one thing is certain: the philologist was left behind and a philosopher was born: a critic of culture, the Kulturkampf.

The context of Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations must be understood within the legacy of Wagner and the work of ‘total art’, which detested the scientific fever, the faith in so-called progress and the mercantile spirit of the present. (He who advocates the transvaluation of these Judaizing values would say: Let’s go back to the Germanic myths!) These were the times when Nietzsche had made his first solo trip abroad, and in his diary, he wrote things like ‘This Alpine valley is absolutely my pleasure: here there are strong, pure airs, mountains’ and ‘roads I walk along for hours’.

This is already the new Nietzsche, the philosopher-poet of little or no company. Even to his mother he cites pen, ink and paper as his best companions: ‘All together we greet you from the bottom of our hearts’. This was also the year in which the opening of the Bayreuth theater was planned. Wagner was already sixty years old, and Nietzsche was brimming with euphoria.

Strauss was to die the following year.

______________

[1] It hasn’t been possible to find out who was behind the initials B.F. The official documents of the journal list Hans Blum, who was then its editor, as the author. Many years later, in 1909, Blum denied that he was the author of the article, but he couldn’t remember exactly who had given it to him; he hinted that it might have been a professor at the University of Leipzig or a publicist inspired by university media. It has also been claimed that the author may have been Bernhard Forster (the initials match), then and always an ardent supporter of the Reich, who later married Nietzsche’s sister. If this is so, Nietzsche’s critic would thus have become Nietzsche’s brother-in-law. Elisabeth, of course, denied it.

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Ancient Greece Art Friedrich Nietzsche

Crusade

against the Cross, 8

The publication of Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music) caused so much trouble in the stagnant German-speaking academy that even when Rhode wanted to defend his friend Nietzsche against the attack of their colleagues, he was unable to obtain a professorship in Freiburg.

We are used to the culture of cancellation in the darkest hour of the West. This month, on the Führer’s birthday for example, Kevin MacDonald expressed his mixed feelings that his ideological enemy at Cambridge University, Nathan Cofnas, had been expelled for daring to talk about race and IQ. But already in 19th-century Europe things were far from an open marketplace of ideas. The aforementioned textual critic of the New Testament, David Friedrich Strauss, whom Nietzsche had read, was also unable to obtain a professorship after the publication of his book (even today academic exegetes don’t even bother to read Richard Carrier’s book about the dubious historicity of Jesus).

Once one understands that the academy is not the proverbial forum for an open marketplace of ideas, but for the ironclad and orthodox transmission of the paradigm of the day, one will understand that only the freelance philosopher will be able to write something worth reading. Always keep in mind that guys like Kant and Hegel didn’t openly contradict the interests of the State or the Church, so their obscurantist philosophies weren’t only tolerated, but promoted.

In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche not only expounds the content of his study of the Greeks, but begins to shape his philosophy. The book is a hybrid of philosophy and philology, which is why Nietzsche himself called it a ‘centaur’. It deals with the birth of Attic tragedy, the motives that inspired it, and the causes of its demise. He aimed to interpret tragedy in ancient Greece, which differed from the concept that the learned had of it. The work develops the thesis that two great opposing forces govern art: the Dionysian force and the Apollonian force. These two forces, once united in Greek tragedy, were separated by the triumph of rationality with Socrates. Nietzsche hoped to rediscover this ancient union in the music of Richard Wagner, to whom he dedicated the book.

The Greece of the white sculptures came to us, but originally they were painted. (Something of this can be seen for at least a few seconds in Oliver Stone’s film in a scene of Alexander the Great’s father, though that film is generally Hollywood Greece rather than historical Greece.) And the same can be said of its architectural ruins: they were originally painted in bright colours, as can be seen in some contemporary reconstructions. To understand Nietzsche one would have to colour not only the sculptures and temple reconstructions, but the original pathos of Greek tragedy, insofar as the Germanic psyche of his time was burdened with what we might call an ogre of superego: something like baptising the pagans through the late saintly Socrates, a figure who doesn’t represent the violent origins of Greece and the ensuing tragedy.

For the man of our century, one way to grasp the controversy that Nietzsche’s first book sparked would be to watch a film like the tragedy of Iphigenia and compare it with thousands of Hollywood turkeys where we see no tragedy at all: the drama is simply resolved with a rational and even happy ending. Apollo is present but Dionysus is absent: prolefeed for the proles! If we take into account what we said yesterday about how the degenerate Aryan, emasculated by comfort to the point of losing the tragic sense of life—and Hollywood has played a central role in making us forget about tragedy and believe that life is merely a drama—we will have, perhaps, a distant analogy to what happened after the publication of Nietzsche’s first book.

Without going into the details, which can be read in scholarly biographies, Nietzsche had violated the rules of the philologists’ guild by saying that a German Renaissance could be catapulted by Wagner’s music. In The Birth of Tragedy a holy man, Socrates, was dethroned. I would add that, being physically ugly, Socrates was never a true Greek because in the real Hellas physical ugliness was almost a refutation (being the son of a midwife, the baby Socrates avoided premature infanticide by the eugenicists of the time). According to Nietzsche, the original tragedy was lyrical-musical, like Wagner’s musical tragedies. With Socrates and his calculating reason a dangerous optimism had penetrated the Greek psyche, and the original, deeply pessimistic tragedy died (I really suggest that any fan of Judaizing Hollywood watch the Greek film Iphigenia, linked above, to get a taste of what we are talking about).

Wagner went to great lengths to calm Cosima down from the shock of such iconoclasm, and she herself wrote to Nietzsche: ‘The master must have told you what excitement I have been in, and also that all night long he had to talk to me about it, with all the details’.

Wagner certainly applauded Nietzsche’s daring, but he feared greatly for his academic future. For in turning against the white Greece to which 19th-century Europeans were accustomed, introducing the violent colour of the original culture, as well as advocating a revival of Germanism thanks to Wagner’s musical dramas, the book was no longer a dull text: it was a political essay. By presenting himself not as an obscure Basilian professor whose texts are suitable only for colleagues but as a Dionysian dancer, Nietzsche, besides being too strong for the palate of his classicist contemporaries, was marked in relation to the notorious composer.

These were times when Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung—the most pagan and ambitious of his operas—was much talked about in Germany. He was still working on the last of the four operas in that series (see our summary from Wagner’s libretto here). Tannhäuser had been left behind in public conversation and the neo-Christian Parsifal hadn’t yet been composed. Nietzsche couldn’t have imagined that he alone would lead the way in transvaluation while the Wagnerians would take a step backwards. Only the next century Himmler and his kind would take steps forward on the psychological Rubicon instead of the fear that the Rubicon causes by stepping back (say, like the regressive step William Pierce took after the exterminationist The Turner Diaries with his next novel, Hunter, where Pierce introduces a Christian character as the good guy in his drama).

Before Parsifal the medicine that Nietzsche prescribed for the general malaise of the Germanic peoples was still sold in the Wagnerian pharmacy. Richard, in fact, invited Nietzsche, now his herald, and in Cosima’s diary we see that her husband even wept with happiness after the publication of The Birth of Tragedy. Unfortunately, Nietzsche didn’t attend because that winter he suffered from the typical Christmas depression that invaded him on the darkest days of the year.

The King of Bavaria himself, a great friend of Wagner, let it be known via third parties that he had received Nietzsche’s book but didn’t comment on its contents. Ritschl, the representative of academic philology who had been so supportive of the young man, wrote in his notes not intended for publication that the book was ‘a witty drunkenness’. For what was already apparent in this essay was a desire to reorganise German culture and to declare conventional philology, so devoid of bright colours and the tragic meaning of life, dead. For the depressed Nietzsche all that suited him: to fight. He wanted to pick a fight to get out of his depressions!

And the fight actually came. One of the normies of the time, the philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, who like Nietzsche had studied at the boys’ cloister, asked the professor to leave the chair and wrote a pamphlet denouncing The Birth of Tragedy, where he writes: ‘What a shame you inflict, Mr Nietzsche, on Mother Pforta’ and later added that Nietzsche had degraded all that he had been taught as untouchable and sacred. Biographer Ross comments: ‘The serene Hellenism… was like a piece of religion for bourgeois and intellectuals that would not be extirpated’. For Wilamowitz had grasped Nietzsche’s intention to create a new philology based on the original spirit of Ancient Hellas, on that deep blue of the Mediterranean and so distant from the grey skies of northern Europe.

Rhode replied to Wilamowitz and even Wagner himself intervened in the exchange with a published text of his own (ignored by the philologists of course). Wilamowitz in turn replied to Rohde and other professionals intervened. Never before had such a furious controversy raged in philology, and Nietzsche took refuge in a further elaboration of his pregnant philosophy.

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Richard Wagner

Crusade

against the Cross, 7

Erwin Rohde, Karl von Gersdorff and Nietzsche.

Although 19th-century Basel was picturesque, it lacked hygiene to such an extent that a few years before Nietzsche lived there it had suffered a bout of cholera.

When he was already a respectable town professor, Nietzsche wore a top hat: the only one in Basel to do so. His friend Rhode remained faithful if distant; with Wagner, he continued his affectionate relationship, and the theologian Overbeck became his closest friend. It is difficult to imagine this Prussian reading passages from Mark Twain’s amusing novels in conversation with his friends, but this has come to light thanks to documents that have come into the possession of his biographers.

Although Nietzsche was already established and a member of the community, the Basilian professorship was to last only a decade. He didn’t like to be a teacher, although the exercises of the Greek tragedies were somewhat close to his interests. Nor was he interested in philological minutiae but in the intense spirit of ancient Greeks. He wanted the spirit of ancient Hellas to be reborn and distinguished from the sombre way in which its study was taught in the formal academy.

He also disliked that he had to appear daily before his students very early in the morning, in addition to preparing the countless hours of lectures and seminars. But he enjoyed the walks, the social life and the meals with his colleagues; he invited his students to his home—time and again he sought their warmth—and when he arrived home, a beautiful grand piano awaited him for his improvisations. With the anchorite image we got of him in his later years, it is hard to imagine him eating at his colleagues’ invitations, joking and even dancing.

But he was too shy to take the step Wagner strongly urged him to take: marriage. Werner Ross tells us that Nietzsche ‘has gone down in history as one of the few important men who has never even been known to have had a relationship with a woman. He was a special being: a fact that can be understood as a priestly renunciation for the sake of a mission that was to shake the world…’

Old-time friendships in Europe were deeper than ours. Curt Paul Janz observed that Nietzsche’s compositions for piano responded to the motto of friendship. Of Rohde, for example, Nietzsche writes, ‘of the best and rarest kind and faithful to me with touching love’. Rhode for his part wrote the following retrospective soliloquy in his diary of 1876: ‘Think of the golden gardens of happiness in which you lived while, in the spring of 1870, Nietzsche played for you the fragment from The Master Singers: “Morning Brightness”. Those were the best hours of my whole life’. And about the celebrated composer Nietzsche wrote about ‘the warmest and most agreeable nature of Wagner, of whom I want to say that he is the greatest genius and greatest man of our time, decidedly immeasurable!’ The group he had first formed with his Shopenhaurean friends mutated into a group that now deified a living man: Richard Wagner. Just as Bayreuth aimed to break with the way music was taught in Germany, Nietzsche wanted to break with the dead form in which philology was taught at the Academy.

Another of Nietzsche’s friends, Karl von Gersdorff, pictured above with Rohde, converted Nietzsche to vegetarianism; and Nietzsche, in turn, converted him to Wagnerianism. Although Gersdorff was in complete agreement with Wagner’s anti-Semitism and even viewed Mendelssohn’s music with contempt, Wagner was exasperated that Nietzsche wouldn’t eat meat when he invited him and even scolded him in front of Cosima. It is very significant to note that neither the Jupiterian Wagner nor the aristocratic Nietzsche said a word about the victims during La semaine sanglante (the bloody week) with which the French government repressed the Paris Commune.

When Nietzsche visited the Wagner house he brought toys bought in the Eisengasse in Basel for Cosima’s children, who saw the professor as a welcome playmate. Wagner himself began his letters with phrases like ‘Dearest Herr Friedrich…’ and had drawn up plans that, should he die prematurely, Nietzsche would be the tutor of his son Siegfried: named after the third opera of Wagner’s tetralogy inspired by pre-Christian mythology. This was Wagner’s fervent wish when Nietzsche was already twenty-eight years old, so, understandably, the academic activity to which he was chained was experienced as an ordeal.

By this time he had left philology behind and philosophy represented his real passion. But we must make it clear that Nietzsche didn’t have in mind the nonsense that, before him, had been written by all the so-called great philosophers (whom I have referred to on this site as neo-theologians). After all, none of them said anything influential about the Aryan race or the transvaluation of all Christian values. The ‘great’ philosophers had spent their lives discussing abstruse metaphysics and theories of knowledge but absolutely nothing relevant to our sacred words. Philosophy has been an immense Sahara of sterile discussions, and the fact that after so many centuries the philosophers haven’t even intuited what eventually motivated Adolf Hitler, is testimony to the frivolity of their activity.

At this point in his life, Nietzsche was already beginning to glimpse a prophetic mission. Many things were on his mind besides the reform of philology on Greco-Roman authors, and the majestic Aryan art that was to give birth to a New Renaissance as envisaged by Wagner, who now inaugurated it in Bayreuth: ideas that were swirling around in his head. We can imagine those times when the master already had white hair and the young professor sported a dark moustache, meetings presided over by the slender and refined Cosima: a woman who was to become a kind of muse for Nietzsche. Although, as a passionate admirer of Greece, one could imagine the professor travelling to Attica, the circle of the inveterate bachelor didn’t leave Naumburg, Leipzig, Lake Lucerne, Lake Geneva, the Swiss mountains and occasionally the Wagners’ house.

When the philosopher would mature, he would discover to his surprise that even Wagner had only been a way station on his spiritual odyssey.

Categories
Friedrich Nietzsche Vincent van Gogh

Crusade

against the Cross, 6

Friedrich Nietzsche in 1867.

Before saying a thing or two about the social impact on the educated sectors of Germany of Nietzsche’s first book, I would like to collect in this and the next entry some revealing anecdotes from the years outlined in the previous entry.

Given that the Nietzsche who would become popular was the philosopher—the hermit Nietzsche, taciturn, myopic and sullen—it is difficult to imagine him cheerful in 1867 when he enjoyed, as he put it, a ‘strong march on foot’ with his faithful friend Rhode: a march in the woods and mountains of Bohemia and Bavaria. Nietzsche had procured sturdy double-soled boots and the experience, which freed him at least for a few days from his academic duties, had Munich and Salzburg as their destination, although they made their way as far as Nuremberg, mostly on foot.

It is also difficult to imagine the philologist gunner whistling Offenbach tunes in the morning, or that the chronic ailments I spoke of vanished that happy season, despite the horse accident as mentioned earlier. The medical examination deduced that he had torn his pectoral muscles, and during therapy, several cups were filled with pus; the sternum was affected and Nietzsche confesses that he had to learn to walk again. Nietzsche’s volume of notes during his convalescence covers many pages, where the philosophical concerns that were to take possession of his soul are absent.

As a professor of classical philology, Nietzsche now earned a decent salary at the University of Basel. For someone born in a humble village, this was like winning the lottery. His mother wrote to him euphorically:

My dear Fritz:

Professor of 800 thalers’ salary! It was too much, my good son and I could not calm my heart in any other way than by immediately sending a telegram to Volkmann in Pforta.

Then I wrote to the good mother, the guardian, the Sidonchen, the Ehrenbergs, Miss von Grimmenstein and the Schenks in Weimar. In the meantime, Mrs Wenkel and Mrs Pinder came to congratulate us, at about 6 p.m. I took my letters to the post office, 25 pages in all, and communicated my joy first of all to the Luthers, who burst into shouts of joy; they called the old privy councillor, and all burst into tears, and heartily congratulated you, as well as Mrs. Haarseim, Mrs. Keil, Mrs. Grohmann with her daughter, Mrs. privy councillor Lepsius, who always shouted: My good son Fritz, as well as Mrs. Von Busch.

And what a beautiful city, said the Keils, the Pinders and old Luther: the university at the top and the Rhine below.

The dream of Nietzsche’s father, who saw it as a prodigy that his firstborn would be born when the king’s birthday bells were ringing, seemed fulfilled. His academic success reinforced the fantasy that Nietzsche would be a genius and probably contributed to that familiar wine going to his head over the years.

And what did his mentor Ritschl have to say? He wrote a eulogy in his reply letter to Wilhelm Vischer, who was envious of the uncouth, medium-sized, light-brown-haired colleague who did not yet dress elegantly. Ritschl wrote:

The man doesn’t even have a doctorate, but only because the obligatory five-year period since completing the baccalaureate (incidentally, taken at Schulpforta) has not yet fully elapsed. Otherwise, he would already have had one. I want to formulate my judgement in a few words, and neither you nor Büchler, Ribbeck, Bernays, Usener [all disciples of Ritschl] or tutti quanti should take it badly.

With as many young people as, for more than thirty-nine years, I have seen being trained before my eyes I have never met, nor have I tried to promote in my speciality according to my possibilities, a lad who so early and so young was as mature as this Nietzsche. The papers for the Rheinisches Museum he wrote in the second and third year of his academic three-year term! He is the first one I have accepted in collaboration while still a student. God willing, he will live a long life. I prophesy that one day he will be at the forefront of German philology.

He is only twenty-four years old; he is strong, vigorous, healthy, bizarre in body and character, made to please similar temperaments. Moreover, he possesses an enviable facility for calm as well as skilful and clear exposition in free expression. He is the idol and unwitting guide of the whole world of young philologists here in Leipzig, quite numerous, who cannot wait to hear him as a teacher.

You will say that I am describing a kind of phenomenon. Well, he is, and a kind and modest one at that. Also, a talented musician, which is irrelevant here. But I have not yet met any active authority who in a similar case has dared to go beyond the formal inadequacy, and I offer my entire philological and scholarly reputation as a guarantee that the thing will have a happy outcome.

No matter how much of a nose for academic talent Professor Ritschl might boast, he never imagined that his protégée was a time bomb that would blow apart the cloistering he had been suffering from since childhood. Instead of the grey monotony of Pforta that continued in Bonn, Leipzig and now Basel, Nietzsche would end his last sane days singing to the God Dionysus. The very intense blue sky seen in the islands of ancient Hellas, to which Nietzsche always aspired, evokes another flight from the gloomy skies of the north to the limpid south.

Vincent van Gogh, who lived within Nietzsche’s lifespan, was also the son of an austere and humble, though Dutch, Protestant pastor.

Unlike Nietzsche, Vincent would become a Protestant pastor for a time, at the age of twenty-six, and go as a missionary to a mining region of Belgium in search of the crucified of the time: a sort of St. Francis in a Protestant version. Only after prolonged self-mortifications would Brother Vincent abandon this black period of his life—literally black, as he watched the poor miners leaving the mines covered in charcoal—and flee in search of the enlightened landscapes of Arles (Nietzsche would do something similar, but not in the South of France but in Italy).

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Friedrich Nietzsche Music Richard Wagner

Crusade

against the Cross, 5

A student philological organization in Leipzig. Nietzsche stands third from left facing Ernst Windisch, who is looking down.

The 19th century represented an awakening of a sector of the population in German-speaking countries to the Jewish question. As a man in tune with his times, Nietzsche would even write to his mother that he had finally found a brewery ‘where you don’t have to swallow melted butter and Jewish facades’. With his typical aristocratic tendency, the young Nietzsche considered all commerce unworthy, not just Jewish commerce. The proletariat was alien to him. He always believed that an uprising of the working class would destroy the world, so it had to be opposed.

For, having studied classical philology, Nietzsche had read directly the Greek writers of the ancient world, who weren’t infected by secular cross-worship in the sense of worshipping the crucified in turn. It was precisely the century in which Nietzsche lived that Doré, Dostoyevsky and Marx saw the horrors to which the Industrial Revolution had brought London and Manchester, times when ‘the crucified’ par excellence was the worker.

The decade before the photograph above, Count Gobineau had published his essay on the inequality of the human races, and Darwin on the origin of species. Those books written in French and English respectively ought to have been the best influences for the young philologist who knew so well the Greco-Roman classics and thus the scale of values before the advent of Judeo-Christianity. But Nietzsche would be impressed by what was then fashionable in German.

He read David Friedrich Strauss’ Life of Jesus. I have complained a lot on this site that much of the racial right is ignorant of the textual criticism that Germans have been making of the New Testament since the Enlightenment. The special edition of Strauss’ book that Nietzsche bought had been precisely the one that had appeared in German bookstores at a reasonable price for freethinkers of limited means. Nietzsche made the mistake of wanting to convey to a silly woman, Elisabeth, the reasons for his recent apostasy, now endorsed by the book in vogue at the time, while his sister replied to his letter confused and saddened by this typical turn of a 19th-century freethinking.

But Strauss wasn’t the most important influence on Nietzsche. In an antiquarian bookshop, he found Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation and began to leaf through it. He bought it and took it home to read. Later he would read Parerga and Paralipomena.

Except for Kant, Schopenhauer rejected the philosophers of classic German idealism, and showed Nietzsche what criticism of a nation’s culture is: university philosophy serves the State and the Church since it is from them that the philosopher receives his livelihood (Schopenhauer is somewhat hypocritical in this matter, since The World as Will and Representation begins with a very dull two hundred Kantian pages that could also fall under such category). The young Nietzsche had found an educator, but more than Schopenhauer’s doctrine, what was decisive was the attitude of the philosopher who not only opposed Hegel and company but presented himself to the world as a pessimistic and solitary hero.

That Nietzsche’s group worshipped the rebellious philosopher is evident from the fact that every year a group of Schopenhauerians celebrated his birth by drinking to the memory of their late master at a bacchanalian dinner. These were years in which the subject of Richard Wagner was also the order of the day, the talk of Leipzig. Werner Ross tells us: ‘The approach to Wagner is the most important event in Nietzsche’s entire biography. It surpasses in intensity and scope even his appointment as professor at the University of Basel’.

Wagner belonged to the section of Europeans aware of the Jewish problem and had written a book on the subject, but he needed fighters for his musical cause. Sophie Ritschl, the sister of Nietzsche’s teacher, took advantage of a whirlwind visit by Wagner to Leipzig to arrange an interview between Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche—a great honour for the latter. Everything seemed calculated to recruit the young genius to the Wagnerian cause!

On 8 November 1868 Nietzsche met Wagner, to whose music he was fully converted. He would never forget those days in which he felt himself treated as an equal of the greatest genius of the age.

But we must take into consideration the time we are talking about. When I saw Wagner’s first masterpiece, Tannhäuser, I was shocked that the Goddess Venus was defeated by invoking the voice of the Virgin Mary. While it is true that Wagner played with pre-Christian myths, he never broke with his Lutheran origins as drastically as Nietzsche would over the years. Nonetheless, when Nietzsche attended concerts playing the overtures to Tristan and The Master-Singers of Nuremberg, he wrote to his friend Rohde: ‘I cannot keep calm before this music: every fibre, every nerve stirs in me, and it is a long time since I have had such a feeling of rapture as when listening to the above overture’. (The same could be said of the impressions that the lad I was decades ago had!)

On 13 February 1869, the University of Basel appointed Nietzsche professor of classical philology: an astonishing case, for he was not even a doctor. This was mainly due to the influence of his teacher Ritschl, now indirectly involved in recruiting his pupil to the Wagnerian cause. On 23 March the University of Leipzig awarded Nietzsche a doctor’s degree, without examination or thesis, based on papers published in Ritschl’s Rheinisches Museum. On 13 April Nietzsche abandoned his German (Prussian) citizenship and became Swiss.

Wagner invited Nietzsche to ‘talk about music and philosophy’ and the young man naturally accepted. On 17 May he visited Wagner for the first time in Tribschen and was captivated. Wagner was ‘a fabulously lively and fiery man, who speaks very fast, is very witty and brings joy to a meeting’.

On 28 May Nietzsche gave the inaugural address of his professorship: Homer and Classical Philology and met the Renaissance scholar Jacob Burckhardt. In 1870 he continued his classes, lectures and philological studies, and in April he was appointed full professor: the year in which The Valkyrie was premiered in Munich. On 8 August he asked the university for permission to take part in the Franco-Prussian war, which was granted, but only as a nurse. Ironically, Nietzsche became seriously ill with dysentery. In October, he returned to Basel and began his important friendship with the theologian Franz Overbeck.

In 1871 Nietzsche began to write The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music: a plea for Wagner or proclamation that, through his music, the glorious days of ancient Greek values would return. (In this Nietzsche wasn’t wrong, as the next century Hitler would intuit; and the dream would have crystallised had he won the war.)

Early in 1872, The Birth of Tragedy was published, the book with which Nietzsche first introduced himself to the public at large. It was well received by his friends, but poorly received by the philologists in the profession. For this reason, Nietzsche even entertained the idea of leaving his chair in Basel to carry Wagner’s gospel as an itinerant preacher. The young philologist had become enchanted by the man who had been born in the same year as his father and, as Nietzsche himself would much later reveal in one of his letters of madness, also by Cosima Wagner.

In April Wagner left Tribschen, and on 22 May Nietzsche attended the laying of the foundation stone of the Wagnerian theatre in Bayreuth. These were the times of his greatest interest in Wagner, and he met Malwilda von Meysenburg through Wagnerian circles. At this time Nietzsche also composed the Manfried Meditation for piano four hands.

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Friedrich Nietzsche

Crusade

against the Cross, 4

Nietzsche had to argue with his mother over his resolution not to continue his theological studies, i.e., to prepare for the career of parish priest.

In Bonn, Nietzsche finally experienced his first breaths of freedom. He no longer had to comply with the rigorous rules of dress, or the obligation to attend religious services in what had been, de facto, the Schulpforta convent for kids. Moreover, Bonn was so far from his mother’s home that he couldn’t even afford to spend Christmas at home. The difference between Bonn and the sullen family life in Naumburg couldn’t have been greater for the young student who attended parties, something inconceivable in Schulpforta.

Nietzsche, who came to live very close to Beethoven’s birthplace, visited Schumann’s grave. His friend Paul Deussen, who was the same age (but who would outlive him by almost twenty years) told the anecdote that Nietzsche didn’t accept the services of prostitutes when they took him to a brothel during one of his escapades in Cologne. More than adolescent sex, music was his girlfriend. As the teenage Hitler would later do, he attended concerts and the opera despite their financial hardship.

A letter to Deussen opens a psychological window into how the young Nietzsche first discovered the late atavistic effects of pagan festivities:

The entire population of the city lived for three days in total debauchery… There was complete freedom to visit and to receive visitors, even to kiss. Breakfast was ready in every home, accompanied by wine and punch; joking and laughing, drinking a glass, and then the round went on… When they arrived at the house of a slaughterer, the party had passed through the window, which was easy, since in the Rhineland houses have very low windows… The students kissed the splendid girl leaning out of the window and left through the front door. In the meantime, the father objected to the custom of wearing masks and wanted to prevent the parade. That’s why I was called. I carried the rather stout man outside and closed the entrance, then collected up my kiss and the procession moved on.

It was a time when the young Nietzsche already wore a moustache, though by no means the bristling wig with which, after his death, his face became iconic. He was such a gregarious young man that in addition to the opera he attended the theatre with friends. No one could have suspected that he would eventually become a hermit. So little noticed was the normie Nietzsche among lads of his age that, except Deussen, no member of the ‘Franconia’ association to which he belonged remembered anything about him when he was already famous. Nietzsche’s German biographers swim in information and documents about his life, to the extent that even some of his class notebooks have come into the public light for centuries to come.

If, to his mother’s chagrin, Nietzsche had abandoned his theological studies after one semester and started studying classical philology with Professor Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl, the following year, in October 1865, following his teacher Ritschl, he went to the University of Leipzig. Nietzsche’s experiences in Leipzig are recounted in a colourful account, Retrospect of My Two Years in Leipzig. When he enrolled in the faculty of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, a century had already passed since Goethe had done so.

With his mentor Ritschl Nietzsche again showed himself industrious: a model student as he had been at Pforta. Ritschl gave his favourite pupil heavy assignments, such as extracting and collating ancient texts and indexing the issues of the Rheinisches Museum für Philologie. In 1866 Nietzsche gave his first lecture at the Philological Association and befriended the student Erwin Rohde, who was to become his best friend. This was the time of the war between Prussia and Austria, in which Prussia emerged victorious although Nietzsche, a Prussian in Leipzig, objected to the city becoming immediately Prussian. But the young scholar writes about that year: ‘I often longed to be torn away from my monotonous labours’.

On 9 October 1867, Nietzsche began his military service with a cavalry regiment. These were terrible times on the other side of the Atlantic, when the Mexican Indian Benito Juárez had Emperor Maximilian shot in Mexico. (In sharp contrast to today’s traitorous white Mexicans who admire Juárez, my great-great-grandfather José María Tort y Vivó, a Catalan living in Mexico mentioned by José Zorrilla in Recuerdo del Tiempo Viejo, was a staunch supporter of Maximilian of Habsburg.)

In March 1868 Nietzsche suffered a fall from a horse, but the period of convalescence served as an opportunity to approach philosophy and in October he finished his military service. Once again: terrible things were happening on the other side of the Atlantic. Blacks were granted the right to vote in the United States because of the triumphant Christian ethics of the Yankee Puritans (at a time when Jewry hadn’t yet taken over the media). But by then the twenty-three-year-old young man already bears the name of Nietzsche.

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Friedrich Nietzsche Pedagogy

Crusade

against the Cross, 3

When one delves deeply into Nietzsche’s biography, curious anecdotes come to light that would be hard to imagine for those who are only familiar with his late writings.

Much has been said, for example, about the friendship between Richard Wagner and Nietzsche. But few know that Wagner was born in 1813: the year Nietzsche’s father was born. When Nietzsche was a little boy playing with his sister Elisabeth with tin soldiers and the porcelain figure ‘Squirrel King’ was executing rebels, the revolutionary Wagner was in serious trouble with the king and his life was spared because he was a conductor. The still-small Nietzsche was on the side of the rulers in his Christian kingdom. There were to be no revolutions.

When Nietzsche would later write about his life, he didn’t remember his home in Röcken except for the image of the parish priest, the father, whom he continued to idealise even after he had finished The Antichrist. Indeed, since his father had died when Nietzsche was four years old, the memories of Prussian discipline the priest had meted out to him, in which the little boy would furiously retreat to the toilet to rage alone, were left out of his memory (his mother would later tell some anecdotes about her young son’s life). The idealisation of the parish priest was such that, in the words of Werner Ross, ‘Nietzsche was to merge with his father to form a single figure with him’.

In the family it was taken for granted that little Fritz would become a clergyman like his father. His mother, who put him to bed, told him: ‘If you go on like this, I’ll have to carry you to bed in my arms until you study theology’. Fritz was an obedient child who knew several Bible passages and religious songs by heart so that his schoolmates called him ‘the little shepherd’, who was impressed above all by religious music.

But since the pietistic oppression was a thorn his body began to rebel. In 1856, when Fritz was already a dozen years old, he began to suffer from head and eye ailments. Although he received special holidays for this reason, from that age he would always suffer from these psychosomatic complaints (which would only be alleviated thirty-two years later, with the catharsis of writing several books in a few months, including The Antichrist).

The young Fritz would sneak into the cathedral to watch the rehearsals of the Requiem and was shocked to hear the Dies Irae. At the age of fourteen he entered the famous school in Pforta, where he received an excellent humanistic education and his love of music increased, although he continued to suffer from severe headaches.

Schulpforta near Naumburg in Germany, a boarding school system for advantaged pupils.

At Schulpforta he even attempted a Mass for solo, choir and orchestra, and at the age of sixteen, he sketched a Misere for five voices. At seventeen the parson’s son was ready to die to meet Jesus, and when another of his friends trained in Prussian education (broken in like a horse I’d better say!) received the conformation, he wrote: ‘with the earnest promise you enter the line of adult Christians who are held worthy of our Saviour’s most precious legacy’.

Nevertheless, the first signs of rebellion, albeit still unconsciously, began to spontaneously sprout in his seventeenth year. In the Easter holidays of 1862, the student Nietzsche wrote to the union of his friends, under the title Fate and History, a prophetic declaration: ‘But, as soon as it would be possible to overthrow the entire past of the world with a strong will, we would enter the roll of the independent Gods’.

Schulpforta’s severe discipline had been a kind of convent to train not only Nietzsche but also the rest of the inmates, but the adolescent Nietzsche, always at the head of the class and lacking an esprit de corps, was such a good boy that in cases of insubordination he sided with the teachers.

In his thick volume (866 pages in the edition I have) Ross comments that the letters of the pupil Nietzsche are empty of content, in the sense that his inner life was still hermetically sealed off from him. Nevertheless, when the lad Nietzsche left Schulpforta on 7 September 1864, close to his twentieth birthday, and the following month went to study theology and classical philology at the University of Bonn, thanks to his Prussian education he already had the resources for a premature doctorate.

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Friedrich Nietzsche Pedagogy

Crusade

against the Cross, 2

 

Lutheran father (1813-1849).

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in the small town of Röcken, near Lützen in Thuringia. Formerly part of the kingdom of Saxony, it was annexed to Prussia in 1815. Nietzsche was the first-born son of the local Protestant pastor, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche (pictured above), who at the age of thirty had married a woman of seventeen. A year after the wedding, Friedrich was born, followed a couple of years later by his sister Elisabeth (Nietzsche’s younger brother was born afterwards, but died at the age of two). What is important to report is that, among the ancestors of the future philosopher, on both the paternal and maternal sides, there were several generations of theologians.

The main biographies on which I will rely for this biographical series are the very voluminous treatises by Curt Paul Janz and Werner Ross. The latter, who unlike Janz writes with humour, mentions that exactly at the moment when Nietzsche was born the bells were ringing for the king’s birthday service. The parson’s eyes filled with tears as he uttered: ‘My son, on this earth you shall be called Friedrich Wilhelm in memory of my royal benefactor, for you were born on his birthday’. He added that his son would be so-called because that is what Luther’s Bible said. Friedrich Wilhelm IV, by the way, was no friend of the ideals of the French Revolution. Although benevolent, through the Holy Alliance he longed for a return to feudal times even with knights, orders and castles.

Little Friedrich Wilhelm was instilled from the outset with the messianic consciousness of being a son of the medieval king and a son of God. To use my language, I would say that Nietzsche was a slave to parental introjects. So much so that, decades later, when he suddenly fell into a state of psychosis and his friend Overbeck came to his rescue in Turin, he realised that only by telling the disturbed man that royal receptions awaited him, did Nietzsche obey to leave Italy. And when somewhat later Langbehn accompanied Nietzsche on his walks in the asylum at Jena in Germany, he said: ‘He is a child and a king; he must be treated as the son of a king that he is. That is the only correct method’.

But in this psychological study I’m getting too far ahead of myself. Let’s go back to his childhood. The thing is that, like Kant, Nietzsche was brought up in pietism. But Kant’s defence mechanism was to shut down all his emotions and he tried to do philosophy as a sort of Mr Spock through pure reason, like a soulless computer. Nietzsche’s defence mechanism against severe pietism would be the diametrical opposite: the mythopoetic explosion of emotions, as we shall see in this series. What we must now tell is that the little Nietzsche was not allowed, in such a Prussian upbringing, to vent his emotions, let alone his anger. Janz’s multi-volume biography informs us of this:

As soon as the eldest son began to talk a little, the father took to spending some of his free time with him. The child did not disturb him in his study cabinet, where, as the mother writes, gazed ‘Silently and thoughtfully’ at the father while he worked. But it was when the father ‘fantasised’ at the piano that the child was most enthusiastic. Already at the age of one year, little Fritz, as everyone called him, would sit in his pram on such occasions and pay attention to his father, completely silent and without taking his eyes off him. However, it cannot be said that during these early years, he was always a good and obedient child. When something did not seem right to him, he would lie on the ground and kick his little legs furiously. The father, it seems, proceeded against this with great energy, despite which the child must have continued for a long time to cling to his stubbornness whenever he was denied anything he wanted; but he no longer rebelled, but, without a word, retired to some quiet corner or to the lavatory, where he bore his anger alone.

Unlike what Alice Miller wrote about little Fritz in The Untouched Key, Janz didn’t suspect that the severe pietistic upbringing might have been abusive.

When Nietzsche was four years old his father died, perhaps of a stroke (it is not clear that the Nietzsche family’s claim that this was due to his falling down the stairs is true). The family moved to Naumburg and Fritz found himself, from then on, as the only male in a household of women: his mother, grandmother, two aunts and younger sister.

The adult women were to teach pious Christian virtues to little Fritz.