For Mother’s Day this year, two of our regular contributors are dedicating articles to an often-forgotten figure from the Nietzscheverse, without whom the philosopher would not have existed: his mother, Franziska Ernestine Rosaura Nietzsche, née Oehler. The pastor's daughter was born on February 2, 1826, and died on April 20, 1897, just a few years before her son, whose mental illness was by that stage so developed that he probably didn’t notice his mum’s death. Who was this woman? How did she shape and influence Friedrich Nietzsche?

In this first part of our small series, Henry Holland reports on her life and origins, while, in part two, Natalie Schulte will delve deeper into her relationship with her son, and the question of how it coloured his writing and thinking about women.

What were the decisive factors that shaped Franziska Nietzsche's life? How could she, a woman in a world thoroughly defined by patriarchal structures, who never pursued paid employment, achieve a certain degree of self-determination? How did she cope with the traumatic early death of her husband? How religious was she? An often-neglected autobiographical fragment, written shortly before her death, sheds new light on her life.

Nietzsche certainly did not have any children and is also not particularly friendly about the subject of fatherhood in his work. For him, the free spirit is a childless man; raising children is the task of women. At the same time, he repeatedly uses the child as a metaphor for the liberated spirit, as an anticipation of the Übermensch. Is he perhaps able to inspire today's fathers after all? And can you be a father and a Nietzschean at the same time? Henry Holland and Paul Stephan, both fathers, discussed this question.

We also published the complete, unabridged discussion on the Halcyonic Association for Radical Philosophy YouTube channel (Part 1, part 2).

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After discussing Jonas Čeika's book How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle and bis YouTube channel (CCK Philosophy) (link), Henry Holland interviewed the American about the blockages of academic philosophy, Nietzsche's relevance as a thinker on the “guideline of the body,” and about tensions between his claim as an anti-philosopher and his social position.