“Look at me so sweet in the forest

I'm going to be so sorry, forget it soon.

Does a rose blossom fragrant in shark grass,

I'll kiss the rose and cry a little.

Funny how wind blows, a dream sweeps through the heart

Does a lime blossom fall from a tree. ”¹

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With the beginning of Romanticism, the forest in German-speaking countries became a place of longing, where you can escape from hectic and rationalistic modern life. For Nietzsche too, the forest becomes a relaxing retreat, but also a source of inspiration and a veritable “magic forest”, where people transform into trees and encounter ghosts becomes possible.

The modern person, who evades mass urban society and chooses voluntary isolation in the forest, opens up his channels of perception for nature and his own inner life. In doing so, he also opens a door to archaic pre-Christian ideas, according to which all living nature is also animated and is penetrated by good and evil spirits. Not only in Grimm's fairy tales, but in many subsequent creations of high and popular culture, the forest appears as a place of transformation and enchantment of modern man. Dark, fearful topoi play a major role in this: witches, wizards and creepy hermits, forest spirits and wolves. Nietzsche also regularly sought solitude during forest hikes and flirted with a life as a forest remit.

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Nietzsche's Wanderlust

Even today, a hiking trail near Cham in the Bavarian Forest reminds of Nietzsche's forest and wanderlust. In August 1867, he visited this area together with his student friend Erwin Rohde, after he had completed his philosophy studies. “As soon as I was loose and single, I flew to the Bohemian Forest with friend Rohde to bathe the tired soul in nature, mountains and forests,” he wrote to his friend Carl von Gersdorff.² He explained to mother and sister: “I really want forest and mountain after such needs have been artificially built up as a result of a 2-year stay in Leipzig and have thus become very strong. ”³ This hike awakened Nietzsche's love for the forest.⁴ Experiences of nature cheered him up and created feelings of grandeur: “Mighty black firs against mountains and spring greenery standing out — sun on long treeless strips in the forest in the evening — you expect the most cheerful dance”⁵, he wrote down in 1878 and added: “In spring, grassy path in the forest — undergrowth and bushes, then taller trees — feeling of blissful freedom. ”⁶ Forest life enchanted Nietzsche in such a way that even passers-by noticed it: ”Once, in the forest, a gentleman who passed by me got very excited: I felt at that moment that I must have the expression of bright happiness in my face and that I had already been walking around with him for 2 hours. ”⁷ In addition, Nietzsche sometimes stylized himself as a hermit or flirted with this role when he shares his master plan with Heinrich Köselitz, for example: “Move away from the world into the forest! Dot. ”⁸ In a later letter to Köselitz, Nietzsche took up this idea again: “I'm leaving for the next few days, via Munich to Naumburg, to hide in a forest. ”⁹ But a nice neighborhood would be a prerequisite for hermit existence, Nietzsche confided to his sister: “A deep forest would be the best thing, but there would have to be cheerful people who I don't need to be wary of.”¹⁰ — because Nietzsche also knows: “[T] he forest solitude is uncanny.”¹¹

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Delivered to the Forest Spirits

The fear of the forest with its darkness and demons, the discomfort in “haunted” places has always been part of the Central German mentality. Nietzsche was certainly influenced by this; he will also have known Grimm's fairy tales, in which the forest plays a prominent role. Places that must seem scary to forest goers included deserts. Many Central German villages were abandoned in times of plague and medieval climate change. They were desolate. There are numerous legends about this sunken villages. They sometimes saw nighttime lights there and avoided these places whenever possible. Stories about hermits were also a source of discomfort, wild women and represent witches. Irritating, supernatural perceptions, which hikers sometimes reported, were attributed in folk stories to the work of forest spirits who accompany the hiker for a while and which you should never irritate if you did not want to lose orientation.¹² Also animated by ghosts Irrwurzeln and Irrgräsern According to the vernacular: Soil plants with a distinctive red color, growing near graves. Whoever steps on it wanders around in circles without ever finding their way out of the forest again.¹³ Even at the time of the Germanic ancestors, the landscape of Central Europe, with everything in it, was considered to be inhabited by good and bad spirits: whether rock, animal or plant. These traditions continued in folk stories, in the world of legends and fairy tales, and sometimes also subcutaneously in the Christian faith. Nietzsche views this critically, but at the same time as the basis for a sublime experience of nature:

Man has even applied this interpretation of all movements and lines to intentions to the nature of inanimate things — in the delusion that there is nothing inanimate: I believe that everything we call a sense of nature when looking at sky, ground, forest, thunderstorm, stars, sea, landscape, spring, has its origin here — without the ancient practice of fear that everything has a second underlying meaning Looking back, we would now have no joy in nature, just as we would not enjoy humans and animals, without that teacher of Understanding, fear.¹⁴

Referring to Schopenhauer's philosophy of nature, he attested to Richard Wagner that he wanted to make animated nature speak with his music:

He also dives into dawn, forest, fog, chasm, mountain height, night showers, moonlight and reminds them of a secret desire: they also want to sound. When the philosopher says that it is a will that thirsts for existence in animate and inanimate nature, the musician adds: and this will wants, at all levels, a resounding existence.¹⁵

The centuries-old fear of forest demons may have been reinforced by poisonous and psychotropic plants and mushrooms that people consumed unintentionally or ritually in previous centuries. Black belladonna, for example, owed hallucinations, the urge to speak, severe excitement, but in higher doses also coma and cardiac arrest. Folk names such as Vertigo cherry, devil cherry, walkerberry, wild berry, furberry, wolfberry or Tollkraut indicated that unpredictable demons were seen at work here. Fortunately, there were also protective forest plants, such as St. John's wort, blackthorn and elderberry. Black elderberry For example, was used as a protective plant against black magic, fire and lightning strikes, as Lebensbaum and regarded as the abode of well-intentioned house spirits. The person who cut down and cut back an elderberry bush provoked misfortune and death. The name of the shrub is said to be derived from Ms. Holla or Holda, a Germanic goddess of home and fertility, a deity friendly to humans, who was able to heal animals and humans. The Brothers Grimm also have in their fairy tale Ms. Holle This mythological figure uses — in general, the Grimms' fairy tales were preceded by numerous stories of witches, vampires and werewolves from regional legends — as can be seen when looking at the historical traditions of the authorities and courts. The Germans' penchant for the supernatural also occupied the Allied occupiers in their reeducation programs. At that time, intelligence officer Terence J. Leonard analyzed German schoolbooks from 1925 to 1945 on behalf of the Textbook Section of the British military government. He found that apart from militarism and hero worship, there is a “cult of morbid and occult” prevailing in these books and he asked himself: “[W] he can children from an early age in the spirit of a deceptive pagan mysticism Smus (ghosts in trees!) Have you ever been raised to completely get rid of these ideas? “German philology is steeped in an “atmosphere of black magic, a mishmash of good and evil.” The Allied re-educator rejected the objection that fairy tales always ended in a good way, because the question was how the turn for the better is achieved in German fairy tales. People could never achieve anything on their own, but only “with the help of a malformed dwarf, an ugly woman, talking animals, or spirits speaking from trees. ”¹⁶

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Become a Tree!

Even in ancient times, forest gods and spirits had taken possession of plants. Nietzsche refers to this several times. In his “Dionysian worldview,” he mentions “the wisdom of the forest god Silen” and the Forest Demon Pan, who has “the gift of prophecy.” Together with Satyrs They both belonged to Dionysus' entourage.¹⁷ Like the Greeks had their demons, the Romans had theirs Genien, guardian spirits who guided man, protected and possibly saved him remain invisible, as Nietzsche in the strange sentence — “The geniuses in the forest wait until the wanderer is over.”¹⁸ — expressed. Nietzsche repeatedly brings the forest into play as a place of gaining knowledge — symbolically, but also in a very concrete way. He writes at one point: “We are the knights who understand birds' voices in the forest, we follow them. ”¹⁹ In another place, he reports about “swarms of muses in the fog of the mountains,” about forest and mountain spirits who throw good and bright things at the hiker “out of their tops and hides of leaves,” “the gifts of all those free spirits who are at home in mountains, forests and solitude and who, like him, are wanderers and philosophers in their soon cheerful and thoughtful manner. ”²⁰ The forest spirits appear to Nietzsche here as friendly relatives and companions.

It is hardly surprising that Nietzsche's fictional character too Zarathustra shares its creator's love of the forest. Zarathustra repeatedly roams the forests and meets miraculous figures there. Right at the beginning of the book, chased by wolves, he drags the body of an injured acrobat through the dark forest for hours, seeks help from a hermit in vain and conceals the carcass in a hollow tree to protect it from animal damage. He later meets two richly decorated kings and the creepy “ugliest person” in the forest. At the same time, the forest serves as a metaphor for Nietzsche in his Zarathustra story. This is how a hunter is described in this book who returned “from the forest of knowledge” unsuccessfully and in a dark mood²¹, elsewhere Zarathustra praises the sublime peace of the forest: “Forest and rock are worthy of being silent with you”²², and asks people to transform themselves into the tree: “Like the tree you love again, the broad-leaning one: it hangs over the sea quietly and listening” (ibid.). In Nietzsche, tree and man sometimes appear as dual beings because he finds a decisive thing in common between them:

It is with people as with trees. The more he wants to go up and up into light, the more his roots strive earthwards, downwards, into darkness, into depth — into evil.²³

The transformation of people into trees, or the image of the human-inspired tree, can be found several times in Nietzsche's writings, especially in the words Zarathustra, who muses about a tree on the mountainside. One cannot help but recognize Nietzsche's self-stylization here:

This tree stands alone here in the mountains; it grew high above humans and animals. And if he wanted to talk, he wouldn't have anyone to understand him: that's how tall he grew. Now he waits and waits—what is he waiting for? He lives too close to the seats of the clouds: he's probably waiting for the first flash?²⁴

Zarathustra then also performs the transformation into a tree, into an object of an animated nature. This is how Zarathustra declared when he entered a forest clearing with his disciples:

I may be a forest and a night of dark trees: but anyone who is not afraid of my darkness will also find roses under my cypresses.²⁵

Literature and forest landscape produce each other. Writers, philosophers and poets are inspired by the dense plant world and subsequent travelers and inhabitants perceive the forest filtered and pointed through stories and through reading. In doing so, the boundaries between literary fiction, expectations and real experience are blurred. This also affected the walker Nietzsche, who perceived the forest as a place of miraculous transformation, but also as an eerie intermediate world with which the hiker, now turning into a tree himself, into a forest, can merge.

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The article image was painted by Australian artist Mitchell Nolte (link), whom we commissioned to illustrate our entire forest series.

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Literature

Story from Bohemia. Folklore Archives. Central Archive of the German Folk Narrative Marburg, No. 140604.

Legend from Styria in the forest near St. Margareten. Folklore Archives. Central Archive of the German Folk Narrative Marburg, No. 188320 & 188737.

Leonard, Terence J.: First Steps in Cruelty. In: British Zone Review. vol I, No. 34, 4/1947, pp. 10-13. Translation and reprint in: Hessian newspapers for folk and cultural research, Vol. 18: Two hundredth of the Grimms, Marburg 1985, p. 111ff.

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Footnotes

1: Letter to Raimund Granier dated 28/07/1862.

2: Letter to Carl von Gersdorff dated 24/11/1/12/1867.

3: Letter to Franziska and Elisabeth Nietzsche dated 6/8/1867.

4: Cf. https://www.bayerischer-wald.de/attraktion/friedrich-nietzsche-wanderweg-9d4b9f08fc.

5: Subsequent fragments 1878 27 [36].

6: Subsequent fragments 1878 30 [116].

7: Letter to Heinrich Köselitz of 20/8/1880.

8: Letter to Heinrich Köselitz v. 21/4/1883.

9: Letter to Heinrich Köselitz v. 7/5/1886.

10: Letter to Elisabeth Nietzsche v. 7/5/1885.

11: Letter to Heinrich Köselitz of 18/7/1880.

12: See e.g. Story from Bohemia.

13: See e.g. Legend from Styria in the forest near St. Margareten.

14: Morgenröthe, Aph 142.

15: Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, paragraph 9.

16: Terence J. Leonard, First Steps in Cruelty (Translation, p. 113). The text was apparently aimed primarily at members of the British occupying power in order to explain the mentality of the Germans to them.

17: The Dionysian worldview, paragraph 2.

18: Subsequent fragments 1882 17 [10].

19:Subsequent fragments 1870 5 [44].

20: Human all too human I, aph. 638.

21: So Zarathustra spoke, From the exalted.

22: So Zarathustra spoke, From the flies of the market.

23: So Zarathustra spoke, From a tree on a mountain.

24: Ibid.

25: So Zarathustra spoke, The dance song.