Introduction: ‘I am no human: I’m dynamite’.¹

But who was this extraordinary figure, who sticks out from the pages of intellectual history like a badly-aching thumb? What’s with the self-description as dynamite,and how did he come to be genuinely perceived as such? What did he teach and in which contexts did his ideas arise? How did their impacts gather momentum, and what can we learn from them and him today?

The nonprofit and Switzerland-based Buser World Music Forum has made it its statutory task to bring the works of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche to even wider general publics. This digital magazine forms the core of the strategy to achieve this goal, complemented by further event-type projects of a cultural, artistic, and scholarly nature. The introduction that follows seeks to provide a rough overview of Nietzsche’s life, work, impact, and relevance today, and thus a first orientation for further in-depth study.

Contents

I. Nietzsche’s Fundamental Ideas

I.1 Fragmentariness as a Writing Principle

I.2 Creation Versus Nihilism

I.3 Slave Morality Versus Master Morality

I.4 The Art of Living and of Individual Liberation

II. Nietzsche’s Life up to His First Major Publication, 1844-1872

III. Nietzsche’s Productive Period

III. 1 From Wagnerian to Free Spirit

III.2 Bright Years: 1876-1882

III.3 The Mature Work

III.4 Breaking Bad

IV. Nietzsche’s Final Years

V. Nietzsche’s Legacy

VI. Conclusion: What Nietzsche Bequeaths Us

Sources and Selected bibliography

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I. Nietzsche’s Fundamental Ideas

I.1 Fragmentariness as a Writing Principle

Fragmentariness and fragmentation characterize most of Nietzsche’s texts. He never wrote anything resembling a conventional philosophical system, but is regarded, instead, as a master of aphorism. Many of his writings contradict each other, blatantly and even irritatingly, and several of his key texts are paradoxical in themselves, defying straightforward interpretation. This makes it difficult to even identify Nietzsche’s fundamental ideas.

This form is programmatic. As Nietzsche himself puts it: ‘The will to [create a] system is alack of moral rectitude.’² He views truth with caution, as ‘a mobile army of metaphors’,³ and it is essentially this that constitutes his philosophical radicalism. He criticizes vehemently the notion that absolute truth exists, which philosophy could reflect. Instead, all that exists are particular, relative, and fleeting ‘perspectives’ on the world, which enable us to grasp it better if we’re able to use the different ‘spectacles’ available to us to view it— but which will never allow us to comprehend it fully.⁴

I.2 Creation Versus Nihilism

Nietzsche presents this idea as a symptom of his age, and not primarily as his own opinion. It refers to his famous dictum that ‘God is dead’.⁵ While earlier centuries, and especially the Christian Middle Ages, had taken God as a general reference point for all thought, feeling, and action, this fixed star has been extinguished as modernity has dawned. Often invoking this loss of orientation through his epithet ‘nihilism’, Nietzsche concludes that this loss threatens to devalue all values, and to generate a dystopia of hedonistic complacency, for which Nietzsche evokes the image of the ‘last human’.⁶

Nietzsche’s raises the big question of whether we’ve really come to the end of the line? Or is there still an alternative to modern nihilism, and all its manifestations as exhaustion, scepticism, despair, and despondency? His counter-concept materializes most clearly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which reads like a ‘Bible for modernity’. It offers up both a satirical and ironic destruction of the old faith and an unironic proclamation of a new start, a utopia of a new cultural beginning, which Nietzsche attempts to summon up with parables including those of ‘the superhuman’ (der Übermensch), the ‘eternal return of the same’ (die Ewige Wiederkunft des Gleichen), the playing child, and the ‘will to power.’ The interpretation of these ‘teachings’ and their exact relationship to each other is probably the most challenging quandary that Nietzsche bequeathed us. Emotionally, Zarathustra is probably his most stirring book. It appeals to the reader as an individual, and seems to offer direct, and almost self-help-book type help in dealing with traumatic experiences. Translating its lyrically-communicated content into conceptual language is, however, tricky. Following Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), Nietzsche’s most important philosophical teacher, ‘the eternal return’ seems to describe a world without objective values or progress, in which the same fundamental conflicts play out ad infinitum, without the possibility of redemption. Yet unlike Schopenhauer, Nietzsche does not conclude from this view that ascetic, world-denying attitudes are desirable. Indeed, he sees such naysaying to the world as merely an alternative expression of the ‘will to power’ that underlies all worldly events. Instead, Nietzsche counsels us to affirm the world unconditionally, and draw from this affirmation the strength for new creation—a creation whose content Nietzsche entrusts to the reader to spell out for themselves.

This leads us to the heart of two conflicting yet fundamental aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy: the ‘negative’ aspect appears at times to be utterly ‘nihilistic’, a radical criticism and rejection of virtually all metaphysics to date. Yet this negativity rubs shoulders with Nietzsche’s great ‘affirming’ attempt to overcome nihilist through an almost intoxicating doctrine, which fosters creativity regardless of religious, scientific, aesthetic, and moral conventions. If metaphysics’ so-called ‘eternal truths’ turn out actually to be mortal ‘idols’,then thinking this through to its logical conclusions need not lead to regret,or world-weariness, but can prompt boundless human energy. Acknowledging this means acknowledging that our own creations also have no claims to ‘eternity’, but should instead be pursued fully conscious that they themselves are no more than‘idols’. Nietzsche discerns just such an ironic worldview in the origins of the Greek antiquity he admires, and he plots and moves to revive such an attitude of heroic realism in modernity.

I.3 Slave Morality vs. Master Morality

Nietzsche’s deployment of new concepts and metaphors to express this fundamental doctrine is incessant. His early work brings the creative interplay of the ‘Dionysian’ and ‘Apollonian’ into fruitful tension with ‘Socratic’ rationalism and the creativity of the ‘intuitive human being’—the latter being contrasted, in turn, with the rigid worldview of the scientist. The ‘free spirit’ hovers above all as the guiding principle of his middle period, a nonconformist, individualistic existence unbound by existing prejudices, which he sets out to debunk and devalue by pointing out their psychological and historical origins. He reveals how, on closer inspection, ‘high’ altruistic ideals often originate in extremely ‘low’, instinctual, and physical motivations. He confronts Christianity and modernity’s ascetic ideals with the life and body-affirming ideals of antiquity, and finds the former to be painfully wanting. These reflections culminate in On the Genealogy of Morality, in which he compares pagan ‘master morality’ with key Christian/modern ideas concerning guilt, equality, and charity. These arose from a fundamentally negative worldview, labelled ‘resentment’ by Nietzsche. The morals that comprise ‘slave morality’ express the ‘people of the herd’s’ hatred and envy towards the strong ‘great individuals’, but cannot manifest genuine creation. The most developed level of ‘slave morality’ is modern science with its unconditional pursuit of objective knowledge—in it, Christian asceticism escalates to the point of its own self-abolition: science demystifies the world, devalues all values, and must ultimately also question its own ideal of knowledge. But Nietzsche then turns this on its head, grasping the disturbing vacuum of nihilism this gives rise to as a chance to herald a new era.

Particularly this aspect of his work made Nietzsche such an inspiration for sociology and psychology—and especially for psychoanalysis. Nietzsche and early analysts shared the conviction that our civilization’s foundational wound is the repression of our physical and especially our sexual needs—concurrently the main cause of individual and cultural pathologies. Often compared to Karl Marx’s economic philosophy of history and seen as its indispensable counterpart, Nietzsche’s psycho-cultural insights can also be read as a rich complement to Marx. Could modern fascism—and we note Nietzsche’s early insight that the effects of ‘Ressentiment’ can be observed most clearly in ‘anarchists and anti-Semites’⁸—better be understood as a modern ‘slave revolt’ than as an expression of economic interests and tendencies? Of course, in their own self-image, the fascists were precisely those ‘barbarians of the 20th century^’9 whose advent Nietzsche prophesied and hoped for; and in a perfect, Nietzschean, ironic move, anarchists were among his most avid readers.

I.4 The Art of Living and of Individual Liberation

Despite recurring group appropriations, Nietzsche’s philosophy is usually understood as radically individualistic. In this vein, the ‘free spirit’ functions as a template for a new form of life, detached from modern mass society. Gradually liberating itself from its prejudices, it seeks to enter a genuine relationship with its instinctual and inner nature. Sovereignty is the goal, subjugating so that reshaping one’s life aesthetically is possible, in harmony with one’s own ideals, and aimed at turning one’s life into a work of art. Emancipated from all rigid ties, the free spirit ought, on this view, to put its striving for self-realization above everything else, with ethical considerations pushed to the side-lines. Reiterating that such a path is accompanied by a deep existential loneliness, Nietzsche advocates it nonetheless—and an ethic of embracing hardship and ‘severity’ to be able to cope with this isolation. This apparent asceticism is not, however, motivated by a hedonistic self-indulgence, but rather by the will to live the kind of creative existence that Nietzsche often compares to a ‘warrior’s’ life. All this aims at realizing the ‘superhuman’, propagated as a cultural model, even though this metaphor for the future remains underdefined in terms of content. Building on this vision, Nietzsche promotes a striving for permanent and individualized ‘self-overcoming’, intended to drive cultural advancement, while knowing that this utopia is a subjective construct, not an absolute point of reference like God is in Christianity, or ‘Communism’ is in Marxism. This self-development dimension of Nietzsche’s thinking has been particularly well received.

While more morally oriented thinkers, including Schopenhauer and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, continued to demonstrate behaviour quite at odds with their philosophical teachings, it’s harder to accuse Nietzsche of such self-contradiction: his conduct in worldly dealings according was grounded unwaveringly in this ethic of heroic individualism. Whether this speaks in favour of his biography, or places it in rather a bad light, is something everyone must decide for themselves. Nietzsche himself did not consider it an implacable doctrine for everyone, but turned the tables and the stakes instead, criticizing Christianity and modern morality precisely for daring to trumpet an ethic that is supposedly valid for all. Nietzsche’s ethics, by contrast, are pitched explicitly at those he regards as the strong and the chosen, those that can cope with the isolation from the ‘herd’ that comes with embracing such values. This is a vision of an aristocracy of the spirit, which is tasked with drafting a new ranking of values based on what ‘life’ really requires, and in opposition to modernity’s life-hostile ‘idols’, including the idea that all humans are equal. At this point, the motif of self-abolition again makes an appearance in Nietzsche’s work. He claims that the masses, weakened and disorientated by ‘slave morality’, are literally longing for new cultural leadership from individuals who had been through modernity’s nihilism, and had been strengthened and steeled by that passage.This, too, could be read as a contribution to the theory of fascism, in more than one sense, yet Nietzsche intends these statements as a kind of apologetics. He enthuses about new forms of slavery and about the ancient Indian caste system, which excludes from society the ‘weak, ill, malformed [Missrathnen], those who suffer from being themselves’¹⁰ simply because they are ‘Chandala’—a word originating in India as a pejorative for ‘unclean’ castes— rather than keeping them alive artificially by providing for them. He yearns for new leaders in the Napoleonic mode, who will stop ‘democratic effeminacy’ in its tracks, and will forge a track to a new era of ‘masculine’ values that should prevail once more. Knowing this, it can hardly shock that Nietzsche condemned feminism outright, calling it one of the ‘worst advances in Europe’s general uglification’.¹¹ This didn’t hold back feminists and other emancipated women, including for example the influential Austrian campaigner Rosa Mayreder (1858-1938) or her German counterpart Helene Stöcker (1869-1943), from pouring over his writings, and interpreting them as ruthless analyses of patriarchy, and as critiques of mainstream liberal feminism. It continues to infuriate that Nietzsche, who advocated a no-holds-barred criticism of all prejudices, was evidently not free-thinking enough to question his own, even though he was friends with numerous ‘new women’.

Nietzsche’s doctrine of the eternal return implies, nonetheless, that resentment will eventually resurface, and that the ‘slaves’ shall ‘revolt’ once more. According to his grand vision, periods of cultural flourishing can only ever be short-lived. However, we should interrogate and even refute his repeated insistence that ‘cultural flourishing’ cannot succeed in an egalitarian social climate, and that culture needs oppression to develop.

Evidently Nietzsche, with his message of a ‘secret doctrine’ for a new and self-constituting aristocracy, a message transmitted very publicly, and formulated to have mass appeal, plays to reader’s vanities. This psychologically astute strategy is a key for understanding the huge pulls his writings have exerted on so many: Who wouldn’t want to belong to that small elite to whom Nietzsche speaks so beguilingly?

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II. Nietzsche’s Life up to His First Major Publication, 1844-1872

A crucial force driving the relativizing side of Nietzsche’s thinking is his profound interest in psychology and history. He dismisses the great philosophical systems as little more than ‘their authors’ self-confession[s]’,¹² masks shielding a ‘will to power’ contained within them. Small wonder then that Nietzsche, more than any other philosopher, has become the object of biographical research and even dissection.¹³

Born on October 15, 1844 in the provincial village of Röcken, at that time part of Prussia, near Leipzig, Friedrich Nietzsche’s early years were rural. His father was the village pastor Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, who died in 1849. Partly to compensate for the loss of income resulting from her husband’s early death, his widow Franziska (1826–1897) then moved with her only son, and daughter Elisabeth (1846–1935), to the nearby town of Naumburg. Nietzsche attended the local cathedral school from 1854, where he proved himself from an early age as a gifted student. The opportunity arising, he transferred in 1858 to the prestigious and highly traditional Pforta Boarding School, which was only a few miles from Nietzsche’s family home. The school had been founded in 1543 and aimed at training an elite cadre for positions in the state, as university scientists and scholars, and above all for the church. He was a precocious student who learnt French, Latin, Ancient Greek, and Hebrew at Pforta, read extensively, and began to write his first poems and prose texts and to compose music. Even in these young years, he was passionate about the music of Richard Wagner (1813–1883).

Emerging from such a select schooling, Nietzsche moved to Bonn in 1864 to study classical philology and Protestant theology. A year later, he followed his mentor Friedrich Ritschl (1806–1876) to Leipzig, where he devoted his studies entirely to philology. His specialized on the language, and self-evidently also the ideas, of the ancient Greeks. This was also the phase in which he first encountered Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which he wrestled with throughout his life. Acknowledging the validity and relevance of Schopenhauer’s premises, or at least to a degree—the world as ‘will’ and ‘representation’, the broadside against Enlightenment notions of progress and truth—, he historicized them, nonetheless, as he himself developed intellectually. He rearticulated Schopenhauer’s ideas, and came to ethical conclusions starkly distinct to those of his predecessor.

Due to his exceptional intellectual talents, Nietzsche was appointed associate professor at the University of Basel in 1869, aged only twenty-five, and without having obtained a regular doctorate. It was Ritschl who instigated the professorial call. Although the young professor carried out his new duties zealously, his heart had long been set on something utterly different from what he already often experienced as very dry philology. The discipline was committed to a strict positivism, as championed by Ritschl, his principal scholarly influence to date, and this commitment felt like a straitjacket. After having met the so highly-admired Wagner in person in Leipzig in 1868, Nietzsche was solicitous in his efforts to gain and maintain close contact with Richard and his wife Cosima (1837–1930), who lived not far from Basel, in Tribschen near Lucerne.

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III. Nietzsche’s Productive Period

III.1 From Wagnerian to Free Spirit

Nietzsche’s first significant publication, The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music(1872), sought a synthesis of what were then his three great causes: Wagner’s music, Schopenhauer’s philosophy, and Greek antiquity, especially its pre-Socratic manifestation. Nietzsche’s bold vision concerned the exceptional fusion of two fundamental drives of artistic creation, the ‘Apollonian’ and ‘Dionysian’, that could be observed in Greek tragedies. He saw this marriage of order and chaos, light and intoxication, transgression and moderation as constitutive of the Greeks’ entire culture. It was, however, the Socratic Enlightenment, unfolding during and after the philosopher’s lifetime (c. 470 – 399 BCE), which through over this harmony with its one-sided leaning towards order and light—and to this day Western culture has not found its feet again after this fateful wrong turning. It was only in experiencing Wagner’s compositions that Nietzsche felt and thought this specific form of unity of being could be had again. If we could but lock ourselves into this Wagnerian vibe, Nietzsche counselled, the enchanted curse of Enlightenment could be broken, and Europe’s whole culture reborn. — We can well imagine how this book’s publication brought Nietzsche’s career as a philologist to a rapid end, its ideas too large by half for that discipline’s conventional and confining strictures.

What Nietzsche is not calling for here is a wilful and unrestrained unleashing of intoxication. Light, order, and moderation should also have their place. But it is clear that, in contrast to what he considers to be the degeneration of the Apollonian into the Socratic, Nietzsche champions the Dionysian as a striking alternative, and repeatedly refers to himself, even in his last writings, as a ‘disciple of the philosopher Dionysus’.¹⁴ In this first major work, Nietzsche manages to lay down a philosophical program that takes readers far beyond mere advertising for Wagner and Schopenhauer, and formulates a direction utterly independent of these thinkers. This is a program for a Dionysian-spirited cultural revolution in the name of active pessimism, aimed at grabbing the steering wheel in the seemingly relentless drive towards progress, and steering ‘progress’ away from its one-sided hostility towards life itself. Nietzsche’s reflections on ancient Greece and opera thus have an unmistakable political meaning. He hopes that the founding of the German Empire [Deutsches Reich] in 1871 under Prussia’s leadership, with Kaiser Wilhelm I as its figurehead, the empire will lead to the emergence of a state modelled on ancient Greece, that will clamp down on the emancipatory movements of his time that invoke the ideals of the Enlightenment—Social-Democracy the foremost among them—and offer up heroic culture to the dissatisfied masses as an alternative. On this understanding, the aesthetic spectacles foreseen are intended to suspend temporarily awareness of social inequality, and cleanse people of their discontent, without impacting the real social hierarchy.

In the four years that followed, 1873-1876, Nietzsche went on to author and pu­blish his four Unfashionable Observations [Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen],¹⁵ slim volumes, like all his books. Already here, his tone and authorial-lyrical ‘voice’ begin to sound markedly different. In Schopenhauer as Educator (1874), the third of the four, the issue is not really Schopenhauer at all, but rather an action plan for heroic individualism, for which Nietzsche draws large scoops from the writings of the American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882). Most significant, however, is the second, On the Utility and Liability of History for Life (1874). There, and in the posthumously published short treatise On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873), Nietzsche articulated for the first time his radical critique of metaphysics, attacking thereby the traditional concept of truth, and laying down, in clear, bold strokes, the program of his perspectivism. This sign posted, for all who had a mind to comprehend, an unmistakable break with Schopenhauer. The foundations for what would become Nietzsche’s real work had been laid.

III.2 Bright Years: 1876-1882

Attending the long-anticipated first Bayreuth Festival, the purpose-built showcase for Wagner’s works, in 1876, Nietzsche came away more outraged than enlivened. It had not been the longed for beginning of a new heroic culture, but a mere staged insinuation of the same, which disgusted him thoroughly. Resultingly, he stopped corresponding with and talking to Wagner, whose work, and especially whose opera Parsifal (1882), meant to be a Christian ‘festival production for consecrating stages’ [Bühnenweihfestspiel], he judged to be a symptom of modern decadence, and in no way a route out of this malaise. Inspired by the morally critical psychological reflections of his new friend Paul Rée (1849–1901), a moral philosopher he joined intellectual forces with around this time, he wrote Human, All Too Human (1878). This work marks the beginning of a whole new period in Nietzsche’s work. The essay form is now mostly left behind by a writer devoting himself, with exceptions, entirely to the form of the aphorism. But there is also a sizeable shift in what he writes about, already evident in the choice to publish the work during the centennial of Voltaire’s death, and to dedicate the new book to him. Nietzsche’s self-image is no longer that of an anti-Enlightenment thinker, but rather of an Enlightenment thinker in the tradition of the great Frenchman, whose faith in gradual progress through education, informed by a particular variety of scepticism, is juxtaposed critically with what Nietzsche sees as the foolhardy hopes for political revolution that Rousseau campaigned for.¹⁶ Seeing himself as a psychologist, he longs to mine the depths of the soul, and drop one of his metaphorical explosives among entrenched traditional prejudices.

This intellectual reorientation was accompanied by a personal one. Nietzsche had suffered from major health problems since his youth. He was plagued by frequent migraine attacks, sometimes lasting for days, as well as digestive and visual disorders. Precisely what was causing these symptoms and this illness is still the subject of speculation, some scholarly and some less so, today.¹⁷ Whatever was causing them, these problems reached such a pitch during this time that Nietzsche was forced to apply for an invalidity pension and retire from his Basel professorship in 1879.

This application granted, there was no reason his quality of life need deteriorate. Released from all professional obligations and with a solid income, he was now able to give himself up utterly to his writing, or at least as far as his constitution allowed him to do so. Now stateless, he led a peripatetic life, journeying between Germany, southern France, Switzerland—especially the mountains of the Upper Engadine—and Italy, a mode of existing fitting snugly to his new philosophy. Wishing to live himself as a ‘free spirit’ liberated from quotidian constraints, selfless devotees appeared as if from nowhere to help him realize this notion, including the young composer Heinrich Köselitz (1854–1918), alias Peter Gast, who offered his services to Nietzsche as a ‘voluntary private secretary’. Day Break (1881) and Gay Science (1882) are two further volumes of aphorisms in the style of Human, All Too Human, which link in, content-wise, to Nietzsche’s campaign for ‘free spiritedness,’ and contain some of Nietzsche’s most quoted and best-known texts.

But like all periods in his life when things seemed to be going right for him emotionally,this was not to last. One of Nietzsche’s enduring sorrows was the issue of his bachelorhood. Simplified depictions of him as a misogynistic eccentric fit in no way to the relations of his everyday life. As Carol Diethe’s monograph Nietzsche’s Women: Beyond the Whip reveals, Nietzsche had many female friends and admirers, and could surely have found a long-term partner among them, if that had been his actual intention. These women recurringly described him as well-mannered, charming even, and valued the mutually respectful conversations they had with him. Nietzsche dreamed of a true companion who he could communicate with intellectually —fully aware of the barriers his health problems presented to realizing this dream.

Yet when he met a young Russian aristocrat called Lou von Salomé (1861–1937) in Rome 1882,it felt like a turning point. Later known as Lou Andreas-Salomé following her marriage to Friedrich Carl Andreas a few years after meeting Nietzsche, von Salomé was gifted, artistically and in many other ways. The intense friendship and occasional sexual love between her and Rainer Maria Rilke bore significant poetic fruit. Later in life, and with Sigmund Freud’s express backing, she became one of the first generation of psychoanalysts. Her numerous literary works include a treatise on Nietzsche that is still worth reading today.¹⁶ The two got along very well and developed an intense intellectual exchange. Nietzsche believed he had found a kindred spirit in her. He quickly proposed, but his friend Paul Rée, of all possible people,turned out to be his more successful rival. The breakup between Lou and Friedrich was now inevitable, and when it came, Nietzsche’s means of dealing with it was another notable transformation in terms of content and style. We might see this as a return, albeit in a fundamentally altered form, to his earlier period of critiquing the Enlightenment, and his dream of a radical cultural revolution grounded in an attitude of heroic pessimism. He now realized, however, that he could only do justice to this worldview by shifting substantially his mode of literary-philosophical expression.

III.3 The Mature Work

There are strong reasons for seeing the three works written in the years following his traumatic break with Rée and Salomé, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887),as the zenith of Nietzsche’s creative output. Zarathustra is often avoided by his philosophical interpreters—but this avoidance shies away from the reality that his philosophical impact would only have been a fraction of what it became, if he had written only his early essays and late volumes of aphorisms. It is only in Zarathustra that the ground he breaks is truly terra nova, stylistically speaking, thus shaping a genuinely original, indeed a unique work: a bible of modernity, a modern myth.

Beyond Good and Evil should be read as the conceptual counterpart to Zarathustra. Formally an aphorism collection akin to his earlier ones, its content and style are nonetheless noticeably darker. Setting off, once again, along anti-Enlightenment paths, Nietzsche writes more enigmatically, but also more polemically. This new tendency culminates in Genealogy.

This book occupies a special position in Nietzsche’s overall output. No longer merely working with the building block of the aphorisms, the book is divided instead into three essays, each grappling with different aspects of Christian / Western morality, with these essays then subdivided into aphorism-like sections. In this respect, it is Nietzsche’s most systematic, perhaps even his major work, and the one in which foundational elements of his thinking can be best distinguished in a reasonably orderly form. Proceeding rapidly and with much concision, his peculiar picture of European is opposed diametrically to the Enlightenment narrative of progress. In Nietzsche’s narrative, a pre-Christian world of ‘master morality’ with its small minority of ‘masters’ lorded over a large majority of ‘slaves’, who the masters subjected brutally to their dominion. These masters freely indulged their capriciousness, and glorified themselves through a morality of self-affirmation, and of self-aggrandizing their own strength, beauty, and goodness. Aware of their actions’ finitude, the masters saw this as no reason to despair but rather as a spur to realize immortality, however relative, through outstanding works.

But how do things stand with this world’s slaves? Nietzsche doesn’t try to shove their fate underneath the carpet, but rather speaks frankly about how their misery is, as he sees it, justified, by the great aesthetic deeds of the masters. The story doesn’t end there, however, with dissatisfaction, or ‘Ressentiment’, growing inexorably among the slaves. They develop a hatred for the masters that becomes all the bitterer the less they are able to find any outward expression for it. They find comfort for the bad hand the world has dealt them in a new worldview that radically upturns the masters’ values: those who are successful in this world, at least on the masters’ terms, are now experienced as despicable and evil, while the unsuccessful are viewed as the ‘truly’ good among the population. It is this group that can expect eternal happiness and revenge, not the least of the awards awaiting it, in a different world: the ‘true’ world.

Yet Nietzsche understands this this new worldview, whose historical origins he locates particularly in Judaism, not as a pure ‘opium of the people’ as Marx understood it, but rather as a kind of ‘cocaine’ of the people. ‘Slave morality’ mutates into a stimulant, empowering the slaves and heaving them up to become history’s perpetrators instead of history’s victims. In Christianity, slave morality wins out over the world of the masters and creates a whole new one, in which none of the old values apply. This new culture condemns worldly success and glorifies failure, it is indeed a society of losers and of foundering, of asceticism and mediocrity. Nietzsche plainly sees modern culture as a continuation and even radicalization of Christian culture.

His suggestive rhetorical strategy consists of posing a daring ‘either / or’ to his readers. Do you want the Christian world with its hatred of physical bodies,hostility to the spirit and the intellect, boredom, and levelling down, a world that will ultimately disappear into the dust because of its refusal to accommodate any genuine creativity? Or do you want a world of heroes, adventures, great art, and brilliant thinkers? Nietzsche grants his readers no space in which they can sit on the fence on this. If you want the latter world, as surely you must, then you must also want the values and structures with which to realize it. You must break with Christianity and its moralism, and take your leave from ideals of the French Revolution, which floated the possibility of a world without slaves.

We should remind ourselves how strong a chasm lies between this narrative and that of the Enlightenment. Nietzsche is convinced that our present day’s greatest problem is not too little morality, but too much, and above all the wrong kind of morality. This morality’s values have trapped Europe in a downward spiral for the last 2,000 years, alleviated only by a few bright stars on the horizon ,including the Renaissance, Goethe, and Napoleon. In this idiosyncratic historiography strong individuals are enslaved and subjugated by the masses,the ‘herd’, which has no patience with exceptions to its own mediocrity. Nietzsche calls out to such strong individuals: free yourselves, shake off your chains, discover your true and predatory nature! And become conscious of the real point of history—to exercise the ‘will to power’.

This now infamous catchphrase was originally intended to be the title of Nietzsche’s true magnum opus: The Will to Power. This was much more than a mere forgery by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, as is sometimes suggested. Between 1885 and 1888, Nietzsche sketched and made many notes for a further collection of aphorisms with this very title, and the editions of the Nietzsche Archive she directed are based on these drafts, even though Förster-Nietzsche bowdlerized them.¹⁹ Nietzsche imagined that this work would finally pour his whole thinking into a systematic form—although he ultimately rejected the project, moving instead into very different territory for his final creative phase. Despite this turn, this so-called great work by Nietzsche has had an immeasurable impact on the history of his influence. It is particularly easy to construct a fascist interpretation of Nietzsche from it: a worldview that regards the democratic ideas of modernity as no more than a product of Christian decadence, and one that must be rectified by a ‘realistic’ view of the world, a morality of strength, and a corresponding political order in which the ‘strong’ come back to power. It was not until after the Second World War that Mazzino Montinari and Giorgio Colli produced a philologically reliable edition of the estate, thus destroying this extraneous myth that had clung to Nietzsche. This clarification now upheld, we should not forget that the ideas in the abandoned The Will To Power, can for the most part be found in Nietzsche’s authorized works, even if they are often overlooked and bypassed in today’s interpretations of Nietzsche, as interpreters make their ways to other aspects of his philosophy.

III.4 Breaking Bad

Nietzsche welds his pen so as to create a persona for himself as ‘untimely’ or ‘unfashionable’, an individual whose relationship with the present is urgently polemical, if a relationship with that entity can be said to exist at all, and as a thinker or seer writing not for his own age, but for a distant future. This was a literary strategy of making a virtue out of a necessity: his publications following the Birth of Tragedy were not just rejected, but were also largely ignored. This disregard disturbed Nietzsche more than his texts let on, and there are good reasons for concluding that this was a major motivation behind him choosing a new tone—what turned out to be a late style—in his last writings, composed in 1888. These seek to violently elicit the responses that his contemporaries have failed to give to date, by turning up the shrillness to a point at which readers are surely intended to experience it as a provocation. He lambasts his former confidante and companion Wagner, declares that the ‘Twilight of the Idols’ is now at hand, and ultimately even stylizes himself as ‘The Anti-Christ’. His final work, Ecce homo, not published until 1908, takes autobiographical form, yet its megalomaniacal pathos remains disturbing and irritating until this day. Is this a skilful satire about the genre of autobiography? A successful revaluation of Christian self-abnegation? Or does it, like his other texts written in this late period, provide evidence for Nietzsche’s growing insanity?

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IV. Nietzsche’s Final Years

On January 3, 1889, Nietzsche, who was staying in Turin at the time, suffered a mental break down. Reports concluded that he could no longer think clearly and spouted pure nonsense. The apparently fearless harbinger of ‘master morality’, and despiser of compassion and charity, now suddenly needed nursing, and could not survive without the help of others. Back ‘home’ in Naumburg, he was cared for by his mother Franziska until her death 1897, who shared the care from 1893with Elisabeth. Much of the physical care was also performed by Alwine Freytag, Franziska’s longstanding servant of many years, and by several other servants.Following their mother’s death, Elisabeth had Nietzsche moved to live with her in the Villa Silberblick in Weimar, which Meta von Salis (1855–1929), the Swiss women’s rights activist and Nietzsche admirer, had gifted to the Nietzsche Archive. After several strokes, he died on August 25, 1900. Not a single line of Nietzsche’s writing from these last ten years of his life is considered philosophically relevant; he was no longer of sound mind.

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V. Nietzsche’s Legacy

This dénouement to the compelling narrative of Nietzsche’s life is bottomlessly tragic because it was from around 1890 that recognition began to arrive, at first a trickle but soon a wide gushing river, the very responses that Nietzsche had worked and hoped so hard for. He had at least been able to witness consciously the first stirrings of this. In 1888, the Danish essayist Georg Brandes (1842–1927), one of northern Europe’s foremost literary critics, gave a well-attended introductory lecture on Nietzsche’s philosophy in 1888 in Copenhagen, and published the first monograph on the philosopher the following year, titling it Aristokratisk Radikalisme [Aristocratic Radicalism].¹⁸ The label won Nietzsche’s approval.¹⁹ The writing and publication of further articles and books about the philosopher seemed then to snowball. As if overnight, Nietzsche became the talk of the town, in all manner of cultural, political, philosophical, and artistic circles. Sales of his previous works, which had until this point been unassumingly gathering dust in a hundred or so bookshops, skyrocketed. No one who wanted to be, or even just appear intellectually ‘with it’ could avoid engaging with Nietzsche.

Four main factors are likely to have brought about this rapid change. First, while his mental breakdown was tragic and presumably disturbing and humiliating for Nietzsche, it was a major factor in attracting people’s sudden notice. He had now become a still living myth, a martyr to his age, misunderstood by the world, and driving into severe mental illness by the depth of his insight. Secondly, and without ever seeking this development, he found in his sister’s person an ambitious executor for his literary estate. Despite not understanding much about philosophy, and despite the distortions with which she published many of his writings, including his posthumous fragments, it’s impossible to imagine any other executor doing so much to establish and disseminate the myth of Nietzsche, thereby increasing his fame to an untold degree.²²

Beyond these two factors, however, the spirit of the times had also changed sizeably. This manifested itself in our third factor, the tsunami of modernization, that swept through the German Empire and the whole of Europe in the final years of the nineteenth century. On the ground this translated into an accelerated questioning of cultural traditions, a grate spurt of individualization, and a search for answers to entirely new problems of life. Readers caught up in this process read Nietzsche as a champion of radical individualism, who had advocated a fundamental cultural revolution based on values of corporeal affirmation. He became the philosopher of the body-centred life reform movement, in all its multitudinous facets. Bohemian circles in Munich, Berlin, Zurich, and Vienna read and debated his work—and, with only a few years delay, similar circles in Paris, Rome, London, and New York—and he was taken up by the milieu that later metamorphosed into the Bauhaus school, in Sigmund Freud’s discussion group, among the first German sociologists, and in the artists’ and drop-outs’ commune at Monte Verità in Ticino, Switzerland. Such lists are nothing like exhaustive.

Finally: Nietzsche’s writing style gave him fourthly the wherewithal to become a popular author, in joyful disregard of his own elitist claims about his own books. It was precisely the brevity and conciseness of his texts that made him accessible even to casual readers, whom he genuinely despised. You don’t have to be a professional philosopher to understand them, nor do you need the patience usually required to tackle canonical European philosophy. Anyone can be inspired by two or three witty aphorisms read before putting out the light at night. It is more than ironic that it was just this style of punchy, pointed writing that spoke to those for whom his worldview reserved only a subordinate place: women, who were largely excluded from higher education at the time, particularly in the German Reich; workers and other lower-grade employees; and precarious intellectuals and artists on society’s margins. It is unsurprising that these audiences harvested very different meanings from his writings than the ones Nietzsche had consciously intended, as their ambiguity makes them preordained for selective readings. Such readers perceived in this ‘master morality’ philosophy an ethic for their own self-empowerment, tools to emancipate themselves from and lift them up beyond traditional values.

The First World War brought this impressive period of cultural experimentation in search of the new crashing to an end—and caused a momentous and lasting rift in the Nietzschean camp. Nietzsche’s relationship to war had been ambiguous to the point of being contradictory: he despised militarism and nationalism, especially that of the only recently-founded German Reich, but also launched attacks against pacifism and pacifists, and repeatedly used military metaphors to describe authentic individuality. This enabled some to call on Nietzsche as a key witness against war—for example, Emma Goldman, Hermann Hesse, or the illustrious ‘Red Count’ Harry Kessler—while others, such as Thomas Mann or his sister, read him as an apostle of war. Parallel paths for the future of Nietzsche’s reception were thus predetermined.

From then on, we can distinguish three main and conflicting currents of Nietzsche interpretation can be distinguished: liberal, left-wing, and right-wing. All three can refer legitimately to elements of Nietzsche’s heterogeneous and paradoxical work. While the liberal view goes all out to underline Nietzsche’s individualism and free-thinking attitude, leftist interpreters seek to square these with a universalist understanding of emancipation—partly in the sense of an assuredly anti-Marxist anarchism, partly in the sense of a synthesis of Nietzsche and Marx. Rightists, by contrast, play up Nietzsche’s critique of modernity and his polemic against ‘slave morality’ to legitimize their own efforts in creating a new hierarchical order. These views collided most jarringly during World War II. In Germany and Italy, Nietzsche was ‘ennobled’ by far-right actors as the mastermind behind fascism and National Socialism, while concurrently inspiring the anti-fascist Resistance. This heterodox grouping included the Confessing Church as embodied in the figure of Dietrich Bonhoeffer(1906–1945), the Jewish militant resistance, the existentialist and surrealist rebellions—out of latter poststructuralism was to develop—or Western Marxism. After the war, Nietzsche became an important thought leader for both the New Left and the New Right.

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VI. Conclusion: What Nietzsche Bequeaths Us

All three interpretations of Nietzsche’s philosophy remain with us today. They are engaged in a ‘war of ghosts/intellects [Geisterkrieg]’,²³ as Nietzsche prophesied shortly before his mental breakdown, and unite only to oppose a tunnel-vision, ultra-rationalist understanding of the Enlightenment. As if Nietzsche had never lived, this understanding still greets one at every turning. Societal majorities still believe in the gradual overcoming of pre-modern ‘barbarism’ through science and political reforms, hunt everywhere so that the remaining vestiges of ‘discrimination’ can be overcome, and dream of eliminating humanity’s great problems through omniscient and omnipresent technology. But Nietzsche’s great ‘no’ to this dangerous forward drive, delivered in voices sometimes shrill, sometimes mocking, and sometimes prophetic—continues to ring out against this vision, if such rationalist technophilia merits such an epithet, in all its variations. He was convinced that our modern obsession with progress was a vast mistake, that could only alienate us further from our instinctual nature, steal our individual freedom from us, and tie us up in a web of indefensible illusions.

Such a vehement objection to the ideology of modernity can hardly be said to be meritless. In multiple climate and ecological crises, subjugated nature is taking its revenge, and there is currently little to suggest that these can be resolved by the means of rational civilization. Moreover, the ubiquitous fight against ‘discrimination’ often manifests itself as aggressive moralism, which in turn provokes a counter-reaction of disinhibition. And despite all efforts and all the material resources expended, the great questions of humanity remain unresolved, there are still masters and slaves, and we continue to observe the eruptions of resentment—or Ressentiment— and the resistance of those who consider themselves ‘master race’. Nietzsche does not have a master plan to solve these problems. But his precise descriptions of them and his sketches for solutions continue to demand further thought in the spirit of Nietzsche’s slogan: ‘Just follow yourself faithfully: – / Then you will follow me – slowly! slowly!’²⁴

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Sources and Selected Bibliography

The following bibliography is by no means exhaustive: Nietzsche is one of the philosophers about whom by far the most has been written. In addition to listing my sources, it serves to provide some references for further reading.

Virtually all of Nietzsche’s works, letters, and posthumous fragments, fully searchable, as well as many other materials about him and his philosophy,can be found on the very useful internet portal nietzschesource.org. For those who prefer a bound edition, we recommend Colli and Montinari’s fifteen-volume Studienausgabe [literally:study edition] of the complete works, published by dtv. Regarding works published during Nietzsche’s lifetime, it is almost irrelevant which original German edition one refers to, but the Colli-Montinari edition is considered the gold standard nonetheless, and is usually cited in research literature. In the case of posthumous writings, there are considerable differences, so a certain degree of caution is advisable, especially pertaining to the compilation Der Wille zur Macht—The Will to Power.

When it comes to English translations, we recommend the edition of Nietzsche’s complete work by Stanford University Press (link), which is the first complete edition in English, especially the volumes by Adrian Del Caro.

Another important resource is the German-language Historical and Critical Commentary on Friedrich Nietzsche’s Works, published by the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, which is now almost complete.

We can also recommend the English-language portal The Nietzsche Channel, which includes an extensive list of links and an annotated overview of his correspondence, as well as the German-language site f-nietzsche.de.

^{1. Overviews and Reference Works}

Andreas-Salomé, Lou. Nietzsche. Edited and translated by Siegfried Mandel. University of Illinois, 2001 [1894]. (Early overview of Nietzsche’s life and work, still worth reading today, penned by Nietzsche’s great love.)

Brandes, Georg. An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche. Translated by A. G. Chater. Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1914. (First monograph on Nietzsche.)

Müller, Enrico. Nietzsche-Lexikon. Stuttgart, 2018.

Niemeyer, Christian(editor). Nietzsche-Lexikon. Darmstadt, 2011.

Safranski, Rüdiger. Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography. Translated by Shelley Frisch. London, 2002.

Sommer, Andreas Urs. Nietzsche und die Folgen. Stuttgart & Weimar 2017.

^{2. On Nietzsche’s Biography}

Diethe, Carol. Nietzsche’s Women: Beyond the Whip. De Gruyter, 2013.

Janz,Curt Paul. Friedrich Nietzsche. Biographie. Munich, 1978/79.(Three-volume standard biography.)

Köhler, Joachim. Zarathustra’s Secret. Translated by Ronald Taylor. Yale University, 2002. (Much abridged English translation of Köhler’s major German-language work, focusing on Nietzsche’s sexuality.)

Niemeyer, Christian- Nietzsches Syphilis – und die der Anderen. Eine Spurensuche. Freiburg & Munich, 2020. (Nietzsche’s illness, including the history of its reception, and syphilis as a general cultural phenomena.)

Stephan, Paul. Bedeutende Bärte. Eine Philosophie der Gesichtsbehaarung. Berlin, 2020.

^{3. On the History of Nietzsche’s Influence and Reception}

Aschheim, Steven. The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990. Berkeley, 1992.

Decker, Kerstin. Die Schwester. Das Leben der Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Berlin, 2016.

Fuchs, Dieter. “Der Wille zur Macht. Die Geburt des Hauptwerks aus dem Geiste des Nietzsche-Archivs.” In Friedrich Nietzsche, edited by Christian Niemeyer et al. Darmstadt, 2014. (Outstanding overview of the Nietzsche Archive’s forgeries during the publication of the original edition of The Will to Power. This whole anthology can be highly recommended.)

Stephan, Paul. Links–Nietzscheanismus. Eine Einführung. 2 vols. Stuttgart, 2020. (An introduction to the history of Nietzsche’s political reception. See also the internet site about the book.)

^{4. Miscellaneous}

Yalom, Irvin. When Nietzsche Wept. New York, 2020. (Perhaps the best novel about Nietzsche’s philosophy, its influence on psychoanalysis, and Nietzsche’s relationship to Lou von Salomé.)

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Photos and Other Illustrations

Figure 1: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6tzen-D%C3%A4mmerung_oder_Wie_man_mit_dem_Hammer_philosophirt#/media/Datei:Nietzsche1882.jpg

Figure 2: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche#/media/Datei:Nietzsche1861.jpg

Figure 3: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Nietzsche_1872.jpg

Figure 4: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Nietzsche_paul-ree_lou-von-salome188.jpg

Figure 5: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Friederich_Nietzsche.jpg#/media/Datei:Friederich_Nietzsche.jpg

Figure 6: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Friedrich_Nietzsche_drawn_by_Hans_Olde.jpg

Figure 7: http://www.kunstmarkt.com/pages/mag/ausstellungen_grossbildansicht.html?berichtid=37766&bildid=37725&bk=013_02

Figure 8: https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Nietzsche-Denkmal_Naumburg_2013.jpg

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Footnotes

1 This and all Nietzsche citations in this article are taken from the original German Digital Critical Edition (eKGWB), based on the critical text by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin/New York, de Gruyter 1967 ff.). Translations from Nietzsche’s works are by Henry Holland, unless otherwise stated. The titles given in single quotes are the titles Nietzsche gave to sections of these books, and the numbers given refer to chapters—or subsections—of the Digital Critical Edition, rather than pages: Ecce homo, ‘Why I Am a Fate’, 1.

2 Twilight of the Idols, ‘Proverbs and Arrows’, 26.

3 On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense, 1.

4 Cf. particularly On the Genealogy of Morality, III, 12.

5 The Joyous Science, 125.

6 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘Zarathustra’s Prologue’, 5.

7 Translator’s note: In Adrian del Caro and Robert Pippin’s introduction to del Caro’s translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the editors make the crucial point that previous translations of der Übermensch as ‘the superman’ should at last be left behind us, not least because of the dated connotations they elicit: ‘For the purpose of providing an elegant and readable translation “overman” may well be the preferred expression, but for purposes of scholarship, the English-speaking world should have advanced far enough beyond Shaw’s and Marvel’s comic book “superman” to speak in terms of the superhuman.’ (Friedrich Nietzsche,Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ed. Adrian del Caro and Robert Pippin, trans. Adrian del Caro [Cambridge University Press, 2006], xli.)

8 On the Genealogy of Morality, II, 1.

9 Posthumous Fragments 1887, Nr. 11[31].

10 Ecce homo, ‘Why I am a Fate’, 8. Translator’s note: The noun Missrathnen, to describe individuals or groups of people, the adjective missrathenen(n), and verb forms missräth and missrathen turn up often in Nietzsche’s work. Translating these too rigidly with a single English word stem risks losing the subtlety with which Nietzsche deploys these words. As Gregor Benton, the translator of Domenico Losurdo’s one-thousand-page study of Nietzsche, rightly identifies, die Missrathnen can simply be read as ‘the failures’: cf. Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel, trans. Gregor Benton (Brill, 2019), 598. But the world also strongly connotes the physically ‘malformed’, i.e., people with physical disabilities, a nuance we must remember if we want to translate faithfully Nietzsche’s pejorative intentions. Nietzsche wants us to pick up this connotation, and his work as a whole doesn’t allow us to forget it.

11 Emphasis in the original. Beyond Good and Evil, 232.

12 Beyond Good and Evil, 6.

13 Among the countless biographies published, the three-volume work by Curt Paul Janz, which appeared in 1978-1979, is still regarded as the standard scholarly work on Nietzsche’s life. Unfortunately, it’s not available in English translation. Joachim Köhler provided a comprehensive analysis of Nietzsche’s sex life in Zarathustras Geheimnis, subsequently published in a much-abridged English translation by Ronald Taylor. I myself investigated the history of Nietzsche’s iconic moustache in my German-language book on ‘Significant Beards’ (not yet published in English). With Sue Prideaux’s 2018 I am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche among the more readable, recent English contributions, it’s hard, generally, to single works out, amongst the wealth of scholarship on offer.

14 Nietzsche’s choice of words at Ecce homo, ‘Preface’, 2, and at other points in his writings.

15 Translator’s note: Bucking the trend of previous translators, including the influential Walter Kaufman, who had opted for the more timid translation of Untimely Meditations for this work’s title, which loses the clever ambiguity of the original, Richard Gray’s translation adopts this alternative, doing a better job of conveying Nietzsche’s acerbic wit in the process. Gray’s afterword makes clear that while ‘meditation’ is one connotation of Betrachtung, ‘it is clearly secondary to the more literal meaning of Betrachtung as “observation” . . . the manner of “observation” Nietzsche practices in these essays is decidedly directed at the sociopolitical and cultural world that surrounded him’. See: Friedrich Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations (Stanford University Press, 1995), trans. and with an afterword by Richard Gray, 396.

16 Cf. Human, All Too Human, I, 463.

17 A chief suspected cause of these symptoms is syphilis, either inherited from his father or picked up by a visit to a brothel, perhaps his only such visit. However, this diagnosis is contested. It’s possible that only an exhumation, which is genuinely being planned, will provide more medical-historical clarity. A recent plea for the syphilis theory was made by Christian Niemeyer in Nietzsches Syphilis – und die der Anderen.

17 The essay The Will to Power provides an excellent overview of the exact extent of the forgeries. The birth of the main work from the spirit of the Nietzsche Archive by Dieter Fuchs.

18 The 1894 monograph is available in English translation: Lou Salomé, Nietzsche, edited and translated by Siegfried Mandel (University of Illinois, 2001). On the greater context, Irvin Yalom’s novel When Nietzsche Wept is highly recommendable, despite the disappointing film version. Building from von Salomé’s relationship with Nietzsche, it also centres the philosopher’s influence on psychoanalysis, including a fictional encounter between Nietzsche and Freud’s teacher Josef Breuer. Cordula Kablitz-Post’s German-language film from 2016, Lous Andreas-Salomé is captivating, particularly because of Alexander Scheer’s convincing portrayal of Nietzsche.

19 An outstanding overview on Förster-Nietzsche’s forgeries is provided by Dieter Fuchs in his German-language article, which translates as ‘The Will to Power: The Birth of Nietzsche’s Principal Work out of the Spirit of the Nietzsche Archive’.

20 Several English translations have been published, including: Georg Brandes, An Essay on the Aristocratic Radicalism of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. A. G. Chater, (Haldeman-Julius Publications, 1914).

21 Cf. Nietzsche’s letter to Brandes on 2 December 1887.

22 Kerstin Decker’s 2016 German-language biography of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche challenges the purely negative estimation of Förster-Nietzsche’s influence that had prevailed to then. The book is not yet available in English translation: Die Schwester. Das Leben der Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Translator’s note: By contrast, Carol Diethe’s biography is available in English: Nietzsche's Sister and the Will to Power: A Biography of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (University of Illinois Press, 2023).

23 Ecce homo, ‘Why I Am a Fate’, 1.

24 The Joyous Science, ‘Prelude’, 7.

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