Friedrich Nietzsche's life (from an internet site)

1844-1900

In the small German town of Röcken bei Lützen, located in a rural farmland area southwest of Leipzig, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born at approximately 10:00am on October 15, 1844. The date coincided with the 49th birthday of the Prussian King, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, after whom Nietzsche was named, and who had been responsible for Nietzsche's father's appointment as Röcken's town minister. Nietzsche's grandfathers were also Lutheran ministers, and his paternal grandfather, Friedrich August Ludwig Nietzsche, was further distinguished as a Protestant scholar, one of whose books (1796) affirmed the "everlasting survival of Christianity." When Nietzsche was 4 years old, his father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche (1813-1849) died from a brain ailment, and the death of Nietzsche's two-year-old brother, Joseph, followed six months later. Having been living only yards away from Röcken's church in the house reserved for the pastor and his family, the remaining Nietzsche family left their home soon after Karl Ludwig's death. They moved to nearby Naumburg an der Saale, where Nietzsche (called "Fritz" by his family) lived for the next eight years with his mother, Franziska (1826-1897), his paternal grandmother, Erdmuthe, his father's two sisters, Auguste and Rosalie, and his younger sister, Therese Elisabeth Alexandra (1846-1935).
From the ages of 14 to 19, Nietzsche attended a first-rate boarding school, Schulpforta, located not far from Naumburg, where he prepared for university studies. Here he met his lifelong acquaintance, Paul Deussen, who was confirmed at Nietzsche's side in 1861, and who was to become an Orientalist, historian of philosophy, and in 1911, the founder of the Schopenhauer Society. During his summers in Naumburg, Nietzsche led a small music and literature club named "Germania," and became acquainted with Richard Wagner's music through the club's subscription to the Zeitschrift für Musik. The teenage Nietzsche also read the German romantic writings of Friedrich Hölderlin and Jean-Paul Richter, along with David Strauss's controversial and demythologizing Life of Jesus Critically Examined (Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet, 1848).
After graduating from Schulpforta, Nietzsche entered the University of Bonn in 1864 as a theology and philology student, but his interests gravitated more exclusively towards philology -- a discipline which then centered upon the interpretation of classical and biblical texts. As a philology student, Nietzsche attended lectures by Otto Jahn (1813-1869) and Friedrich Wilhelm Ritschl (1806-1876). Jahn was a biographer of Mozart who had studied at the University of Berlin under Karl Lachmann (1793-1851) -- a philologist known both for his studies of the Roman philosopher Lucretius and for having developed the genealogical method in textual recension; Ritschl was a classics scholar whose work centered on the Roman comic poet Plautus (254-184 BC). Inspired by Ritschl, and following him to the University of Leipzig in 1865 -- an institution located closer to Nietzsche's hometown of Naumburg -- Nietzsche quickly established his own academic reputation through his published essays on Aristotle, Theognis and Simonides. In Leipzig, he developed a close friendship with Erwin Rohde, a fellow philology student, with whom he would correspond extensively in later years. Momentous for Nietzsche in 1865 was his accidental discovery of Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation (1818) in a local bookstore. He was then 21. Schopenhauer's atheistic and turbulent vision of the world, in conjunction with his highest praise of music as an art form, captured Nietzsche's imagination, and the extent to which the "cadaverous perfume" of Schopenhauer's world-view continued to permeate Nietzsche's mature thought is still a matter of scholarly debate. After discovering Schopenhauer, Nietzsche read F.A. Lange's newly-published History of Materialism and Critique of its Present Significance (1866) -- a work which criticized materialist metaphysical theories from the standpoint of Kant's critique of metaphysics in general, and attracted Nietzsche's interest in its view that metaphysical speculation is an expression of poetic illusion.
In 1867, as he approached the age of 23, Nietzsche entered his required military service and was assigned to an equestrian field artillery regiment close to Naumburg, during which time he lived at home with his mother. While attempting to leap-mount into the saddle upon a particularly unruly horse, he suffered a serious chest injury and was put on sick leave after his chest wound refused to heal. He returned shortly thereafter to the University of Leipzig, and in November of 1868, met the composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) at the home of Hermann Brockhouse, an Orientalist who was married to Wagner's sister, Ottilie. Wagner and Nietzsche shared an enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche -- who had been composing piano, choral and orchestral music since he was a teenager -- admired Wagner for his musical genius and magnetic personality. Wagner was exactly the age Nietzsche's father would have been, and Wagner had also attended the University of Leipzig many years before. The Nietzsche-Wagner relationship was quasi-familial, sometimes-stormy, and it affected Nietzsche deeply: twenty years later, he would still be assessing Wagner's cultural significance. During the months surrounding Nietzsche's initial meeting with Wagner, Ritschl strongly recommended Nietzsche for a position on the classical philology faculty at the University of Basel. The Swiss university offered Nietzsche the position, and he began teaching there in May, 1869, at the extraordinary age of 24.
At Basel, Nietzsche's satisfaction with his life among his philology colleagues was limited, and he established closer intellectual ties to the historians Franz Overbeck and Jacob Burkhardt, whose lectures he attended. Nietzsche also cultivated his friendship with Wagner and visited him often at his Swiss home in Tribschen, a small town near Lucerne. Never in outstanding health, further complications arose from Nietzsche's August-October 1870 service as a hospital attendant during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71). He witnessed the traumatic effects of battle, took close care of wounded soldiers, contracted diphtheria and dysentery, and subsequently experienced a painful variety of health difficulties for the rest of his life.
Nietzsche's enthusiasm for Schopenhauer, his studies in classical philology, his inspiration from Wagner, his reading of Lange, and his frustration with the contemporary German culture, coalesced in his first book -- The Birth of Tragedy (1872) -- which was published when he was 28. Wagner showered the book with unqualified praise, but a biting critical reaction by the young and promising philologist, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff (1848-1931), dampened the book's reception among scholars.
As he continued his residence in Switzerland between 1872 and 1879, Nietzsche often visited Wagner at his new (1872) home in Bayreuth, Germany. In 1873, Nietzsche met Paul Rée, who, while living in close company with Nietzsche, would write On the Origin of Moral Feelings (1877). In 1876, at age 32, Nietzsche made an unsuccessful marriage proposal to a Dutch piano student in Geneva named Mathilde Trampedach. During this time, Nietzsche completed a series of four studies on contemporary German culture -- the Unfashionable Observations (1873-76) -- which focussed, respectively, upon the historian of religion and culture critic, David Strauss, issues concerning the social value of historiography, and Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner as inspirations for new cultural standards. Near the end of his university career, Nietzsche completed Human, All-Too-Human (1878) -- a book which marked a turning point in his philosophical style, and which signalled the end of his friendship with Wagner, who came under attack in Nietzsche's thinly-disguised characterization of "the artist." Despite the unflattering review of The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche remained respected in his professorial position in Basel, but his ailing health, which led to migraine headaches, eyesight problems and vomiting, necessitated his resignation from the university in June, 1879.
From 1880 until his collapse in January 1889, Nietzsche led a wandering, gypsy-like existence as a "stateless" person (having given up his German citizenship, and not having acquired Swiss citizenship), circling almost annually between his mother's house in Naumburg and various French, Swiss, German and Italian cities. His travels took him through the Mediterranean seaside city of Nice (during the winters), the Swiss alpine village of Sils-Maria (during the summers), Leipzig (where he had attended university), Turin, Genoa, Recoaro, Messina, Rapallo, Florence, Venice, and Rome, never residing in any place longer than several months at a time. On a visit to Rome in 1882, Nietzsche, now at age thirty-seven, met Lou Salomé, a twenty-one-year-old Russian woman who was studying philosophy and theology in Zurich. He soon fell in love with her, and offered his hand in marriage. She declined, and the future of Nietzsche's friendship with her and Paul Rée appears to have suffered as a consequence. In the years to follow, Salomé would become an associate of Sigmund Freud, and would write with psychological insight of her association with Nietzsche. These nomadic years were the occasion of Nietzsche's main works, among which are Daybreak (1881), The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). Nietzsche's final active year, 1888, saw the completion of The Case of Wagner (May-August 1888), Twilight of the Idols (August-September 1888), The Antichrist (September 1888), Ecce Homo (October-November 1888) and Nietzsche Contra Wagner (December 1888).
On the morning of January 3, 1889, while in Turin, Nietzsche experienced a mental breakdown which left him an invalid for the rest of his life. Upon witnessing a horse being whipped by a coachman at the Piazza Carlo Alberto, Nietzsche threw his arms around the horse's neck and collapsed, never to return to full sanity. Some argue that Nietzsche was afflicted with a syphilitic infection (this was the original diagnosis of the doctors in Basel and Jena) contracted either while he was a student or while he was serving as a hospital attendant during the Franco-Prussian War; some claim that Nietzsche's use of chloral hydrate, a drug which he had been using as a sedative, deteriorated his already-weakened nervous system; some speculate that Nietzsche's collapse was due to a brain disease he inherited from his father; some maintain that a mental illness gradually drove him insane. The exact cause of Nietzsche's incapacitation still remains unclear. That Nietzsche had an extraordinarily sensitive nervous constitution and took an assortment of medications is well-documented as a more general fact.
During his creative years, Nietzsche struggled to bring his writings into print and never doubted that his books would have a lasting cultural effect. He did not live long enough to experience his world-historical influence, but he had a brief glimpse of his growing intellectual importance in discovering that he was the subject of 1888 lectures given by Georg Brandes (Georg Morris Cohen) at the University of Copenhagen, with whom he corresponded. Nietzsche's collapse, however, followed soon thereafter. After a brief hospitalization in Basel, he spent 1889 in a sanatorium in Jena at the Binswanger Clinic, and in March 1890 his mother took him back home to Naumburg, where he lived under her care for the next seven years. After his mother's death in 1897, his sister Elisabeth -- having previously returned home from Paraguay, where she had been working with her husband Bernhard Förster to establish an Aryan, anti-Semitic German colony called "New Germany" ("Nueva Germania") -- assumed responsibility for Nietzsche's welfare. In an effort to promote her brother's philosophy, she rented a large house on a hill in Weimar, called the "Villa Silberblick," and moved both Nietzsche and his collected manuscripts to the residence. This became the new home of the Nietzsche Archives (which was previously located at the family home in Naumburg), where Elisabeth received visitors who wanted to observe the now-incapacitated philosopher. On August 25, 1900, Nietzsche died in the villa as he approached his 56th year, apparently of pneumonia in combination with a stroke. His body was then transported to the family gravesite directly beside the church in Röcken bei Lützen, where his mother and sister now also rest.