Walking the Tightrope

After Sorrento, Nietzsche slowly made his way, traveling largely third-class, back to the Alps. “’It is my kind of nature.’ His impending return to Basel and to teaching evoked ambivalent responses in him. On the other hand, the very thought of returning to Basel was repulsive to him; he wanted now to dedicate himself to his philosophy and his writing. On the other hand, he realized that it was his philosophy that was killing him, and so his teaching obligations appeared to be his salvation. ‘My altogether problematic broodings and scribblings have until now only made me ill; as long as I was an actual scholar , I was also healthy. But then came the nerve-racking music and metaphysical philosophy, cares concerning myriad things that don’t mean anything to me. So, I want to become a teacher again: if I cannot survive it, then I want to perish practicing my craft .’ “Yet something had changed once and for all. Philology now seemed to be a layer of moss smothering plants he genuinely wan...

"On the morning of January 1, 1877, I took a beautiful walk along the seashore alone with Nietzsche, and we sat down on an outcropping of rock that jutted far out into the deep blue sea. The weather was beautiful as a spring morning; a warm breeze was blowing and on the shores gleamed the golden fruits of the green orange-trees. We were both in a peaceful, harmonious mood; our pleasant, meaningful conversations stood in harmony with the auspicious beginning of the year, and we finally agreed that the real goal of life had to be to strive for truth. Nietzsche said that for the real human being everything had to serve *that* purpose, including suffering, and that to this extent he also blessed the past year of his life, in which he had suffered so much. "How mild, how conciliatory Nietzsche was then, how much his kind, amiable nature still held the balance with his analytical intellect. How cheerful he still could be, how heartily he could laugh, for despite all seriousness, ou...

Albert Brenner joined Fritz and Paul Ree at Frl. Meysenbug’s villa. Brenner was a student of poetry at Basel and a great admirer of Nietzsche’s lectures. Brenner was sent to Sorrento “by his worried parents to be cured of adolescent moodiness and fits of suicidal despair.” ( Cate , page 226) Frl. Meysenbug’s home provided a suitable environment for rest and rejuvenation within the context of a “spiritual rationality” nested in the peaceful southern Italian surroundings. “The villa stood on the coast a fifteen-minute walk from Sorrento with a view over the open sea to Naples and Vesuvius. ‘We live…in a quarter in which there were only gardens and villas and garden-houses,’ Brenner wrote to his family. ‘The entire quarter is like a monastery.’ Later Nietzsche himself wrote to Reinhard von Seydlitz, a writer and painter with whom he was acquainted: ‘We lived in the same house and moreover we had all our higher interests in common: it was a kind of monastery for free spirits.’ The ‘secular...

“Nietzsche had anticipated that Bayreuth would put an end to the mistaking of ‘entertainment at any price’ for art. As it turned out, outrageous prices were being charged for food, lodgings, and carriage rides between the city and festival hall. Monarchs, princes, diplomats, and women of ill repute were the center of the attention. These people typically languished during the performances, but perked up at social events. Later Nietzsche wrote about Bayreuth: … ‘more than anything else, I saw how even to the inner circle the ‘ideal’ was not the point, that entirely different matters was considered weightier and more passionate.’” ( Safranski , page 138) Fritz felt that his fourth Untimely Meditation was the cultural highlight of Wagner’s Ring Cycle première at Bayreuth. Wagner, too busy with the social magnitude of the opening, failed to personally acknowledge Fritz’s philosophic attempt to place the high art of the event in a greater context. Suddenly, Fritz realized there was no high...

Fritz’s relationship with his sister was a complex one. Of course, many brother and sister interactions are. Generally speaking they were very close during the period of his life up to 1876 and remained close afterwards though there were increasingly periods of unrest between them. His relations with his mother remained on a more even keel. She continued to lovingly wish the best for her son and to harbor hopes that he might one day return to his lost Christian faith. Franziska stayed in Naumburg for most of Nietzsche’s life. Elizabeth was often with her mother, though she traveled a bit more. Friedrich Nietzsche loved his sister and his mother. For a time, his sister lived with him at his residence at Basel, keeping his modest home in order and attending to various chores. Elizabeth would often take dictation for Fritz when his eyes were too strained to see. She would read to him in the afternoons and evenings. They cohabitated on a very mundane level. Therefore, he opened up to his ...

Nietzsche as Professor of Philology at the University of Basel is captured by Ludwig von Scheffle, one of his admiring students, reminiscing upon the summer of the Ring at Bayreuth, but a few months before. He gives us some remarkable intimate details of Fritz. Professor Nietzsche entering the classroom… “I had not expected the professor to come into the room in the fire of thought, like Burckhardt. And I probably was already learning that provocative tone in a writer does not always match his behavior as a private person. But such modesty, indeed humility, of deportment was surprising to me in Nietzsche. “Moreover he was of short rather then medium height. His head deep in his shoulders of his stocky yet delicate body. And the gleaming horn-rimmed glasses and the long hanging mustache deprived the face of that intellectual expression which often gives short men an impressive air. “And yet his whole personality showed anything but indifference to his personal appearance. Here one saw n...

“A few months after Nietzsche had settled in Basel, Franz Overbeck arrived from Jena to take up the chair of ‘critical theology’. Overbeck, who was born in 1837 and was thus seven years Nietzsche’s senior, became the one permanent friend Nietzsche had whose friendship was founded on a purely personal, instinctive basis. Although he became for a while a keen Wagnerian under Nietzsche’s influence, he was for most of his life quite at variance with Nietzsche in his opinions…But his closest friend for most of his life was Nietzsche, whom he met when he took up lodgings at No. 45 Schutzgraben. His account of his friendship is an unqualified expression of thanks for the experience. ‘Our friendship was without any shadows,’ he writes. At the same time, he is not sparing in his criticism, which he had certainly voiced while Nietzsche was still able to understand it; but in this instance criticism did not constitute a ‘shadow’. As the years passed, Overbeck moved away from Nietzsche philosoph...

“In the third and fourth Untimely Ones. Two images of the hardest self-love, self-discipline are put up against all this, as pointers to a higher concept of culture, to restore the concept of culture – untimely types par excellence , full of sovereign contempt for everything around them that was called “Empire,” “culture,” “Christianity,” “Bismarck,” “success,” – Schopenhauer and Wagner or, in one word, Nietzsche.” (Ecce Homo, 1888, "The Untimely Ones", section 1) So, years later, Fritz saw more of himself than Wagner (who was dead by then) in his 1876 essay entitled Richard Wagner at Bayreuth . The essay is the last of four that are collected under the heading of Untimely Meditations or Unmodern Observations (which is the translation I own). Nietzsche worked on a fifth essay pertaining to philology but he never completed it. Originally, he and his publisher were anticipating about a dozen essays, but no more were ever written or published under this heading. Once more we...

"As well as being happy in his cave (his apartment), Nietzsche enjoyed a vibrant social life. He was regularly to be found in the homes of colleagues and in Basel's best patrician houses - often overlapping categories since many of the professors came from the best families." ( Young , page 165) Indeed, the man who became Basel's prodigy professor entered his academic career full of social life, just as he had enjoyed in Bonn and Leipzig before. "In the first years of his being (in Basel) he had a rich social life that included dance-evenings. The young women were enchanted with him." (Young, page 202) We have seen glimpses of Nietzsche’s mind and personality in his own writings and letters. But, there is a large body of material available regarding what those who knew Fritz thought of him. A clearer picture of just who Nietzsche was can be found when one takes their writings into consideration. Fritz enjoyed many friendships in his student days at Pforta ...

Nietzsche’s appointment to his professorship at the University had one rarely considered consequence; it left him without friends his own age. All of his student years he had enjoyed close friendships with classmates, Fritz was not a social hermit (though he already claimed to be an “intellectual” one) until many years later. “What Nietzsche most missed in Basel was the stimulating theater and concert life he had first encountered in Cologne and later relished in Leipzig. The old patrician town lacked a concert hall that could stand comparison with the famous Gewandhaus, while it’s stage offerings were so wretched that Nietzsche stigmatized Basel as being a place that was ‘hostile to the Theater-Graces’. In Leipzig he had been surrounded, stimulated and consoled by a circle of young friends…but in Basel he had no close friends or colleagues who were at all close to his age. The historian Jacob Burckhardt was twenty-six years older.” ( Cate , page 91) Among anyone at Basel: “It was Jaco...