Walking the Tightrope

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...