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Showing posts from November, 2011

"I am lost"

“From Leipzig, where the first wintry snows were already falling, Nietzsche took the train to Basel, to ‘help’ Franz Overbeck celebrate his forty-fifth birthday on 16 November. He told his Basel hosts that his ‘idyll’ with Lou Salomé was finished, without explaining what had gone wrong. Lou’s health was so fragile – like his own – that she was as ill-suited to look after him as he was to take care of her. ‘Now I am going into complete solitude,’ he had abandoned as hopeless his short-lived endeavor to ‘return to the world of men.’ “If Nietzsche heard the nasty rumor that was already circulating in Basel’s academic circles – about the ‘mistress’ he had brought back from Italy and whom he had been ‘sharing’ with a friend of his in Leipzig – it was certainly not from the Overbecks. But what infuriated Nietzsche was to discover that his sister Elisabeth, in her righteous zeal as the self-appointed guardian and preserver of her brother’s ‘sullied reputation’, had taken it upon herself to ‘s