Biography

German philosopher and artist who deconstructed morality and celebrated the Romantic myth as an expression of life.
"Nihilism stands at the door: whence comes this uncanniest of all guests?" In 1901, this question appeared in the first chapter of a posthumously published philosophical work called The Will To Power. The author of the book was Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, a German philosopher and artist, renowned for his fiery outbursts on Christianity, moral conventions and contemporary modern society. Alienated from the outside world and in deep mental breakdown, Nietzsche left the world with an astounding legacy that would continue to question and criticize established norms and principles long after his death. Who was he, this lonely man who hid his face behind a giant moustache, writing mystical aphorisms that declared the death of God?

Introduction

Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in a small German town called Röcken bei Lützen, located southwest of Leipzig. His father died when he was only four years old, which left him in the hands of his mother, Franziska, his paternal grandmother, Erdmuthe, his father's two sisters, Auguste and Rosalie, and his younger sister, Therese Elisabeth Alexandra. From the beginning, Nietzsche's life was already taking a decisive form. Early on he became acquainted with the music of Richard Wagner, whose charismatic art and personality attracted his attention. This eventually led to a close friendship between the two, who both shared a passion and enthusiasm for the philosophical works of Arthur Schopenhauer.

Being a successful student in philology and somewhat of an academic star, thanks to his essays on Aristotle, Theognis and Simonides, Nietzsche was suddenly called in to enter the military service at age 23. During this time he was struck by a serious chest injury, which forced him to immediately suspend his military training. Five years later, Nietzsche released his first book, entitled The Birth of Tragedy (1872), which examined the Greek culture and the metaphysics behind art, drawing a heavy inspiration from Schopenhauer and also Wagner, whose work he praised immensely.

Nietzsche continued visiting Wagner regularly at his home in Bayreuth, until Human, All-Too-Human (1878) was published. This work marked the end of their ten-year friendship, in which Wagner came under attack as the thinly-disguised "artist." At around this time, Nietzsche's life changed completely. He became the Nietzsche we commonly think of today: the lonely wanderer who had given up his German citizenship, travelling around Europe with no stable home of residence. In 1882 he visited Rome, where he met the Russian woman named Lou Salomé. Nietzsche fell in love with her and requested her hand in marriage, but she declined. Their friendship was never to be the same again, and one can imagine that Nietzsche was never to fully recover from this, either.

The following years became a particularly productive period for Nietzsche, with the publication of works such as The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morals (1887), Twilight of the Idols (1888), and The Antichrist (1888). Shortly after The Antichrist was published, Nietzsche suddenly fell into a mental breakdown, often described as a scene where he witnessed a horse being whipped, clung his arms around the animal's neck, and then collapsed. For a long time his madness was believed to have been the result of a syphilitic infection, but recent studies have showed that the culprit was actually brain cancer, which Nietzsche appears to have inherited from his father.

Nietzsche spent his last days on an estate known as the "Villa Silberblick," rented by his sister Elisabeth, who had married a German anti-Semite named Bernhard Förster. On August 25, 1900, Friedrich Nietzsche passed away in what is presumed to have been pneumonia in combination with a stroke. His body was placed in the family gravesite together with his mother and sister, by the church in Röcken bei Lützen. Villa Silberblick became the "Nietzsche Archives," containing his personal manuscripts, but to the rest of the world, Nietzsche was already archived in the history of mankind as the man who changed the face of German philosophy forever.