January 26, 1996

Dear Rudy,

Many thanks for the red marks on my Elisabeth chapter, all of which have been incorporated. I find it most enjoyable to replace a poor word with a good word, and so for the many better words (and phrases, and ideas) -- thank you. I have much to learn about style, and particularly style in this endeavor, which seeks to please the heavy black Scholarly Bird that lurks on my shoulder, as well as those of young readers who don’t know Nietzsche from a laundry soap -- and most of all, moi-même. Does that work when I stick to simply telling this elegant tale? Of course not. 

 Intriguing as it is just to write a story, of course I would much rather follow the hunches farther afield, and write as you say with compact, playful wit --or as someone else put it, urbane humor, or Richard, deep irony, which means freeing myself from my ten pound draft-tome. (Julian Barnes certainly didn’t worry about filling in all the blanks: he took a novelist’s liberty, and choose to write chapters about those delicious Flaubertian details that appealed to him over the mistake of trying to tell a linear story.)  So rather than send you a long and dull chapter, I’ll confine myself to a short, quick letter. 

Drs. Binswanger and Vulpius, and the two Leipzig doctors of 1867, were probably accurate in their diagnosis of Nietzsche’s syphilis, I expect, and wonder if anyone along the way would have questioned it, if Elisabeth had not been so effective with her various cover-ups. I checked with a doctor this weekend about the secondary symptoms you mentioned on your envelop, and she said that syphilis, the trickster’s disease, follows many routes. Besides, without autopsy, we don’t know the state of Nietzsche’s inner organs upon his demise.  Jonathan wondered if Elisabeth refused an autopsy. Instead of a syphilis chapter, I’m currently revealing various theories about it progressively, with the idea that any reader loves a good mystery. So in chapter one on Nietzsche’s childhood, I mention Hayman’s speculation about Franziska’s mismatched pupils, in the brothel chapter, all the speculation about the prostitute, in the Elisabeth chapter, the cover-ups with Vulpius and so on to the Freudians, who seem to have had no doubt. When Lou found out about it is still unclear, but I don’t think she knew (??) when she was writing her Nietzsche book. She did know by the time Möbius published, and certainly when she joined Freud. And of course there is that mysterious possible earlier meeting between Freud and Lou. 

Another theory about Elisabeth and Bern: they could have been infertile. Not producing a perfect little German might have been frowned upon in that group, and not good for that arch-Aryan marriage.

And yes -- I think Thomas Mann must have reliving (perhaps very consciously) and rewriting Nietzsche, don’t you? Certainly the philosophical content is there, but the life? The new diaries substantiate more than a few of those parallels. I haven’t yet finished Hayman’s biography, though I’ve cheated on the best parts with the index.  Most intriguing -- that both lived a public life above a secret life, as did Jung, though to a different purpose. I have not been able to read a word about Aschenbach after Robert Aldrich without seeing Nietzsche -- certainly a parallel that Visconti used completely in his film.  

Lunch last week with Richard. He is reading Wagner, read my Elisabeth chapter, said that Lou was an itinerant Adventuress as opposed to Cosima and Elisabeth who seemed to want to stay put and establish Matriarchies on the Corpses of their respective Geniuses. I don’t think Richard thinks well of Adventuresses, but I could be wrong.  (And how much of Lou’s adventurousness accommodated the compulsion to stay with Andreas?) Richard thinks I am digressing from being a student of Professor Binion, but he is wrong there. 

What next? I took your chapters of 1882 to Maui with me and added yet another level of color to my Technicolor scholarship. I almost have a rough draft of the events of 1882 in narrative style, for what it’s worth. It feels necessary to have that as the backbone of whatever pages survive the paper shredder. How can a reader follow reliving and retelling if I haven’t produced the living and the telling? Lively to me it is not, however.  Instead Jung beckons. And recalling that you find letters more fun than text, I’m tempted to see what happens if I just digress instead of sending you another snoreful chapter.

So, digress I will. Question: why should I tap away at yet another telling of this Eternally Recurring Tale when you have told already told it so well? Will a simple version, told like a story, reveal anything of interest?  In a simple story Nietzsche and Lou are not romanticized the way they are in most of the literature, excluding Frau Lou. Would not the Gentle, Romantic Nietzscheans find blasphemy in such a proposition? And would that not be fine with me, since playful sparring with Gentle Nietzscheans has become my favorite sport? 

Immersed in Lou's diaries, letters, her intrigue, her life (all in translation of course, snippets and shadows), I look back to see that my dilemma begins with the size of the cast in this production. So many people that while I digress with them along the way to finding Lou, she slips out the back, and possibly ends up looking over my shoulder.  But here I am, finally, sorting through layers of clues and cover-ups, in quite an obsessive fashion, with this problem: While the story has been playing itself out in the foreground, I have become fascinated with details of the background which when followed take me finally so far into my tableau that I too disappear through a door at the horizon.

I have hoped to send you a real text someday, but in the meantime, if I try to begin as a proper biographer would, with Nietzsche’s childhood, I get lost immediately in that quicksand, since all the scholarly mysteries of later years are there in the Oedipal first ones. But not Oedipally. I won’t get caught in the Freudian wash and dry! If I spin a few fanciful tangents, do you care? And if I stop for a moment on the bicoastal ride between Nietzsche and Freud to set down in the middle land, where to I end up?  Lost with little Rilke? Pardon the diminutive, but I must spend more time with his poetry before I see without the prejudice of Lou’s first meeting, so little Rilke he remains for now, with apologies to all the Rilke scholars who are as mixed on Lou as are the Nietzscheans.

But I was telling you about my problem with casting, and who is in this packed room, where the most unlikely people have shown up together in a series of inter-related intrigues and bizarre bedfellows. Or alleged bizarre bedfellows. For example: recall that the New Yorker suggested that Hitler sexually abused the Wagnerian progeny -- surely  that can’t go without comment, on this, the day after the fiftieth anniversary of his suicide. First though, before I lose the train entirely, let me log in a few of the people in this  distractingly full room. 

Nietzsche and Paul Rée, of course; Cosima dressed in her pink flounced gown with Richard in his beribboned and multi-hued silk pjs; King Ludwig with his frowning Exchequer; Count Joukowsky with the crew of the Wagner entourage: von Stein (like one of Schiller’s young men?), Taussig, Ritter (who tried to leap suicidally from his rowboat with Cosima in his wake); in the corner, Joukowsky's friend, abashed Henry James; Oscar Wilde and his syphilis doctor; Thomas Mann and his wife and brood of children and Italian boyfriends; Frank Wedekind with Cosima's mum, the Countess; Elisabeth Nietzsche with Karl Schlechta and her Nazi archivists; Turgenev with his roomies, the Diva Pauline and her husband; Ibsen with his ducks; Lou's nightowl Orientalist; Rodin and his studio-- Clara, Camille, Rilke; Martin Buber, with no Thou; Tolstoy and young Pasternak; Lou's brother Jenia; Franz Brentano with three of his students from the University of Vienna-- Husserl, future medical spy Josef Paneth, and Josef's chum Sigmund Freud. Freud's clan (not cult, no, no) is the largest: Martha and (dare we speculate about) Minna, daughter Anna with her friend Dorothy Burlingham; Jung, with Emma and Toni Woolf , but not Sabina Spielrein who stayed home with a (psychosomatically said Jung) sprained ankle; Otto Rank with Tola and Anaïs and Henry Miller; Victor Tausk; Paul Federn; Stekel; Ernest Jones; Princess Marie with her chows. Not speaking to them across the room was Alfred Adler. And Jaspers and Viktor Frankl and Heidegger with Elfriede, ignoring Hannah Arendt, and Husserl too. Well, those are the ones I remember today. Oh yes, I forgot those on my side of the room. There you are, Lou's best gumshoe scholar, having a polite conversation with Linde Salber (this is my fantasy, recall), Irv Yalom with Josef Breuer; Molly Peters; Walter Kaufmann with Werner Erhard and the Reverend Moon, about to leave for Europe with Werner’s gay biographer, W.W. Bartley. In the Kaufmann corner the Gentle Nietzscheans (the fierce ones were all arrested before the party); Michel Foucault, pretending not to know anything of Nietzsche's private life, with his biographers Didier Eribon and Jim Miller, having a tiff moderated by Alexander Nehamas.

   But enough name-dropping! If I am going to digress, I have to pay homage for a moment to Tristram Shandy, and end this long letter with at least one note about Lou.  

     ...revengeful schoolgirl, beast of prey, cat nature, brain with appendage of soul, lacks industry, cleanliness, bourgeois decency, goalless, treacherous, ungrateful . . . 

Nietzsche about Lou, December, 1882

From Tristram Shandy, I learned that footnotes are more fun to follow than texts. For a good author will tuck away in a footnote that little intuition, hint of blissful association, that just won't fit in the properly behaved linear text. And that little hint of excitement, exuberantly followed, will take me like a mouse's tail into a mouse's hole that will lead-- well, that's the whole point: who knows?

When Nietzsche rejected Lou in 1882 ("If I banish you from me now it is a frightful censure of your whole being"), he called her goalless.  

Nietzsche had goals, that neat and meticulous man, and where did they lead him? See, that's the thing about honoring digressions; I am pulled to wonder where Nietzsche's goals led him. To the insane asylum? No. Syphilis led him there, unless you still cherish the hope that he was not infected. To being a posthumouse (sic, I mean posthumous, but the mouse is still there in my mind) philosopher, understood only by future generations (i.e. millennial us perhaps, stupid little species on a star about to blow up?)

 But did Lou have goals? That, I think, was her charm. She did not. Do you think she would have been able to imagine being one of Freud's best friends, author of essays on psychoanalysis, one of the first women analysts when she was a schoolgirl in a small German community within a Russian community in St. Petersburg? She could not. Lou knew from an early age about following footnotes. It takes a certain willingness to push your rowboat farther out from shore than comfort indicates. It takes a willingness to be ambushed by that which is truly fascinating.

So where am I to begin with telling the story of Lou and Nietzsche? In my text I begin as a good biographer should, properly, with Nietzsche's birth in 1844, and his reluctance to speak until age two and a half, and with Lou's birth in St. Petersburg in 1861, and how the Czar, who lived in the palace across the street, sent a congratulatory telegram to her father, General Gustav von Salomé and how the serfs rose up almost immediately, clearly unrelated to the birth of a daughter, finally, in the von Salomé family. But it gives me no pleasure to start here, with facts that are so well-known. No, that’s absurd: almost nothing in the Eternally Recurring Tale goes without a challenge, and I can’t get through an introductory sentence without debate. How many princesses did Pastor Nietzsche tutor? How many brothers did Lou have? I must footnote your suggestion that she lied about that and what it means if she did. But why should I bother, when the one who really interests me this morning is Lola Montez.

Lola Montez was a "painted and jeweled woman with bold, bad eyes...demonic and heartless,"

---Richard Wagner

"Do you want me to put a pillow under my hips and whisper sweet nothings in the ear of the King?" Richard Burton (playing Wagner) said to John Gielgud, referring, not too subtly, to the persistent scholarly concern over what Wagner and gorgeous young King Ludwig of Bavaria were doing on those languid afternoons when their carriage took them so far afield. "Who do you think I am,” Burton continued. “Lola Montez?" 

There is no footnote, of course, in the movie telling who Lola Montez was, so I tracked her down immediately. You probably know all about her: red-headed fiery Irish lass (born Marie Dolores Eliza Rosanna Gilbert) who masqueraded as an Andalusian dancer and ended penitent in New York after being a feminist and spiritualist in the California Gold Rush. But who was this demonic and heartless lass Lola Montez to Richard Wagner?

That gets a little complex, but let me try. She was the lover of Cosima’s father, Franz Liszt, which makes her, what, something of a lover-in-law to Wagner? But here's where it gets interesting; she was also the lover of Ludwig I,  grandfather of Ludwig II (Maximilian was the father between).

And what is Lola to this story? It was due to her that Ludwig had the cash to bankroll the Parsifal extravaganza in Bayreuth where Lou committed the (alleged) dire "offense" that caused Nietzsche to write so nasty a list of adjectives. Why did Lola ask her lover Ludwig to close the universities? --not  a good choice in 1848 when the world was in revolutionary tumult. The populace was so angry that they evicted Lola, and exiled Ludwig as well. Baby Ludwig II without delay toddled in as Crown Prince, a position which brought with it the cash, ultimately, for patronage. When Wagner began elegant spending with this Ludwigian purse, he was nicknamed by the angry populace Ludwig's "Lolotte."  So it is thanks to Lola, in a way, that we have the magnificent setting for Parsifal, and for a key scene in our story.

Lola, of course, never met Lou, since she left the world the year Lou entered it. But on one of her dancing tours of Russia, she dallied with the Czar, who lived in that palace across the street from the von Salomé quarters. The Czar's tutor was the poet father of Paul Joukowsky -- Wagner's set designer on Parsifal. But Paul Joukowsky's life as Lou's compatriot in Czarist Russia will have to wait, for I have work to do, and although Paul Joukowsky and the misinterpretation of his sexual preferences (see the story about Henry James) are central to this tale, I am confusing myself already, and therefore possibly you as well.

For now I will leave with this question for Richard Wagner: Were you in any position to criticize someone like Lola Montez, for being painted and jewelled? .....

The air was filled with perfumes and he was adorned exactly like a woman, the most grotesque sight you could imagine. That was his reality, he was completely identical with the anima, he was a transvestit which means a man who conceals himself in women's clothes, enjoying playing the role of a woman.

Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: 

Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939

The word "grotesque" stands out so much here that Jung's prejudice would be fun to track but Jung's relationship to Wagner and to Nietzsche and Lou is so complex that I know better than to get started on that. Instead I’ll stick with dress designers. Bertha Goldwag of Vienna traveled incognito to Wagner's magnificent new home, a gift from Ludwig of course, pretending to bring silks, satins, and lace to a fictional Countess in Berlin. With them she decorated every inch of Wagner's new home with fabric, and every inch of short Wagner as well, with lacy, dressing gowns, suits and shirts. If he did wear more feminine clothing then, as Jung hints, I don't know who designed it, but I have a good hint might have created such items for him in Bayreuth in 1882. 

Paul Joukowsky.

As you recall, he designed a dress on Lou’s body in public (unless he only hemmed it), causing Paul Rée to write, "for surely he will next want to marry you. Enfin Lou, even then I want to remain your friend.” Was this jealousy? Or was it Paul Rée’s habitual playfulness? For all his high seriousness as a career pessimist, for all his posturing carrying a vial of poison around his neck should the impulse to suicide occur, Paul Rée was certain playful. And he knew that Joukowsky’s affections were well taken at that moment with Pepito, an imported Italian fisherman (sent to “gladden his days” one biographer wrote).  Fred Peters missed the point entirely with his conclusion of the dress designing incident: “It is not hard to imagine what kind of girl Lou was.” Frolicking with the gay men on the Parsifal set was Lou’s delight, and so the real issue here, of course, is -- how much did Elisabeth observe about Joukowsky and Pepito from her second story window in Bayreuth in the summer of 1882? 

There is more to say about Joukowsky -- about his month in Paris with Henry James, James’s dismay over the overt homosexuality in the Wagner camp in Posillipo when he visited Joukowsky in 1880 and  Fred Kaplan’s footnote in his James biography speculating that Joukowsky might have been Wagner’s lover as well.  But Henry James’s comments on the dangers of public disclosure in 1882 (not an issue in Italy, of course, or in Ludwig’s Bavaria but certainly in Henry James’s world -- and what a digression there -- articles about Henry have even put him in bed with William!) -- will have to wait, because I am trying to stick to Wagner’s wardrobe, and maybe the question of who designed the clothes for the forays of the crew into Bayreuth in drag.  (Footnote to consider here: the article by Colette’s husband about gay want ads in Bayreuth which I found poring for a day through microfiche at Stanford. And I could wander off to look into Colette’s syphilis) Well, maybe it wasn't Paul Joukowsky who put lace on the hems of those dresses, but if not him, then who? 

Speaking of lace, Lou wore lace on the cuffs of her high-necked black dresses (in the Paris student style) when she showed up at Malwida’s salon in Rome in January, 1882. And Nietzsche covered his chairs with the finest white Mulhausen lace coverlets when he was a professor at Basel. What do you think of what his student von Sheffler writes of his taste in decor? 

. . . soft, large armchairs invited one to sit down. They had white lace coverlets with delightful flower patterns such as the famous Mulhausen lace factories have been producing since French times! . . . and when one was half sunk in to such a gallant armchair, one's gaze fell again on fresh flowers! In glasses, in bowls, on tables, in corners, competing in their discrete mixture of colors with the watercolors on the walls! Everything airy, aromatic and delicate! ...Lightly curtained windows, filtering the glare of daylight, made one feel like a guest invited not to a professor's house but to a beloved girlfriend's.

Note if you will the contrast between Nietzsche’s warm and inviting professorial apartment from his decade in residence in Basel, and the austere later quarters described by Stefan Zweig:

And up again into the small, narrow, modest, coldly furnished chambre garnie, where innumerable notes, pages, writings, and proofs are piled up on the table, but no flower, no decoration, scarcely a book and rarely a letter. Back in a corner, a heavy and graceless wooden trunk, his only possession, with the two shirts and the other worn suit. . . . Wrapped in an overcoat and a woolen scarf (for the wretched stove smokes only and does not give warmth), his fingers freezing, his double glasses pressed close to the paper . . .    

Gentle Nietzscheans quote this passage so many times that finally Nietzsche (popular Nietzsche, Nietzsche 101) is remembered only in the midst of these quite adverse conditions. Wretched Nietzsche, suffering from migraines, taking frequent breaks to throw up, to go out for a cup of hot water, to meet Freud's schoolmate Josef Paneth for a free medical opinion, and to share some ideas. I pause to wonder here if astute Paneth, having the opportunity to look deep into Nietzsche’s eyes with what? Affectionate concern? Cool medical detachment?? --  saw  signs of syphilis in 1883, but to speculate on this charming possibility will require that I read some pages on eyes and 19th century syphilis, a gift from my opthomologist. I must table this talk for a future digression).

Zweig's description could be Nietzsche's room in the boxy white house in Sils Maria, upstairs in the back, except for the absence of a stove in the Sils room. And if he had a stove, why did it smoke only and give no heat? A stove repaired the next day gives a cozier image. Can we imagine careful Nietzsche existing very long with anything broken, except “typewriters and Lous”? That house in Sils is still charming beyond belief. I would call and book myself a room today (the phone number is 0041-(0) 81-826 53 69) if I didn’t find it just  too strange to imagining a phone ringing in Nietzsche's old airspace. Nietzsche scholars find it elegant enough to  honeymoon in the Nietzsche house, somewhat daringly I might add, since it was here that nose-to-paper, Nietzsche penned the prototype for the modern lonely, existential male ego, after his nasty break-up with Lou.

But I started in search of a lacy digression here, and have a question to ask you: isn't there more of Nietzsche to be remembered than this one Zweigian image? Would you like history to remember you only on a bad day when you had a killer headache? What about the younger Nietzsche who was not yet a great philosopher, who was in better health, and whose life was filled with both words and deeds, travel and adventures, a life lived wearing one mask after another? A Nietzsche at least who did not wear a tattered old suit.

   "So Nietzsche walked around Basel with a grey top hat. He did not wear a veil, otherwise he was a complete English gentleman from the storybook, a perfectly ridiculous sight. That was adorning himself! For nobody in Basel ever dreamt of walking about like that." 

Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: 

Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939

Jung, that gossipy old clothes horse, never wore anything except a stuffed shirt. Nietzsche prided himself on his wardrobe then. Note the professorial garb as described by Von Scheffler: "light-colored pants, a short jacket, and around his collar fluttered a delicately knotted necktie, also of a lighter color."  

 And when Paul Rée arrived in Genoa for vacation carrying an odd-shaped typewriter for his self-professed 7/8th blind friend (perhaps overstated? Who could navigate alone that steep path to the sea in Nizza being 7/8th blind?), he found Nietzsche dressed as a pirate, pretending to be Prince Doria, Andrea to those who dare use his first name.

Who was Doria if not a sunken ship? With some difficulty I got my hands on an 1888 book in French which described the 15th century Genoese buccaneer as a blood-thirsty mercenary who killed the requisite number of prisoners, and then killed some more just for sport. I am reminded of Nietzsche's other favorite oceanic adventurer, Columbus, who acted with less than gentility when he hit the Americas. Deadly to the Europeans as well, this Columbus, since he packaged syphilis in with the sweet red peppers of the Capsicum family -- if in fact you believe that the Poison of the Darkness (Jung’s term) was a gift from the Americas rather that vice versa. Perhaps workers in the Nietzsche Factory should fantasize a bit more about Nietzsche dressed as a pirate in Genoa.

Robert Aldrich gives us a picture of another man dressing up as a pirate in Italy: Wilhelm von Gloeden, the photographer whose post cards of Platonesque bathhouses brought gay men from repressive Germany to the sunnier and more accepting climate of Italy. Is that lace on the cuff of von Gloeden's pirate costume? But von Gloeden must be saved for another time, because pirates and Genoa and Columbus lead inevitably to that about which we are both most intrigued: the Myth of Syphilis.

      ...the causal toxin must have once entered Nietzsche's system, namely without his knowledge. The most obvious and likely occasion for this assumption was his service as a volunteer medical corpsman in the 1870 campaign, and especially perhaps the final transporting of influenza and diphtheria patients under the most unfavorable hygienic conditions. To overcome his lively disgust and probably in the belief that he was thereby enjoying some disinfecting protection, he smoked in the ambulance. How easily a transmission of the poison could have taken place if he ever set down his cigar in order to help a patient in the crowded vehicle!

-- Health Commissioner Vulpius, 1899

The little spirochetes that Columbus most probably brought back to Genoa replicated many times, beginning with the great syphilis epidemic the year after Columbus returned, before depositing themselves in Nietzsche's central nervous system. "Trust not the Genoese, my Friend," wrote Nietzsche in that poem he gave to Lou. Of course Nietzsche was not referring here to the rumor that he contracted syphilis in a homosexual brothel in Genoa --but what did he mean? And while we are on that poem, why did you translate it as “My Darling”? As we speculate about the many reasons for Nietzsche’s obsession with secrecy, we have to wonder whether or not he was  harboring the knowledge of this sexually transmitted disease, which was first treated in Leipzig by two doctors in 1867, and which killed him in 1900. Ah, a gentle hammer tap on the knee of the Gentle Nietzschean: Must I not properly insert "allegedly" here?

Scholars have enjoyed pretending Nietzsche didn't have syphilis, or had it without noticing it, or forgot that he had it, or thought he was cured. And even if he did have it, it was irrelevant, since it mysteriously appeared only on January 3, 1889 in Turin when his insanity manifested itself most clearly and all his work was safely and sanely wrapped up.  But since there is more than a fair chance that in 1867 a young man going to a doctor with those embarrassing little lesions would be acutely aware of the implications of something sexually transmitted, if not the Pox itself, should we not at least ask what effect it might have had on his friendships, or dare we even breathe this possibility -- on his writing --in that 23rd year of philosophical transition?  

Wouldn’t those who are heavily invested in seeing Lou and Nietzsche as a boy-meets-girl romance, with courtship and proposals of a sweet marriage (some excuse for this before Frau Lou perhaps, but after??) do well to ponder what the presence of this deadly sexually transmitted disease means in the story? Jung, who knew what there was to know about this syphilis, said that if Nietzsche and Lou had produced a little SuperHeir, it would have most likely been an average baby, though perhaps a little more pathological than most. Recall that Ronald Hayman looked into mother Franziska’s unequal pupils and speculated that Pastor Nietzsche might have transmitted that gift. But let’s stay with Nietzsche’s pupils, because otherwise I’ll have to go track down the details of how syphilis is transmitted at various stages, and how the congenital variety works its way.

Doctor Vulpius diagnosed syphilis because of a lack of reaction to light in Nietzsche's pupil, as well as pigment spots on the front of his lens capsule. What could possibly have caused Vulpius, this respected physician, to write something as silly as the Cigar Theory of Sexually Transmitted Disease? Freudian symbols aside, here a cigar is definitely not just a cigar, and cigars join mosquitoes and toilet seats for sheer  absurdity. Not to mention that an 1870 excuse for an 1867 Alleged Infection is not too useful anyway.

 Vulpius wrote " . . .  it is understandable that I approached my patient not only with medical but also with psychiatric interest, which in turn led Frau Dr. (honorary) Förster-Nietzsche to entrust me with writing a critique of her brother's medical history and the unsavory controversy connected with it." 

  So the cigar theory was commissioned by none other than that Queen of Perfidy herself, sister Elisabeth.  

  Oh, Elisabeth, what are we to do with you?

"....with that anti-semitic goose there can be no reconciliation."

---Nietzsche                  

Elisabeth, as you have observed, threatens to take over my story, since it is back to Elisabeth’s tall tales that we must go to see where so many of the misconceptions about Lou begin, and unraveling Elisabeth’s lies is no short task. My long chapter about the jungles of Paraguay, and speculation about why Elisabeth and Bern did not produce the perfect Aryan Heir in their expat colony, and how Elisabeth enticed the doctor to falsify the records – “death by nerves” the death certificate said after Bern found a strychnine and morphine cocktail preferable to being caught between angry German bankers and over-bearing Elisabeth -- all this is critical to the story, but how tedious.

Pious and Nazi-esque was Elisabeth, an unfortunate combination of traits to be sure. But Elisabeth is most hated for meddling so with the Archive, forging documents, and generally editing in a way meant to please Patron Adolf. Both Elisabeth and Cosima had a desire to establish a Matriarchy on the Corpses of their respective Departed Geniuses and wanted to stay home to do so, as opposed to Lou, the Itinerate Adventuress. Cosima of course did not like to see her former babysitter hatching such a fat egg: Elisabeth after all got three nominations for the Nobel Prize and what did Cosima get for chasing after Richard and writing down every his burp? Elisabeth must have felt some ownership over Nietzsche’s words. Was the Weimar Archive anything more to her than an expanded version of that childhood treasure chest, full of her young brother’s scribblings?

Elisabeth wrote vicious and untrue things about Lou, and called her that most detestable of types, God save us all, the Emancipated Woman  -- childless, independent, blasphemous. But wasn’t Elisabeth, childlessly and independently representing that most blasphemous of brothers, an Emancipated Woman by her own definition?  If Lou didn't bother to nitpick with Elisabeth, and ignored Freud’s question -- he asked her: when will you set the record straight!! --  why should I? 

Why don’t I just thank Elisabeth where I can, because to tell the truth, she has become both tiresome and intrusive. So, something kind about Elisabeth. Without her efficiency, the Nietzsche papers might not have been collected so neatly and Walter Kaufmann would not have had such a fine resource to create his popular Viking Portable Nietzsche. And can't we thank Elisabeth and mother Franziska for taking care of an insane man for a decade? For if the worst Nietzschean nightmare prophecy of the future might be just this physical and mental degeneration leading to a decade of nursed incarceration, surely the other side, nursing him all those years, was terrible as well? And if Elisabeth took absurd liberties with history, find me someone in this story who did not! 

Nietzsche himself was fond of his spitting Llama most of the time and in 1908 H.L. Mencken wrote how lucky Nietzsche was to have such a fine and caring sister. D’Annuncio thought she was quite Antigone-esque but they were before Hitler  and before Karl Schlechta brought Elisabeth’s bizarre editorial policy to light. A narrow escape for the Nobel Committee, wasn’t it?

Walter Kaufmann revised his Nietzsche biography after reading Frau Lou, which he said “supersedes all previous studies” neatly wrapping up and disposing of one hundred years of very strange scholarship and then rewriting his Nietzsche book with the Binion discovery: Lou lied. But Kaufmann doesn’t point out that you therefore did not tell the final story, but the anti-story, raising in “Beyond Frau Lou” that other question, that juicier question: why did she lie?  And peaking behind that question, what would she have said if she had told the truth? Kaufmann wants completion, simplicity, enough for him that she was “unreliable,” that both she and Elisabeth were “unreliable witnesses,”  a phrase simply picked up (and picked up simply) by most of those coming after.  Nietzsche, of course, praised Lou for her gift: “magnificent honesty.”  

Here is a good joke. Having established that Elisabeth was unreliable through and through, Walter Kaufmann makes her the final source of the truth about Lou:  “there seems to be no reason to doubt Elisabeth’s word” in the famous Clara letter where Elisabeth purports to set the record straight about that shocking Finnish Jew (neither of which Lou was) who had so corrupted her saintly brother. This bizarre letter has become the source of much of the definition of Lou’s character. Yet where was there ever more reason to doubt Ms. Elisabeth-Antigone than in this cornerstone document, written when Lou threatened everything -- her fiancé, her place with the Wagners, and most, her image of her ideal brother? 

And where would I be with this story if, on that dense foggy surreal Pennsylvania night when I rented a car with two students and drove Walter Kaufmann to Princeton to give an early Sunday lecture in chapel when his plane was grounded, I had known that Frau Lou might have already been on his desk? 

If we can’t trust Lou, or Elisabeth, if all  the biographers before you have been superseded, and if you end Frau Lou with the enticement to circle around and begin again, can we look to Nietzsche himself for “truth”?? The most truthful of men about his emotions, Nietzsche seems never to have lied straight out, though of course he took some casual liberties for whatever reasons with simple facts, such as the fabricated Polish ancestors. But that doesn’t mean that he ever told the truth either, unless it was to Lou and Paul Rée.  With them I could speak without a mask, he wrote to Elisabeth at the height of his anger over losing them. Nietzsche without a mask. How tantalizing Why does everyone write about his masks and no one about what he might have had to hide?

Last year when I reached this point, I gave up completely on the whole group (or so I thought) and took off for Taos, New Mexico to see what I could find about D.H. Lawrence, and his wife, Frieda von Richthofen. Why? I've always been curious why she left her husband, Ernest Weekley, and her three children in Sherwood Forest to run off with David Herbert Lawrence, who wrote about Freud’s stream of consciousness running out his ear. Did Lawrence have any biographical links to the Freud circle, I wondered

     "I expect you will be surprised when I tell you that in 1925 Carl Jung sat where you are sitting now."

--Receptionist, Mabel Dodge Inn, 

Taos New Mexico

Mabel Dodge was D.H. Lawrence’s patroness. When he died, she plotted to steal his ashes from Frieda and set his soul free to the breeze but Frieda caught wind of the whole thing and mixed poor Lorenzo’s remains with concrete. Nietzsche was buried with a holy Christian ceremony, and Lou’s last wish to join her garden was denied, but I won’t go off on unsuccessful burial stories -- rather I want to tell you how disconcerted I was when the receptionist told me of Carl Jung’s visit to the New Mexico desert.

That Trickster, that veritable archetype of himself. What could he have been doing there? Was he chasing the expatriate cowgirl, Lola Montez, through the old Wild West?  Of course not. The receptionist told me that Mabel, her Pueblo husband Tony Luhan and Georgia O'Keefe had exchanged syphilis in this B&B, in what order I forget, in the bed upstairs that was mine for the night. (We have already lost track of whether Columbus was the exporter or importer of syphilis in the American Indian community, but what does it matter now?)

Dr. Jung had not come here to treat Mabel for syphilis or to see if she would be a suitable patient because she had already applied to him and been rejected, nor was he there to discuss her analysis with A.A. Brill, translator of Freud into English, nor to discuss the paying of Brill’s fees with one of Lawrence’s original manuscripts. If he had paused to relieve himself upstairs after the long and dusty ride from Santa Fe, he would have been seen by anyone wandering in the courtyard, because D. H. Lawrence did not paint cute blue chickens on the windows to assure privacy in Mabel's privy until 1927.

No, Jung was only checking out the mythology of the local Pueblo Indians. There is a section in  Memories, Dreams and Reflections on Taos if you are curious. It is too bad for history that one of Jung's famous synchronicities did not allow Frieda and Lorenzo to wander by Mabel's on that day when Jung was sitting in a chair that was not quite sturdy enough for his magnificent size, which would have dwarfed Freud in the picture of the group at the Weimar conference if Jung had not stooped and Freud had not stood on a box. Why do I wish that these three, Jung, Lawrence and Frieda, had conversed? Why do I wish that three diaries would be neatly archived and available with reflections on this discussion that never happened? Because in Taos I discovered that Frieda left Weekley because she had been totally ruined for the sedate life of motherhood in Sherwood Forest by none other than the original Fierce Nietzschean, renegade Freudian, Otto Gross. Otto Gross -- the man who converted Jung to enlightened polygamy when he was looking for an excuse to begin a sexual relationship with his first psychoanalytic patient, Sabina Spielrein. Otto Gross, Freudian analyst and Freudian patient, who escaped over the walls of Jung’s famous mental institute  and died soon after of a drug overdose.

"The nearest approach to the romantic idea of a genius I have even met.... Such penetrative powers of divining the inner thoughts of others I was never to see again."

  --- Ernest Jones on Otto Gross, in his biography of Freud

In 1907 Otto Gross, anarchist and sexual libertarian, had two children, one with his wife (whose name was Frieda) and one with Frieda Weekley’s sister, Else. He named both boys Peter. If Frieda Weekley, who was also his lover that year, had become pregnant as well, no doubt his fatherdom would have been thrice Petered. There are in fact rumors of a third child. To Frieda, he wrote "It is as if out of your letter streamed the warmth of your body, so sweet and powerful, like a wave of happy, liberating bliss, as you live and give, you whom I love with such joy." 

When Jung got stuck in a session, Gross analyzed him, and once they even had a twenty-four hour marathon session. His drug of choice was cocaine. Did he and Freud share notes on the use of cocaine? Gross gave Jung the idea of the introvert/extrovert classification and once, when he was arrested by the Berlin police as a dangerous psychopath, Jung obliged his father (a famous criminologist) by signing a certificate to that effect. When friends conspired to spring him, they arrived to find he had been invited to join the staff. 

I spent the afternoon on the flat deck outside the upstairs bathroom of the Mabel Dodge Lodge, photographing Lawrence’s captivating window-chickens, which I later enlarged and framed, making a private exhibit of Lawrence’s playful design, and wondering what Frieda had told Lawrence about Gross’s attempt to live out his interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy. What Jung had told Gross of the rumors about Nietzsche he had picked up in Basel. What Sabina Spielrein thought about Lou when they were both analysts with Freud, and finally, what Gross knew about how much Freud lied about having read Nietzsche. With one window open, I could see in to the bathroom, and of course could not resist speculating on what Jung thought of this open-air john as he looked out on the silent desert. I wondered what negotiations Lawrence had with Mabel prior to carrying pots of blue and white paint up the narrow staircase to assure the sanctity of that loo. But what am I doing lost in fantasy about poultry decorating a desert inn when I have a different Lou to pursue?

So here is a myth-maker’s riddle to close.  Who more than anyone determined the way the contemporary Western mind thinks of cruelty, or warfare, or mass destruction? Who conceived these thoughts in syphilitic despair? Who, being otherwise chaste, as far as anyone knows, might have contracted this “spectral spirochete” from a single episode with a prostitute? Is the entire responsibility for destruction in the Western world to lie on the fragile shoulders of this one poor Esmerelda of the streets?  I have set you up, of course, to answer Nietzsche! But according to Simon Weisenthal the answer, as revealed in today’s issue of the New Yorker, is Adolf Hitler. The New Yorker, our best current source of gossip on dead Germans. 

Ron Rosenbaum apparently did not know of the red bow Claude Lanzmann so unsuccessfully tried to tie around you and your inflammatory Hitler article in Paris. His article would have been so much more to the point if he had known how much the whole myth-making procedure reduced to illogic and temporal confusion when Lanzmann tried to link you and Hitler together as Nazi Revisionists. His definition of how the myths define the myth-makers while eluding the subjects is of course my favorite investigation, but he seems to miss some larger context in this article, Jonathan’s question: Why does it all matter?

Who has created the 20th century Western mind? One might say Freud, for the analytic/unconscious orientation, Jung with the spiritual/transpersonal, Hitler with the insane/political (i.e. the potential for species self-destruction). And who stands behind these three men? Nietzsche. Rosenbaum reviewed theories about the question: When did Hitler turn? When did the baby of the baby picture cease to be innocent? The question behind the myth of Nietzsche is: When did Nietzsche turn?  When did the god-fearing and god-pleasing Lutheran boy become inspired to change the rules defining Truth and thereby script our minds in such an unsettling manner? Was it when the first spirochete entered his bloodstream? Was it when he wandered in to the bookstore and discovered Schopenhauer? Or was it November, 1882 when he thought he could no longer trust his two best friends?

Yesterday I spent the day watching Alec Guinness (who never should have passed a screen test for Hitler) trying to speak with an  English-German accent, reading the New Yorker article, and watching the Russians doing primitive forensics on the remains in the bunker.

But that is a story for another day.

Love,

Deb