Nietzsche’s Secrets

Watch out! There is nothing we like to show others more than the seal of secrecy  along with what lies under it.

Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 197

The philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote that anyone who finds consistency in Friedrich Nietzsche’s work has not read far enough: Self-contradiction is the fundamental ingredient in Nietzsche’s thought.[1] The same can be said of his biography.  While the linear chronology of his life is carefully documented, unsolved mysteries and unanswered questions -of love and death, sex and syphilis, genius and insanity - have yielded so many different Nietzsches that his contemporary image is more a cubist painting than a frontal portrait. Each new study off the press adds another conflicting view, and past interpretations change as new biographical detail is added to the  lore. His own life has become the best illustration of his theory of perspectivism, with prejudices of each successive decade adding complexity to the Nietzsche Legend.

Nietzsche was born in the small town of Röcken on October 15, 1844. His father was a Lutheran pastor and his mother a Lutheran pastor’s daughter.  Pastor Nietzsche died when little Fritz was almost five, leaving him and his sister Elisabeth to be  raised by his mother, two unmarried aunts and a grandmother. At fourteen he enrolled on scholarship at the boarding school Pforta.  After attending university first at Bonn and then Leipzig, he was appointed to teach classical philology at Basel. After ten years there, he obtained a paid medical leave of absence and spent the next decade traveling and writing, mostly in Italy and Switzerland. At the start of 1889 he went insane, and after a brief incarceration, he spent the next eleven years in the care of his mother and sister. He died on August 25, 1900.           

While each Nietzsche biography uses the well-documented events of his life to tell its own internally consistent story, an overview of the vast literature reveals countless contradictions and scholarly squabbles. Did he have syphilis? If so, when, where and how did he contract it C and was he aware that he was infected?  If he was aware, did such knowledge contribute to his self-image as a culture critic and outsider? When did his insanity first manifest? Was it on January 3, 1889, when he fell to the ground in the town square of Turin and rose insane? Or were his last works already showing the effects of dementia?  Was he in love with Lou Salomé?  (Or Cosima Wagner? Or Paul Rée?) What mysterious Aoffense@ (as he called it) caused his break with Lou? Did he break with Richard Wagner over the religious nature of Parsifal C or because Wagner spread dangerous rumors about his sexuality? What did Nietzsche’s mother learn that led her to call her son an insult to his father’s grave?  Had Franziska Nietzsche been both boisterous and over-attentive as a young mother, a “wild shoot” in the pious Nietzsche family, or was she stupid and remote?  Was Pastor Nietzsche the epitome of the gentle country parson, as Nietzsche recalled, or an evil tyrant who beat the boy and locked him in dark closets?[2]

How these questions are answered shapes the various accounts of Nietzsche’s life. The subject —Nietzsche — remains the same, but the story unfolds very differently when written by Lou Salomé, Elisabeth Nietzsche, H.L. Mencken, Charles Andler, Erich  Podach, Karl Jaspers, Crane Brinton, Walter Kaufmann, R. J. Hollingdale, Curt Paul Janz or Ronald Hayman. 

Contradiction in the biographical literature began with books by Lou Salomé, a woman who was Nietzsche’s friend in 1882, and by his sister Elisabeth. Lou’s study, published in 1894, was followed a year later by the first of Elisabeth’s three volumes (eventually reduced to two — The Young Nietzsche, which describes an  idyllic childhood, and The Lonely Nietzsche— the story of the hermit years). Lou’s book traced the development of his thought through various periods of his life. If the task of the biographer is to explicate the thinker through his person, it applies in an unusual degree to Nietzsche because external intellectual work and a picture of his inner life coalesce completely.[3] By contrast Elisabeth’s books contain little about her brother’s philosophy but quite a bit about that “miserable compound of cunning and malice”[4] —her enemy, Lou Salomé. Nietzsche’s friend and transcriber Peter Gast, who knew Nietzsche’s work intimately, marveled that Lou resisted becoming inflamed by Nietzsche and instead retained a cold and observational attitude toward him. To Gast’s mind she was a woman whose level of intelligence was seen only five or six times a century. Elisabeth predictably dismissed Lou’s effort as “a product of injured feminine vanity revenging itself upon a poor invalid who could no longer defend himself”[5] and concluded:  “Frau Lou Andreas paints a fancy picture, of which one can only say ‘It isn’t Nietzsche!’ "[6]  Nietzsche’s friend Franz Overbeck found Elisabeth’s book to be the dishonest one: “rarely has the reading public been so duped,” he wrote,[7] as in the book by Nietzsche’s dangerous sister.

Lou never answered Elisabeth’s various charges against her — despite Sigmund Freud’s urging years later. "It has often annoyed me,” Freud wrote to her, “to find your relationship to Nietzsche mentioned in a way which was obviously hostile to you and which could not possibly correspond with the facts. You have put up with everything and have been far too decent; I hope that now at last you will defend yourself, even though in the most dignified way.”[8]

The Story of Nietzsche, Lou and Elisabeth

Early in 1882 Nietzsche traveled to Rome with the encouragement of his friend, the philosopher Paul Rée, to meet a young woman from Russia who was traveling in Italy with her mother. Nietzsche spent most of his time in Rome in bed plagued by intense migraines, but he did venture out to meet Lou.

Lou, who had just spent the year studying at the University of Zurich, hoped to find in the spas of Italy a cure for persistent health problems of her own— chronic fever and bleeding lungs. She had met Paul Rée at the salon of Malwida von Meysenbug, idealist and former revolutionary, whose drawing room was one of the cultural centers of Europe. Accompanied by Rée, Lou went to the Basilica of St. Peter to meet Nietzsche. She recorded her first impression of him in her diary:

I would say that this reserve, this inkling of concealed loneliness, is the first strong impression which makes Nietzsche's appearance so striking . . . His eyes truly betrayed him. Although half-blind, they showed no trace of the peering and blinking and involuntary intrusiveness of many shortsighted people. They looked much more like guardians of treasures and unspoken secrets which no trespassers should glimpse. This defective vision lent his features a special kind of magic in that instead of reflecting ever-changing, external impressions, they revealed only what he had internalized.[9]

Nietzsche felt he had finally found the long wished-for disciple in Lou. He wrote to Malwida, “This year, which signifies a new crisis in several chapters of my life [epoch is the right word — an intermediate state between two crises, one behind me, one ahead of me] has been made much more beautiful for me by the radiance and charm of this truly heroic soul. I wish to acquire a pupil in her and, if my life should not last much longer, an heir and one who will develop my thoughts.@[10] Lou, twenty-one that year, had been raised in a German-speaking community in St. Petersburg where her father was a general in the Czar’s military administration. Having come to Europe in pursuit of an intellectual life, she soon made plans to spend the following winter with Nietzsche and Rée in Paris, as part of the lively intellectual circle around the Russian expatriate Ivan Turgenev. When Lou’s mentor in Russia, the evangelical preacher Hendrik Gillot, greeted her announcement of the plan with dismay, she replied passionately that she thought he would be singing her praises over how well she had learned her lesson: this was no fantasy but reality involving “individuals you might have selected yourself, filled almost to bursting with spirituality and keenness of mind.” She continued with youthful ardor: “I can't live according to some model, and I could never be a model for anyone else; but I intend to shape my life for myself, no matter how it turns out. This is not a matter of some principle I'm following, but something much more wonderful  C something that exists inside me, glowing with life itself, something that wants to burst forth with a shout of joy.”[11]

Nietzsche, too, was exuberant. “How could I fear fate,” he wrote to Ida Overbeck, “particularly when it confronts me in the wholly unexpected form of Lou? Rée and I feel the same devotion to our courageous, high-minded friend: even on this score he and I have great faith in each other, and we are not of the dumbest or youngest. So far I have kept strict silence here about all these things.”[12] To Peter Gast he wrote that Lou was “amazingly ripe and ready for my way of thinking.”[13]

Lou spent most of  May at Paul Rée’s family estate in Stibbe, working on notes for a  study of Nietzsche. In July she attended Richard Wagner’s summer festival in Bayreuth with Elisabeth but without Nietzsche, who was by then persona non grata in the Wagner camp.  “As for Bayreuth,” Nietzsche wrote to her, “I am satisfied not to have to be there, and yet, if I could be near you in a ghostly way, murmuring this and that in your ear, then I would find even the music of Parsifal endurable [otherwise it is not endurable].”[14] Lou and Elisabeth had an argument following the festival, and when Elisabeth reported it to Nietzsche he canceled a planned time with Lou, but he soon changed his mind and they spent three weeks together in Tautenburg —with Elisabeth (still angry) staying nearby.  There they had their most intense philosophical discussions. Nietzsche later wrote that it was only after meeting Lou that he was ready for his Zarathustra. “If anyone had heard us,”  Lou wrote in her memoir, “he would have thought two devils were conversing.”[15]

Elisabeth, apparently, did think just that. From early childhood, she had revered her brother. That summer she discovered he had changed. To her friend Clara Gelzer she wrote:

Do not read my brother’s books, they are too frightful for us, our hearts are made for higher things than the self-admiration of egotism. Oh, make no effort or cause yourself any pain by attempting to reconcile these books with earlier Nietzsche works, it is not possible because, my dear dear Clara, and tell no one, I have lived through a frightful experience here and I have had to recognize that Fritz has become different, he is just like his books.[16]

Elisabeth blamed Lou for leading her brother astray: “she is the personification of my brother’s philosophy with that furious egotism which tears apart everything in its path.”[17]

Nietzsche spent October in Leipzig with Lou and Rée, visiting friends and experimenting with the life they planned to live together the following year. But in November without warning he announced to Ida Overbeck that the Trinity was off, and he began to write vicious letters to Lou, blaming her for an unspecified offense. “If I banish you from me now, it is a frightful censure of your whole being  . . . You have caused damage, you have done harm — and not only to me but to all the people who have loved me: this sword hangs over you.”[18]  Lou, whose letters of the period have been lost, apparently defended herself —Nietzsche wrote of her “justification” —but whatever she said failed to reconcile him. “Should Lou be a misunderstood angel?” he asked. “Should I be a misunderstood ass?”[19] And finally “Adieu, my dear Lou, I shall not see you again.”[20]

Lou never did see Nietzsche again. Three times she went to Celerina, a short distance from Sils Maria where Nietzsche spent his summers, but she never made the trip to the white boarding house where he lived. Afterward she lived in a scholarly community as planned with Paul Rée, though in Berlin instead of Paris. In their intellectual circle, which included many of Nietzsche’s friends, his absence was felt:  “. . . he stood, like a hidden shadow, an invisible figure, in our midst.”[21]  The sociologist-to-be Ferdinand Tönnies temporarily took Nietzsche’s planned place as third housemate.  Tönnies, who at first idolized Nietzsche but later came to believe his elitism was dangerous, was sent by Lou on a mission of reconciliation to Sils Maria. “I encountered the hermit frequently and felt the piercing gaze of his feeble eyes upon me,” Tönnies wrote, but he found himself unable to speak to Nietzsche: “An alien fate deterred me.”[22]  

During Nietzsche’s insanity Elisabeth took over from her mother the rights of administration of her brother’s literary estate and established the Nietzsche Archive at Weimar. Nominated three times for the Nobel Prize for her literary work on Nietzsche’s legacy, she enjoyed the fame denied her brother by dementia. She saw herself equal to Cosima Wagner as the guardian of the immortal remains of one of the two greatest men of the nineteenth century; like Cosima, she claimed the right to edit as she pleased. Her privileged status did not survive the disclosure by Karl Schlechta and others that she had forged and falsified documents, and rewritten or reattributed letters by and to Nietzsche. H.L. Mencken’s story of Nietzsche cast Elisabeth as the loving and helpful sister. In the contemporary literature she has been reduced to lurking “malignantly in the footnotes, the undergrowth of history.”[23] Ben Macintyre referred to her as nasty, bigoted, ambitious and bloody-minded. It is a rare subject who can elicit such adjectives from her biographer.

Lou earned her living and established her reputation as a woman of letters in Europe writing novels, stories, essays and reviews. Beginning at age fifty she trained in psychoanalysis, which she practiced until her death in 1937. She was Sigmund Freud’s close friend and confidante.

After her death Ernst Pfeiffer, the executor of her literary estate, published her retrospective memoirs under the title Looking Back. Here she stated, as she had previously told others, that Nietzsche and Rée had both proposed marriage to her. For many years Pfeiffer denied access to Lou’s archive, with the exception of a few scholars who were restricted to taking notes only when he was present in the room, and at that with some of the material (such as the Anna Freud correspondence) within view C but tantalizingly off limits.

In 1962  H .F. Peters used the material in the archive for a biography of Lou, somewhat in the style of a romantic novel, centering on her troubled friendship with Nietzsche, and in 1968 Rudolph Binion published Frau Lou: Nietzsche’s Wayward Disciple. If at first Binion had felt no need to “rehash that stale Nietzsche-Lou story,”[24] he soon found Nietzsche (and his rejection of Lou ) to be central to the narrative of her life. What began as a psychoanalytic study of a psychoanalyst, ended with a repudiation of some of the basic tenets of psychoanalysis, and when Binion finally compiled his thousands of pages of notes into one massive manuscript, he suddenly discovered yet another problem: Lou, it appeared,  had invented Nietzsche’s proposal of marriage. This surprise led to other unravellings until he “perforce concluded that nothing Lou ever said about herself could be trusted.”[25]  Faced with yet another rewrite, after his Lou project had already extended years beyond the initial plan, he concluded with a chapter entitled “Beyond Frau Lou,” in which he acknowledged that the mystery at the base of the story of Lou and Nietzsche was still unsolved. “I am leaving the text discontinuous and inconsistent just so as to underscore its inconclusiveness.”[26]  In Binion’s mind Lou’s life is “enchanted,”[27] her writing extraordinary — and her habit of freely fictionalizing her own life irksome to an extreme. Of the many tellings of the tale of Lou and Nietzsche, Binion’s remains unique in ending with recognition of the questions that remain unanswered.

While Walter Kaufmann was revising his study of Nietzsche’s life, he received the manuscript of Frau Lou in the mail. He rewrote his chapter about Lou and Nietzsche based on the new discoveries and concluded:

The relationships between Nietzsche, Lou, and Rée have been a matter of controversy ever since Nietzsche broke with Lou and Rée. Until 1967 there were mainly two versions: Elisabeth's and Lou's; and those who had discovered Elisabeth's sovereign impatience with the truth, and eventually that she had even tampered with the documents and forged letters, believed in Lou's unquestionable honesty. It was only in a comprehensive study of Lou's life and works published in 1968 that her falsification of the record and her tampering with the evidence were proved. Now we know that both women are unreliable witnesses.[28] 

But Kaufmann’s off-handed rejection of the two “unreliable witnesses” was a poor reading of Binion, who had no intention of dismissing Lou so lightly, or of equating her “fabrications” with Elisabeth’s “falsifications.” Kaufmann ignored Binion’s open-ended question of why none of the pieces quite fit together in the story of Lou and Nietzsche: why were both of these women lying? Nietzsche’s wish that he and Lou not become the object of European gossip did not come true, and his many invocations to secrecy have only inflamed the curiosity of those who have tried to tell their mysterious story.[29]

Crane Brinton distinguished gentle from tough Nietzscheans. Following Kaufmann most biographers of Nietzsche have been of gentle disposition portraying him as an unlucky lover, chaste but not from choice. Binion’s case that Nietzsche’s proposal of marriage was Lou’s tall tale (whatever her motivation) is lost in the assumption of much of contemporary biography that an infatuated Nietzsche not only proposed to Lou, but that it was her rejection of him that caused his misery at the time of the writing of Zarathustra. Kaufmann, the last person one would expect to accept Elisabeth’s word without question, used her correspondence with her friend Clara Gelzer as the source for one of the most inaccurate possible portraits of Lou, stating that “there seems to be no reason to doubt Elisabeth’s word”[30] when she promised to tell the whole truth about Lou— warning enough from Elisabeth to be wary of what followed.

In grand soap opera style, various texts have assumed that both Nietzsche and Rée proposed marriage, that Nietzsche had Rée propose on his behalf, that because Rée failed Nietzsche proposed again, and that Nietzsche encouraged Rée to propose. Elisabeth and Ida Overbeck agreed that Nietzsche had no intention of marrying Lou, and Joachim Köhler[31] has suggested that marriage might have been intended as a cover-up for rumors of pederasty [32] circulating around Bayreuth at the time. In all the permutations of marriage possibilities, no one seems to think it strange that two misogynist friends who never before or after had a known erotic relationship would both fall immediately  in love with a young woman who expressed a complete disinterest in romantic pursuits.   

To sustain this romantic perspective it has often been necessary to contradict Nietzsche. ADear friend,@ Nietzsche wrote to Peter Gast, AYou=ll surely do us both the honor of keeping the notion of a love affair far removed from our relationship. We are friends, and I intend to hold this girl and her trust in me sacred.@[33]  And later, AI myself really do not need to feel ashamed of the whole affair. I have felt the strongest and most genuine emotions for Lou and there was nothing erotic in my love. At most I could have made a god jealous."[34]        

While Nietzsche=s literary and philosophical reputation has soared, as a man he has always had commentators who have referred to him personally in a demeaning fashion: as Aa sport of nature@ or Aa strange bird@ (Jung),[35]  Apriggish@ (Brinton),[36] a Amiserable little man@ (Nehamas)[37] or a Asomewhat pathetic oddball@ (Solomon)[38]. Similarly, as Lou=s stature as a woman of letters has increased with time, speculation about her private life has led to contradictory images that imitate both Nietzsche=s high opinion of her in the beginning of their friendship, and his name-calling at the end. (In a letter to Paul Rée=s brother he referred to her as Athis thin, dirty, evil-smelling little monkey with her false breasts C a fate!@)[39]  Lou has been described as muse,  moral monster, cannibalistic virgin, goddess, cocktease, femme fatale, witch and earth mother. R. J. Hollingdale considered it lucky Nietzsche didn=t marry her since she was frigid, while Stanley A. Leavy (editor of her Freud journal) called her compulsively sexual and Victor Emil von Gebsattel (a psychoanalyst and short-term lover) gossiped that she was a nymphomaniac.

Questions of Syphilis and Sex Enter the Literature

In 1902 a psychiatrist, P. J. Möbius, published a study which was the result of one of Elisabeth Nietzsche=s major miscalculations. Before she granted him access to Nietzsche=s medical records at Jena, she might have been warned by his previous books, which included On the Physiological Weak-Mindedness of Women, and by his technique, pathography  C his other allegedly pathological subjects included Jesus and Shakespeare. He shocked her by revealing the diagnosis of syphilis and by hypothesizing that Nietzsche manifested insanity as early as 1881 (thus before he met Lou). Only the intellectually deaf, Möbius wrote, are unable to hear the undertones of progressive paralysis in Nietzsche=s work. He concluded, AIf you find pearls do not imagine that it is all one chain of pearls. Be distrustful, for this man has a diseased brain.@[40]  Möbius wrote that although Nietzsche=s attraction for sex had been abnormally weak,[41] he undoubtedly had visited prostitutes; Elisabeth was furious and vehemently denied the possible truth of this allegation. Nonetheless the question of syphilis (and sex) had been raised in print.

To erase the diagnosis of syphilis, Elisabeth tried persuading Franz Overbeck (on his deathbed) to admit that he had given incorrect information when Nietzsche was admitted to the asylum, but Overbeck refused, adding that Nietzsche=s doctor, Otto Binswanger, had told him confidentially that he had no doubt of the diagnosis. With word out in the general press, and no help from Overbeck, Elisabeth finally tried at least to control the damage. She commissioned one of Nietzsche=s doctors to counter some of the Aunsavory@ gossip set off by the diagnosis with a hypothesis that Nietzsche might have contracted the disease by smoking a contaminated cigar when he was a military nurse. "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!"[42] 

A few years after what Elisabeth referred to as Möbius= Adisgusting calumny,@ Ludwig von Scheffler, a student of Nietzsche=s at Basel, composed a portrait of his former professor to counter Avery bad images@ that Adistort his features and give a false idea of him@[43] and published it in the Neue Freie Presse.  Scheffler=s portrait, full of homoerotic hints and innuendoes, linked Nietzsche with the poet August von Platen,[44] a royal page in the Bavarian court who escaped to Italy in 1824 to live the rest of his life free of the sexual restrictions of the north. AHow great the similarity of the two men=s temperaments was, I had been convinced long ago. In Platen=s case the evidence is in his memoirs, which say everything. In Nietzsche=s case, I learned it from direct experience.@[45] That experience was an episode in which Nietzsche invited his student on a vacation in the south, which Scheffler declined in a poignant scene. AEven to this day I cannot speak of it without shyness. Least of all, however, because I fear an uncomprehending reader. Whoever has looked so deeply into Michelangelo=s heart and drawn the veil from Platen=s confessions will also not stand in timid silence before Nietzsche=s mysterious psyche.@[46]  Nietzsche was quite familiar with Platen=s life: he had requested a copy of the biography of the poet for his birthday from his mother when he was at Pforta. 

Scheffler described another meeting with Nietzsche, this time in a museum, before Holbein=s self-portrait:

I faltered when I came to the mouth. I could see the lips before me. So fully rounded yet so energetically closed! Not avid, yet as if created for pleasure!

>A mouth . . .,= I stammered bewilderedly. 

>A mouth to kiss!=

 Disconcertedly I looked aside. Truly, it was Nietzsche who had spoken, in an attitude and tone which seemed to contrast most strangely with the mildly sensual coloration of his words. For leaning far back in his armchair, his head bowed onto his chest and his arms hanging limply on the armrests, he seemed to have spoken out of a dream rather than as a comment on my report.[47] 

Freud, Jung and Biographical Gossip

At the April 1, 1908 meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Paul Federn stated: AAccording to a reliable source, Nietzsche had at certain periods of his life homosexual relations and acquired syphilis in a homosexual brothel.@ At the second meeting devoted to Nietzsche  (a discussion of the recently published Ecce Homo on October 28, 1908 ) Freud revealed, if not the Areliable source@ of that rumor, at least the name of the man who brought it to the Freud inner circle.  According to Otto Rank=s minutes, Freud said: AWe just have not succeeded in understanding Nietzsche=s personality. One could look at the matter this way: this is an individual about whom we lack some prerequisite information. Some sexual abnormality is certainly present. Jung claims to have learned that Nietzsche acquired syphilis in a homosexual brothel; however, this is immaterial.@[48]  Freud described Nietzsche as a man who had reached a degree of introspection never before achieved - - or likely to be achieved again; due to paresis he was able to penetrate all layers of the psyche and recognize instincts at the base of everything. ACompletely cut off from life by illness, he turns to the only object of investigation that is still accessible to him and which, in any event, is close to him as a homosexual, i.e., the ego.@[49]        

Although Freud=s private comments to his Wednesday group of colleagues remained unpublished in Otto Rank=s notebook until 1967, he did have one other occasion to reveal Jung=s rumor. His friend Arnold Zweig announced a plan to write a comparison between Freud=s thought and Nietzsche=s.  Oddly, after avoiding comparison with Nietzsche all his life, Freud wrote back pleased that such a study would be availableC  after he was dead and Zweig was haunted by his memory. But Zweig changed his project. Instead he would write a wildly romantic novel following Nietzsche into psychosis C Athe dark realm full of magic laws and the wild residues of the psyche,@[50] with Hitler looming in the background, and with Lou and Cosima Wagner as constellations in the sky.

Freud tried to talk him out of this new plan. Unsuccessful, he mentioned Lou as one of the few people alive who knew anything intimate about Nietzsche . AAnd she is not given to telling it. Certainly she would only do so by word of mouth. She never wanted to tell me about him. For your purposes she would of course be invaluable.@[51]  Freud wrote to Lou on Zweig=s behalf; she responded quickly: AIt is absolutely out of the question that I should participate in this in any way. I cannot consider such a thing and the mere thought of it fills me with dismay. Please tell this to your correspondent in the strongest and most final terms C moreover, how right you are to dissuade him altogether from his Nietzsche plan!@[52] Still Zweig would not give up. He said if Lou would not at least give him details about Nietzsche=s Saxon dialect or bushy moustache, he could very well just make it up. AShould writers be allowed to weave such a web of fantasy round the crude pathological facts?@ Freud queried.[53]

As a last attempt to show Zweig just how far wrong he could go with his project, Freud revealed the rumor that Nietzsche had been a passive homosexual and had acquired syphilis in a male brothel in Genoa, though not citing Jung as the source. AWhether this is true or not C quién sabe?@[54]  Zweig never wrote the novel. 

When Freud had been a student of Franz Brentano=s at the University of Vienna and a member of the study group that corresponded with Nietzsche, the philosopher had been a Aremote and noble figure@[55] to him. And when Freud spoke of the heights from which Lou had descended to join the Freud circle, he was perhaps thinking of her association with Nietzsche. As a doctor Freud found Nietzsche to be a case study like none other. By his great introspection Nietzsche Aplaced his paretic disposition at the service of science@[56]  C and by implication, at the service of Freud himself. Freud may or may not have shied away from too much reading of Nietzsche to avoid undue influence, as he claimed at various times. It is clear, however,  that he did not shy away from psychological or medical gossip. One of his early personal links to Nietzsche was Josef Paneth, a university friend who spent time with Nietzsche in the winter of 1883-84 and who wrote letters about him to Freud, which Freud subsequently destroyed.  Elisabeth quoted from one of Nietzsche=s  letters to Paneth in her biography:   AFifty years hence, perhaps, a few men [or one man C it would need a genius!] will be able to see what I have done.@[57]  Freud published his last, and possibly most philosophical, work C Moses and Monotheism C exactly fifty years after the onset of Nietzsche=s insanity.[58] 

If Freud=s attitude toward Nietzsche was a cool, clinical detachment, Jung=s was much more emotional and personal. As a native of Basel Jung had the opportunity to learn biographical details from Nietzsche=s former colleagues. His research was done less with the techniques of the academic scholar than of the private investigator. At the university he heard many Aunflattering tidbits@[59]  about Nietzsche, where he only found two people who spoke favorably of him; both were homosexuals, Jung added C one committed suicide, one Aran to seed as a misunderstood genius.@[60] Jung was a colleague of Ludwig Binswanger, a member of Freud=s Wednesday evening group, whose uncle  (Otto Binswanger) had been Nietzsche=s doctor in the asylum. He corresponded with Elisabeth Nietzsche about various biographical matters and with one of Nietzsche=s early biographers from Basel, Carl Bernoulli. 

In the notes on his seminar on Nietzsche=s Zarathustra, Jung related a dream of Nietzsche=s to the diagnosis of syphilis:

. . . Nietzsche always suffered from the peculiar phobia that when he saw a toad, he felt that he ought to swallow it. And once when he was sitting beside a young woman at a dinner, he told her of a dream he had had, in which he saw his hand with all the anatomical detail, quite translucent, absolutely pure and crystal-like, and then suddenly an ugly toad was sitting upon his hand and he had to swallow it. You know, the toad has always been suspected of being poisonous, so it represents a secret poison hidden in the darkness where such creatures live C they are nocturnal animals. And the extraordinary fact is that it is a parallel to what actually happened to Nietzsche, of all people C that exceedingly sensitive nervous man has a syphilitic infection. That is a historical fact C I know the doctor who took care of him. It was when he was twenty-three years old. I am sure this dream refers to that fatal impression; this absolutely pure system infected by the poison of the darkness.[61] 

Perhaps Jung=s most fascinating and surprising source of information was Franz Overbeck.  AOverbeck always handled Nietzsche with gloves; I knew him. He was a typical, refined historian, a very learned man, and in all his ways exceedingly polite and careful not to touch anything that was hot.@[62]   What Jung might have discussed with a fellow medical doctor who had treated Nietzsche for syphilis, or with a fellow historical theologian, remains speculation.

Like Freud, Jung wrote that he had long held back from reading Nietzsche, but less from a desire to avoid influence than from Aa secret fear that I might perhaps be like him, at least in regard to the >secret= which had isolated him from his environment.@[63]  [COMMENT1]  Jung was referring to Nietzsche=s A#2" personality,@ his AZarathustra@ C the dangerous part of himself that he fearlessly released into a world that knew nothing of such things.  Jung found Nietzsche=s hidden personality to be morbid, and the fear that his own second personality was morbid as well filled him with terror. AI must not let myself find out how far I might be like him,@[64] he wrote, though he did in fact find out through self-analysis following his break with Freud many years later. At every step of the way he hit up against Athe same psychic material which is the stuff of psychosis and is found in the insane.@[65]  But Jung felt he was saved by strong ties to the other world C his wife,  children,  medical career Cunlike Nietzsche, the hermit, who Alost the ground under his feet@ and was a Ablank page whirling about in the winds of the spirit.@[66]

The Lonely, the Tough, the Romantic Nietzsche

One of the most often quoted portraits of Nietzsche as philosopher-hermit comes from biographer and novelist Stefan Zweig:

Nietzsche=s inborn disposition toward an unduly violent reaction to every stimulus was undoubtedly fostered by the fifteen years he spent in a stifling atmosphere of seclusion. Since during the three hundred and sixty-five days of the year nothing corporeal, neither woman nor friend, came into personal contact with him, since he exchanged scarcely a syllable with anyone but himself, he carried on an uninterrupted dialogue with his own nerves.[67] 

In writing of Nietzsche=s wretched conditions Zweig hoped to counter the image popular at the time of Nietzsche as a Germanic superman, a Prometheus, an archetypal hero C Aevery feature of this masterful countenance taut with will-power, health, and strength C such is the portrait usually given of him.@[68]  In its place he created the sick and miserable Nietzsche. He catalogued these complaints: AHeadaches so ferocious that all he could do was to collapse onto a couch and groan in agony, stomach troubles culminating in cramps when he would vomit blood, migrainous conditions of every sort, fevers, loss of appetite, exhaustion, hemorrhoids, intestinal stasis, rigors, night-sweats C a gruesome enumeration, indeed.@[69]  In Zweig=s portrait Nietzsche lived in a series of chilly, dowdy rooms lacking flowers, ornaments, books or letters:

Wrapped in a loose overcoat, a woolen muffler round his throat C for the miserable stove merely smoked when lighted and gave forth no heat C his fingers stiff with cold, two pairs of spectacles on his nose, which almost touched the paper as he wrote, he scribbled for hours at a stretch, scribbled down words which his eyes were hard put to it to decipher when the work was done. Those poor eyes burned, and watered with fatigue . . .  During all the years of his pilgrimage he never once put up in friendly and cheerful surroundings, never at night felt the warm body of a woman pressing against his; never did the sun rise to see him famous . . . .[70]      

While this portrait of the sick, lonely Nietzsche may have been accurate enough for certain days in his last years of sanity, it is incorrect that he spent fifteen years C from 1873 to 1888  (included here of course is the year of intense social interaction he spent with Lou and Paul Rée) C in such unremitting isolation. That his conditions were often spartan is true, though more from choice than necessity.[71]  But his environment was spectacular (Sils Maria for example) C  and as to never having  Aput up in friendly or cheerful surroundings,@ consider this letter to his mother, written from Florence in November 1885: AThe day after tomorrow we [i.e., Herr Lanzky and I] retreat into the wood-, mountain-, and cloister-solitude of Vallombrosa, not at all far from here. The best room is being prepared for me; we=ll have quiet; the place is famous: Dante and Milton have glorified it, the latter in his description of Paradise.@[72] 

Oddly Zweig himself countered the image of the wretched Nietzsche with one ecstatically Dionysian. In a chapter titled AThe Discovery of the South,@ he wrote about Nietzsche=s joyous decamping from Germany. This chapter is so contrary to the one about the miserable Nietzsche that Zweig seems to have been creating an entirely different character. In the Asun-intoxicated joy of life@ of the south, having left Germany and Apatriotic strangulation@ for good, Nietzsche discovered a natural style of life.  AHe wanted to be burned by the sun, not merely to be illuminated by it; clarity must have cruel teeth that bite; joviality must develop into a voluptuous orgasm.@[73]  Rid of the tentacles of the past, the professorial chrysalis, the restrictions of Christianity and morality, the Germanic fogs and obscurities, Zweig=s ecstatic Nietzsche was free to live as an outlawed prince.

The powerful, violent figure that Stefan Zweig had at first countered with his weak and victimized Nietzsche surfaced again in the literature during and after World War II, when Nietzsche=s writing was associated with Nazism. This persona lasted until 1950 when Walter Kaufmann  published his opinion that Nietzsche, who was anti-anti-Semitic and anti-nationalistic, was not only innocent of ideological association with Nazism, but could be seen as its philosophical antithesis. Biographically that association began with Elisabeth.

In February 1932 Adolf Hitler arrived in Weimar with a phalanx of storm troopers. In the National Theater, where a play coauthored by Mussolini was being staged, he approached Elisabeth Nietzsche=s box and presented her with a huge bouquet of red roses. While at first she was reluctant to befriend the man who was about to lose the next election, Hitler=s rise to power eventually resulted in funding for the archive, which she staffed with Nazis. When she died Hitler gave her a state funeral, and placed a laurel wreath on her coffin. ABelieve me,@ she had written,  AFritz would be enchanted by Hitler, who with incredible courage has taken upon himself the entire responsibility for his people.@[74]  Elisabeth supported the idea that Nietzsche had influenced National Socialism.  Hitler might not have read Nietzsche (the pages of the complete Nietzsche given to him by Mussolini remained uncut), but he financed his way into the Nietzsche legend. And he  associated himself closely with the Wagner family as well. As AAunt Elisabeth@ had often watched over Richard=s and Cosima=s children when she and Nietzsche were on intimate terms with Bayreuth, years later Hitler (AUncle Wolf@) was entrusted with the care of Wagner=s grandchildren.[75]

Questions Unanswered   

Always lurking beneath the surface of Nietzsche=s life story is the question of the poison of the darkness, the mystery and myth of syphilis. According to Crane Brinton, Athe fact that Nietzsche did have syphilis may be regarded as proved [as certainly as anything of the kind can be proved].@[76] Still the doubt remains. How did this supposedly chaste man become infected with a sexually transmitted disease? Could he have been infected at birth? C a possibility raised by Ronald Hayman.[77]  Was he infected in a brothel in Cologne where he was taken (by mistake)? Nietzsche allegedly recounted this event to his friend Paul Deussen: "I stood for a moment speechless. Then I made instinctively for a piano in the room as to the only living thing in that company and struck several cords. They broke the spell and I hurried away."[78]  If Nietzsche left in horror, why then is it stated as fact in so many texts that he contracted syphilis in this brothel in Cologne? Thomas Mann recounted the brothel episode in his novel Doctor Faustus, which is based in part on Nietzsche=s life. But Mann fictionalized a subsequent encounter with a prostitute, who warned the Nietzsche-character that she was infected with the Aexhilarating but wasting disease.@[79] This leap of logic is motivated by the question: where else could a young man of the time have contracted syphilis but a brothel?

If a band of ardent scholars were to raid the Röcken cemetery at night to exhume Nietzsche=s bones, would they find the tell-tale scrimshaw marks of the syphilis spirochete? Perhaps. But they might equally well come up with a delicate female bone. There is a rumor that Elisabeth arranged to have her brother=s gravestone moved so that it would be over her own grave. This would not have been the first time Elisabeth exercised her editorial powers over death. She refashioned Nietzsche=s death mask to suit her own idea of proper rigor mortis. When her husband preferred strychnine to life with her (and creditors) in the jungles of Paraguay, she bribed an official to issue a death certificate saying Adeath by nerves.@ And to avoid hints of familial mental illness, she invented a story that her father died of a concussion after tripping over the family dog.        

Freud admonished Arnold Zweig, AFirst, it is impossible to understand anyone without knowing his sexual constitution, and Nietzsche=s is a complete enigma.@[80] The various hypotheses and conjectures about Nietzsche=s possible loves, as well as about his sexual habits, are often informed by projection, prudery, denial, cover-ups, lies, and wishful thinking. Gossip and misinformation pass from one book to the next, so that in different texts Nietzsche is heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, a frequenter of prostitutes, incestuous with his sister, oversexed, undersexed, chaste, promiscuous, a compulsive masturbator, sadistic and/or masochistic.

If Lou and Elisabeth are not to be trusted to tell the truth, and if the vast biographical literature spins one contradictory tale after another, is Nietzsche=s own self-accounting the final source of information about his life? Nietzsche wrote of  masks and labyrinths, and what lay beneath the seal of secrecy that protected his own life is anything but clear from his own words. In May 1885 he wrote to Elisabeth:

I am much too proud as ever to believe that any person could love me, namely this requires the precondition that a person knows who I am . . .

When I have shown you great rage, it is because you forced me to relinquish the last human beings [Lou and Rée] with whom I could speak without Tartuffery. Now ‑‑ I am alone. With them, I had been able to converse without a mask about things which interested me . . .

Hide this letter from our mother . . .[81]

Whatever Nietzsche might have revealed about himself in these conversations without a mask with Lou Salomé and Paul Rée remains unknown. Rée fell to his death from a cliff without having written his version of Nietzsche=s life, and Lou created her own complex literary mask, her own fiction, to protect her privacy, or his, or because she had learned early on (from him?) that one=s self-accounting can be as creative as one=s fiction, and not the illusion of one fixed historical truth. Might Lou have been thinking of a conversation without the mask in this diary entry? ACruel people being always masochists also, the whole thing is inseparable from bisexuality. And that has a deep meaning. The first time I ever discussed this theme was with Nietzsche [that sadomasochist unto himself]. And I know that afterward we dared not look at each other.@[82]   

Philosophers often disregard the person behind the work. Nietzsche argued against this separation, and persistently remained a human presence on his pages. "Gradually, it has become clear to me," he wrote, "that every great philosophy up to the present has been the personal confession of  its author and a form of involuntary and unperceived memoir"[83] C  an idea he credited to Lou: AMy dear Lou, Your idea of reducing philosophical systems to the personal records of their originators is truly an idea arising from a >brother-sister brain.=@[84]

Who was Friedrich Nietzsche? The answer to that question depends on who is listening  to his personal confession ‑‑ and when, and where. Not content to be a metaphysician alone, he was also a poet, an aesthetician, a culture critic, a theologian, a musician, a philologist and perhaps above all a psychologist. His language was vital and intimate with the inner tension of those personal depths from which (and to which) he spoke.

Perhaps Nietzsche was merely a sickly philologist whose pathetic life was in sharp contrast to his robust style. Perhaps his only mature passion did end in victimization by that vicious Russian adventuress, Lou Salomé. Perhaps he never believed he had syphilis. Mazzino Montinari, the dean of modern Nietzsche scholars,[85] denied the appropriateness of delving into Nietzsche=s private life and secrets when he wrote, AI  beg  the reader=s pardon for having once again concerned myself with a pseudo-problem, sickness, sexual relations, chastity, etc., which should no longer interest anyone.@[86]  Should we watch out, and keep the seal of secrecy unbroken over the mysteries of Nietzsche=s life? Should we respect his posthumous privacy? Should we believe the story of one biographer over another, subscribe to the interpretive prejudice of one decade more than the next, or read Nietzsche=s texts as if they had no author? Nietzsche was the philosopher of questions, not of easy answers, and if mysteries of love and death, sex and syphilis, genius and madness remain unsolved a century after his death, perhaps that was his gift to his readers of the future. 

ENDNOTES

[1]. Karl Jaspers,  Nietzsche, An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity, trans. Charles F. Wallraff and Frederick H. Schmitz (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1966), 10.  First published in 1935.  

[2]. With stunning psychohistorical circularity, psychoanalyst Alice Miller inferred this last theory from a reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.  Alice Miller, The Untouched Key: Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness, trans. Hildegarde and Hunter Hannum (New York: Doubleday, 1990).  First published 1988.

[3]. Lou Salomé,  Nietzsche: The Man in His Works, ed., trans. and with an introduction by Siegfried Mandel (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Books Ltd., 1988), 4.  First published 1894.

[4]. Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, The Life of Nietzsche, Vol. II, The Lonely Nietzsche, trans. Paul V. Cohn (New York: Sturgis and Walton Company, 1915), 143.  First published 1914.

[5]. Förster-Nietzsche, 128.

[6]. Förster-Nietzsche, 144.

[7]. H. F. Peters, Zarathustra=s Sister: The Case of Elisabeth and Friedrich Nietzsche (New York: Markus Wiener Publishing, 1985), 184.  First published 1977. 

[8]. Freud to Lou, 5 August 1932. Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé Letters, trans. William and Elaine Robson-Scott, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer (New York: Norton, 1972), 198.  First published 1966.

[9]. Lou Andreas Salomé, Looking Back,  trans. Breon Mitchell, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer  (New York: Paragon House,  1991), 167.  First published 1951.

[10]. Nietzsche to Malwida von Meysenbug, 2 July 1882, in Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Psychologist, Philosopher, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974),  53.  First published 1950.

[11]. Lou to Gillot, 26 March 1882.  In Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back,  45-46.

[12]. Nietzsche to Ida Overbeck, 28 May 1882.  In Rudolph Binion, Frau Lou: Nietzsche=s Wayward Disciple (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 61.

[13]. Nietzsche to Peter Gast, 13 July 1882.  In Nietzsche: A Self-Portrait from his Letters, trans. and ed. Peter Fuss and Henry Shapiro (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 63.

[14]. Nietzsche to Lou, 20 July 1882. In Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. and ed. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), 188.

[15]. Andreas-Salomé, Looking Back, 50.

[16]. Elisabeth to Clara Gelzer, 2 October 1882.  Trans. by Ruth Treuenfels in Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul Rée, Lou von Salomé: Die Dokumente ihrer Begegnung, ed. Ernst Pfeiffer (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1970).

[17]. Elisabeth to Clara Gelzer, 2 October 1882.

[18]. Nietzsche to Lou, end of November, 1882.  In Angela Livingstone, Salomé: Her Life and Work (Mt. Kisco, New York: Moyer Bell, Ltd, 1984), 53.

[19]. Nietzsche to Lou, mid-December, 1882.  Kaufmann, 59.

[20]. Nietzsche to Lou, mid-December 1882.  Binion, Frau Lou, 101.

[21]. Andreas Salomé, Looking Back, 53.

[22]. Binion, Frau Lou, 117.

[23]. Ben Macintyre, Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux,  1992),  x.

[24]. Rudolph Binion, AMy Life with Frau Lou,@ in The Historians Workshop, ed. L. P.  Curtis, Jr. (New York: Knopf, 1970), 297.

[25]. Binion, AMy Life with Frau Lou,@ 297.

[26]. Binion, Frau Lou, 493.

[27]. Binion, Frau Lou, 492.

[28]. Kaufmann, 49.

[29]. For non-biographical versions of the story, see Irvin D. Yalom=s novel When Nietzsche Wept (in which Lou arranges a mutual analysis with Freud=s colleague Josef Breuer for Nietzsche in an imaginary thirteenth month added to 1882), Giuseppe Sinopoli=s opera Salomé, and Liliana Cavani=s film Beyond Good and Evil.

[30]. Kaufmann, 54.

[31]. Joachim Köhler, Nietzsche=s Geheimnis (Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1992).  Köhler=s biography assumes that Nietzsche was homosexual.

[32]. Nietzsche thought Wagner himself was in part responsible for these rumors. On April 21, 1883 he wrote to Peter Gast (with instructions to burn the letter immediately), AWagner is certainly not wanting in malign discoveries; but what do you say to the fact that he exchanged letters [even with my doctors] expressing his conviction that my altered way of thinking was the consequence of excesses against nature, leaving it to be understood that it involved pederasty?@ In Mazzino Montinari, ANietzsche and Wagner One Hundred Years Ago: 1980 Addendum,@ in Nietzsche in Italy, ed. Thomas Harrison (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1988), 113-14.

[33]. Nietzsche to Peter Gast, 13 July 1882.  In Fuss and Shapiro, 63.

[34]. Nietzsche to Peter Gast, middle of December 1882. In H. F. Peters My Sister My Spouse: a Biography of Lou Andreas-Salomé (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962), 139.

[35]. C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, ed. Aniela Jaffé (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 102. First published 1963.

[36]. Crane Brinton, Nietzsche (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 94.  First published 1941.

[37]. Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 234.  Nehamas created a Nietzsche who created himself as a work of art through his writing, a Amagnificent character@ in contrast to the miserable little man.

[38]. Robert C. Solomon, ANietzsche ad hominem: Perspectivism, personality and ressentiment@ in The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche, ed. Bernd Magnus and Kathleen M. Higgins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),  213.

[39]. Draft of letter to Georg Rée, July, 1883 in Peters, My Sister, My Spouse, 146.

[40]. Möbius quoted by Erich F. Podach,  The Madness of Nietzsche, trans. F. A.Voigt (New York: Putnam, 1931),  61.  First published 1930.

[41]. R. J. Hollingdale disagreed about Nietzsche=s low sexual energy: AAs many passages in his writings, and especially some in the uninhibited Ecce Homo, disclose, Nietzsche was highly sexed and inordinately attracted to women, yet there is no record, or even hint, that he ever went to bed with a woman of his own class and, the documentation of his life being as ample as it is, we may conclude that he never did so.  He had many women friends but not one wife or mistress. The reason may, as has very generally been assumed, be that he suffered from paralyzing inhibition: but might this inhibition, if it really existed, not have originated in his knowledge that he suffered from something else too?  something that, seeing he was a man of honour, must for ever keep him 'celibate' in relation to women of his own class?@ From the introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. and intro. by R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Penguin Books, 1980), 21.  First published 1965.

[42]. Statement by Health Commissioner Vulpius reprinted in Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of His Contemporaries, ed. Sander L. Gilman, trans. David J. Parent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 259.

[43]. Ludwig von Scheffler, first published in Neue Freie Presse (Vienna) August 6 and 7, 1907, reprinted in Gilman, 63. Scheffler was Nietzsche=s student in 1876.

[44]. For a discussion of Platen=s influence on gay German youth and quotations from his memoirs, see Robert Aldrich, The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy (London: Routledge, 1993): AThat homosexuality was at the heart of Platen=s poetry was evident to both contemporaries and later commentators,@ p. 61.

[45]. Gilman, 75.

[46]. Gilman, 72.

[47]. Gilman, 71.

[48]. Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, Vol II: 1908-10, ed. Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, trans. M. Nunberg (New York: International Universities Press, 1967), 31.

[49]. Nunberg and Federn, 31.

[50]. Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig, The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig, trans. Elaine and William Robson-Scott, ed. Ernst L. Freud (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1970), 80.

[51]. Freud and Zweig, 76.

[52]. Freud and Zweig, 79.

[53]. Freud and Zweig, 85-86.

[54]. Freud and Zweig, 85.

[55]. Freud and Zweig, 78.

[56]. Freud, Minutes, II, 32.

[57]. Förster- Nietzsche, vol. II, 196.

[58]. For a discussion of the influence of Nietzsche on Freud, and the biographical connections, see Ronald Lehrer, Nietzsche=s Presence in Freud=s Life and Thought: On the Origins of a Psychology of Dynamic Unconscious Mental Functioning (Albany, State University of New York, 1995).

[59]. Jung, Memories, 101.

[60]. Jung, Memories, 103.

[61]. C. G. Jung, Nietzsche=s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-39, Vol I, ed. James L. Jarrett (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988),  609. (P. J. Möbius reported corresponding with two doctors who treated Nietzsche for syphilis when he was twenty three.)

[62]. Jung, Zarathustra, 635.

[63]. Jung, Memories, 102.

[64]. Jung, Memories, 102.

[65]. Jung, Memories, 188.

[66]. Jung, Memories, 189.

[67]. Stefan Zweig,  Master Builders: A Typology of the Spirit, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Viking Press, 1939),  458.  First published 1925.

[68]. Stefan Zweig, 448.

[69]. Stefan Zweig, 454.

[70]. Stefan Zweig, 450-51. Contrast this room with von Scheffler=s description of Nietzsche=s apartment when he was a professor at Basel: AAnd when one was half sunk into 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.@  Gilman, 69.

[71].  See William H. Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon: A Publication History and Bibliography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) for an account of Nietzsche=s finances. Schaberg estimates that Nietzsche=s net worth (partially from inheritance)  was 14,000 marks, or four full years of salary, when he left Basel.

[72]. Nietzsche to Franziska Nietzsche, November, 1885 in Kaufmann, 464.

[73]. Stefan Zweig, 504.

[74]. Elisabeth Nietzsche to Ernest Thiel, 1933, in Peters, Zarathustra=s Sister, 221.

[75]. On September 19, 1994 the New Yorker published this hearsay in a review of Frederic Spotts= book Bayreuth: The History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994): AIt seems that, besides putting the little Wagners to bed, Hitler sexually abused Wieland. Spotts has revealed this incident C vouchsafed to him by one of Wieland=s children C only since the publication of the book; he had omitted it as irrelevant,@ p.  110.

[76]. Brinton, 15 n16.

[77]. Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 24. First published in 1980. Hayman noted that both Nietzsche and his mother had dissimilar sized pupils, a possible indication of syphilis.

[78]. Paul Deussen, quoted in R. J. Hollingdale, Nietzsche (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1985), 33.  First published in 1965.

[79]. A phrase from the dust jacket of the 1948 Knopf edition of Doctor Faustus.

[80]. Freud and Zweig, 85.

[81]. Nietzsche to Elisabeth, mid May 1885.  In Salomé,  Nietzsche, lviii-lix.

[82]. Diary entry May 11, 1913,  Lou Andreas-Salomé, The Freud Journals, trans. Stanley A. Leavy (New York: Basic Books, 1964), 143.

[83]. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 6, quoted in Salomé, Nietzsche, 4.

[84]. Salomé, Nietzsche, 3.

[85]. According to Sander L. Gilman=s dedication on the title page of Conversations with Nietzsche.

[86]. Montinari, 117.

 [COMMENT1](That he was long held back from reading Nietzsche)