The story that has been told over and over, and pretty much accepted as true, about Lou and Nietzsche is that the very sick thirty-seven year-old Nietzsche fell in love, one scholar said “in love and lust,” with twenty-one-year-old Lou Salome, that he proposed marriage to her and that her rejection of him sent him into a suicidal depression in December 1882. Lou is then portrayed, both critically and romantically, as a femme fatale and muse— a woman who used men.

My reading of the Lou story is different. As a first step in putting together an alternate story, I have reconstructed the events of 1882, with passages from the letter, to see where it may lead, beginning with the narrative Rudolph Binion constructed in his biography Frau Lou, but deleting his interpretations to construct a simple narrative.

The Story of 1882

 While Nietzsche and his friend Paul Rée were vacationing in Genoa, Lou and her mother were traveling to Rome, hoping the baths and the weather would cure Lou's fever and bleeding lungs. She brought with her a letter of recommendation from her professor, Gottfried Kinkel, to Malvida von Meysenbug, the author of the three volume best-seller Memoirs of an Idealist. Malwivda saw in Lou my own youth resurrected"1 and responded to Lou's poems: “They disclose what I behold with ever purer delight: your inner life, which is meant for blossoms so noble that you must keep it most holy . . . Yours is a great task; we shall yet speak much of it.”2 Lou attended salons in Malwida’s drawing room, which was presided over by an imposing bust of Richard Wagner.

From Genoa Nietzsche and Rée took a side trip to Monaco for two days. Nietzsche, who did not gamble, continued on to Messina; Rée went to Rome. In her memoirs, Lou recalled meeting him: “The young Paul Rée entered with her (Malwida): a friend of some years whom she loved like a son, who -- having come helter-skelter from Monte Carlo -- was in a rush to send the waiter the money he had borrowed from him for the journey, since he had lost everything, literally every last penny, gambling." 3

Lou and Ree quickly became friends. Preferring his company to that of the young women of Malwida's salon, she flaunted convention by going for long walks with him late at night. After having a dream of "a pleasant study filled with books and flowers, flanked by two bedrooms, and us walking back and forth between them, colleagues, working together in a joyful and earnest bond," 4 Lou and Rée began talking about making this dream a reality -- with Nietzsche as the third. Lou wrote her spiritual mentor and tutor in Russia, Heinrich Gillot, about the work-study plan.

Gillot had always attempted to turn Lou away from fantasy and toward reality and action, and so when he responded to her announcement of the study plan with a lecture, she fought back with a clear statement of her purpose:

I've read your letter at least five times, but I still don't get it. What in the devil's name have I done wrong? I thought you would be singing my praises. After all, I'm just showing you how well I learned my lessons. First of all because I'm not simply caught up in fantasy, but turning it into reality, and secondly because that reality involves individuals you might have selected yourself, filled almost to bursting with spirituality and keenness of mind....I can't live according to some model, and I could never be a model for anyone else; but I indeed 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 -- something that exists inside me, glowing with life itself, something that wants to burst forth with a shout of joy.

 And now you write that you always considered total dedication to purely spiritual goals a mere "transition" for me. Well, what do you mean by "transition"? If there are some further final goals behind these, ones for which one would have to give up the most magnificent and hard-won thing on earth, namely freedom, then I hope I always remain in transition, because I won't give up freedom for anything. No one can be happier than I am now. I have no fear of the bright, pious, and joyful battle for that freedom which is now beginning; on the contrary, let it begin! Let's see whether the so-called "insurmountable barriers" life puts in most people's way don't in fact turn out to be harmless chalk lines! But I would indeed be shocked if you didn't give me your spiritual support. You write with some annoyance that your advice probably won't do much good. "Advice!" -- No! What I need from you is much more than advice: I need your trust. Not in the normal sense one understand it, of course -- no: what I need is your trust that no matter what I do or don't do, it will remain within the circle of what we share....." 5

Rée wrote to Nietzsche about Lou: “She is a forceful, unbelievably clever being with the most girlish, even childlike qualities. She would so much like, as she put it, to make a nice year of it at least, meaning next winter....It could really prove too nice."6 And-- she "hears everything through and through, so that she almost exasperatingly always knows in advance what is coming and where it is leading."7

Nietzsche responded:

“What pleasure your letters give me! They draw me in every which way -- and to you in the end, come what may...Greet the Russian girl for me, if that makes any sense: I am greedy for souls of that species. In fact, in view of what I mean to do these next ten years, I need them! Matrimony is quite another story. I could consent at most to a two-year marriage, and then only in view of what I mean to do these next ten years.

* Did Nietzsche and Ree both propose marriage to Lou? And if so, what what kind of marriage was meant? The theme that Nietzsche never proposed to Lou, and that she was lying when she later said that he did, is countered by this early mention of marriage. The question, then, is not whether Nietzsche proposed, but what he meant by marriage; a two-year marriage being something quite different from what is implied in the scholarship by a proposal. Binion calls this letter a "jest," though there is no reason not to take Nietzsche seriously within his ten year plan.

Lou and Nietzsche met on April 24 at St. Peter's Basilica. Paul wrote in one of the smaller chapels nearby. Lou described her first impressions of Nietzsche 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. The hasty observer notices nothing remarkable; this man of average height in his simple yet very meticulous clothing, with his calm features and plainly combed-back brown hair, could easily be overlooked. His thin, highly expressive mouth was almost completely covered by a large moustache, brushed forward. He had a quiet laugh, a noiseless manner of speaking and a careful, thoughtful gait, stooped slightly...Nietzsche's hands were beautifully and nobly formed. He himself thought that they disclosed his intellect..... 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's first words to Lou, from her memoirs, were: "From what two stars have we fallen together here?"

A plan was made to live together in the coming winter. They discussed Vienna but decided on Paris, so that Nietzsche could attend lectures, and where they could be in contact with Ivan Turgenev, someone Paul knew from a visit in 1875, and Lou knew slightly from St. Petersburg.

*Binion: “Nietzsche was not fit to leave before another week, within which he explained to Lou that her chaste menage a trois was not all that simple even with chaperon, as "I should consider myself duty-bound to offer you my hand so as to protect you from what people might say...." Does this not already contradict Binion's central thesis that Lou made up the proposal of marriage?10

* Turgenev is one of the minor characters in the story with numerous connections. He was living in an unconventional threesome himself in Paris; he was supposedly in love with an opera star, and he lived with her and her husband. Turgenev also introduced Paul Joukowsky and Henry James. 

May

Lou and her mother traveled to Orta; Nietzsche and Ree joined them the following day. On May 6th, Lou and Nietzsche climbed Monte Sacro.

* Binion: "There for the first time Nietzsche thrilled to Lou's responsive intelligence... Just a few hours on the holy mount and he had dimly conceived the grand design of fashioning her according to his philosophical ideal -- of schooling her to be his 'heiress' and 'successor'." Ida Overbeck wrote, "Mentally passionate nonmarital relationship was in ideal always dear to him." Lou in her memoirs says that she can't remember if she kissed him; Nietzsche thanked her for the best day of his life.

Nietzsche then took a side-trip to visit his friends the Overbecks, meeting Lou and Ree in Lucerne on May 13. He had written Ree, "I really must speak with Miss Salome once again, perhaps in the Lowengarten."

* Scholars speculate that he either proposed marriage to her, or told her had not intended to propose to her before, and that she either turned him down or was relieved.

Bonnet

Lou named their new partnership "The Trinity." They posed for a picture at the studio of Jules Bonnet.

*H. F. Peters describes the photographing event:

Among the props in Bonnet's studio was a small farm cart which came in handy for rural scenes. It could be photographed drawn by dogs or donkeys, or simply left standing in the background. When Nietzsche saw it his eyes lit up. He demanded that it be placed in the center of the stage and told Lou to kneel in it. A rather awkward gesture, Bonnet thought, and not at all suitable for a young lady. But his protests went unheeded. Then Nietzsche asked him for a piece of rope which, he insisted, should be tied to his and Ree's arms and held by Lou like a rein. Thus the two men were harnessed to the cart in which Lou knelt Over Ree's protests, Nietzsche claimed that no other pose could more fittingly represent their relationship. Lou, who felt rather cramped in her half-kneeling posture, told them to hurry, but Nietzsche was not satisfied yet. As their driver, Lou must have a means to enforce her authority. A small stick was found, a piece of rope tied to it and thus a whip fashioned. Nietzsche gave it to Lou; as a finishing touch, he tied a sprig of lilacs to it. A second later the camera clicked and the picture was taken.

 It turned out well. Some people laughed when they saw it and treated it as a joke; others, like Malwida, were shocked by it and thought it showed Lou's depraved sense of humor. Lou and Ree were asked of it and tried to forget it. But it exists. It can neither be explained away nor dismissed from memory. Monsieur Bonnet's camera caught the rapt ecstasy on Nietzsche's face. It remains a grotesque and terrifying reflection of the way his mind worked.

The photograph, has been widely reproduced and commented upon. As an exercise in projection it is unsurpassed.

Nietzsche: “Oh the bad photographer! And yet: what a lovely silhouette atop the rack-waggon!”

Rée: “Picture arrived yesterday. Nietzsche was superb; you and I hideous, can dispute the prize for ugliness between us. You see, Lou, for once you were not right after all.”

Livingstone: "It provokes questions: is the woman being carried by the strength of the men while she spurs them on to their achievements, or is she lashing them along on a glorious journey of her own? The faces do not answer: Lou's is attentive and strained, gazing obediently at the camera, yet also unexpectedly sensual-looking and faintly mischievous; Paul Ree is ill at ease; he faces the camera and tries to smile, but also averts his eyes and wears an acid expression of self-dislike (Ree, who was quite handsome, thought himself ugly); only Nietzsche looks pleased to be photographed. As if acting out his character, he gazes with wide-open visionary eyes ('seven-eights blind' as he was) upward and out of the picture.i

MacIntyre: “Nietzsche appears serene, Ree embarrassed and Lou, well, demonic.”

May Continued

Over the next few weeks, both Nietzsche and Ree wrote to Lou with increasing enthusiasm for their project. Nietzsche began to write about the necessity of keeping everything secret. Complaints about Nietzsche crept into Ree's letters.

 Rée to Lou:

“I thought I should expire from pain and longing. But that's all nonsense and childishness (the more since this wistful pain is not without its dash of pleasantness...)”

 Yet it is sad too if I take you away from him altogether -- then you won't get to know him -- and there is so much to know about him! -- and it will be painful for him besides...I prefer not to write Nietzsche after all that Mama wants to sort of adopt you, as I'm afraid he will see it as only a trick to keep you from him...I am of course indescribably tense pending your decisions. Already I regret having told you too emphatically what in my opinion you ought to do. Heed no one but yourself. . I am not so wholly open and honest in my relationship to Nietzsche, especially since a certain little girl has bobbed up from abroad... I am and shall remain entirely your friend alone; I have no scruples about behaving a little crookedly, a little falsely, a little mendaciously and deceitfully toward anyone except you. Out of my friendship to you I make a cult....Are we really going to see each other again-- or have I only dreamed it! Come soon, lovely reality, to your nameless P.

* Binion writes that by mid-May Lou was coming between Ree and Nietzsche. Nietzsche he feels, considered the Trinity to be a "daring cabal" .... "The key reason was its homosexual tendency -- his potentially sharing a woman with Ree." Though Binion does not see a homosexual relationship between Nietzsche and Ree, he does later say that Lou was a "mediator of homoerotic tension between them."

 Nietzsche to Lou: “Here in Naumburg I have so far been wholly silent about you and us. That way I remain more independent and can serve you better.-- The nightingales sing the whole night through before my window. Rée is from head to toe a better friend than I am or can be: mark well the distinction! When I am alone I often, very often, speak your name and -- to my greatest pleasure!"19

 Nietzsche to Rée: “I have been taciturn and shall remain so -- you know what about. One cannot be friends more wonderfully than we are now, can one? My dear old Rée!”

Nietzsche to Lou, May 28:

For, honestly, I should very much like to be all alone with you as soon as possible. Such solitary beings as I must first slowly get used to those dearest to them: be considerate of me in this -- or rather a little obliging! ... (So long as all summer plans are still up in the air; I do well to maintain complete silence in my family -- not from joy in secrecy, but know 'knowledge of people.') My dear friend Lou, on 'friends' and on friend Ree in particular I will explain myself orally: I know quite well what I am saying if I call him a better friend than I am or can be...After Bayreuth we shall seek another resting place for the benefit of your health?... They say I have never in my life been so cheerful as now. I trust my fate.

Nietzsche to Ida May 28: “How could I fear fate, particularly when it confronts me in the wholly unexpected form of Lou? Ree 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.”

 Nietzsche to Rée:

What's doing with our summer plans?...I often laugh at our Pythagorean friendship. It raises me in my own esteem to be really capable of it. Yet it does remain laughable? -- In heartfelt love, you F.N.

June

 Only one letter survives of those written by Lou to Nietzsche from this period:

 . . . if I now leave being alone with you out of account, this is only in the interest of our plans. . . . you are like two prophets, one turned to the past and one to the future, of which the first, Ree, exposes the gods' origin, while the second extinguishes their twilight....Only remain so cheerful and healthy, everything will turn out very well. We are good hikers and find our way in the brush.

 Rée to Lou: “Be assured that you are the only person in the world whom I love," and "Your mind is so pleasant in that it does not weigh down on one. This Nietzsche's, for instance, does. It presses, oppresses mine; mine breaks down when his is close by.”

 Malwida to Lou June 6:

And then this Trinity! Firmly as I am convinced of your neutrality, just as surely as does the experience of a long lifetime tell me that it will not work without a heart's cruelly suffering in the noblest case, otherwise a friendship's being destroyed...Nature will not be mocked, and before you know it the fetters are there...I wish only to protect you from nearly unavoidable sorrow such as you have experienced once already.

Nietzsche to Lou June 7:

. . . it is unbearable for me to think of you suffering alone....neither Mrs. Ree in Warmbrunn nor Miss von Meysenbug in Bayreuth nor my family need break their heads and hearts over things that we, we, we alone are and shall be up to, whereas they may strike others as dangerous fantasies.... it also seems to me more advisable not to put our Trinity on display so openly this summer...I too have a flush of dawn about me -- and this is no printed one. What I no longer thought possible -- to find a friend of my utmost joy and sorrow -- now seems to me: as a golden possibility on the horizon of my whole future life. I have only to think of my dear Lou's brave and prescient soul and I am moved. 

Nietzsche to Overbeck June 7

There are lots of life secrets of mine bound up with this new future, and task remain that can be carried out only through deeds... I go on keeping silence here. As for my sister, I am wholly determined to leave her out: she could only confuse things (and herself to begin with)

Nietzsche to Lou June 10:

From this distance, my dear friend, I cannot make out which people have to be told about our plans, but I think we should make sure we confide only in them. I love privacy, and want very much that you and I be spared the gossip of a whole continent. Other than that, I have such high hopes for our living together that all repercussions, essential or incidental, are of little concern to me just now. Whatever happens we'll bear it together, and together each evening we'll put our little worries behind us -- agreed?

 . . . Finally in all practical matters I'm highly inexperienced. For years now I've never had to explain or justify to others anything I've done. I prefer to keep my plans secret; the whole world may talk about what I do if it wishes. But nature has given every creature its own weapons of defense -- to you it gave your magnificent honesty. Pindar says somewhere, "Become what you are."

 About the same time, in a letter to Paul, Nietzsche writes:

. . . All in all I beg you to keep silence toward everyone about our winter project: one ought to keep silence about everything in the making As soon as it is spread about prematurely there are contradictors and counterplans: the danger is not slight... In sum, we both have it quite good: who else has such a lovely prospect before him as we do? 22

 Nietzsche to Lou June 18: (Let) “You know that I wish to be your teacher, your guide on the path to scholarly production?”

 Malwida to Lou June 18, Stibbe:

 About your plan I can say no more. I fully acknowledge its ideality and grasp its attractiveness. You are choosing your fate and must fulfill it, whatever it may bring. You are making no sacrifice, though, for what you are undertaking is the fulfillment of your highest wishes under ideal conditions. From the heart I wish happiness to Nietzsche as well. May both of you but guard your health...But I would like to insist very strongly that you not get all wrapped up in Nietzsche's work. I should have preferred your going your own way mentally, just to prove for once that, even in these highest realms of thought, a woman can stand alone and attain independent results. In so far, I am very sorry about this mental dependency.

 Nietzsche to Lou June 18:

 I should so much like to work and study some with you soon. I have prepared fine things -- fields in which sources are to be discovered. ... You do know that I wish to be your teacher, your guide on the way to scholarly production? What do you think of the time after Bayreuth? What would be most desirable, advantageous, and valuable to you for just this period? And is September to be kept in sight for the beginning of our Vienna existence? My trip has taught me again about my ineffable awkwardness as soon s I feel new places and people about me: I believe the blind are more reliable than the half blind. Concerning Vienna, it is now my wish to be set down like a piece of luggage in a small room of the house you want to occupy. Of next door, as your faithful friend and neighbor.

 Ree was to forward this letter to "our very remarkable and all too lovable friend."

 Nietzsche to Ree (check date, is this around June 18?): “I am full of confidence in this year with its mysterious dice game over my fate... " ..."no longer in any condition to undertake anything alone.... I am now working it out so that my mother too could invite Miss Lou."

 He did not send this paragraph:

My silence would have been impossible in the long run; it was necessary for only the very earliest period, as I had agreed with Overbeck. I myself could make this new "demand" on my family only after much vexation and almost a slight threat; from scratch such a venture as our Vienna plan would have bewildered them -- they would have taken it for folly or infatuation.

 June 26

My dear friend, half an hour from the Dornburg on which the old Goethe enjoyed his solitude, lies Tautenburg in the midst of beautiful woods. There my good sister has fixed up an idyllic little nest for me, for this summer. Yesterday I took possession; tomorrow my sister is leaving and I shall be alone. But we made an agreement that may bring her back. For supposing that you found no better use for the month of August and found it seemly and feasible to live with me in the woods here, my sister would accompany you here from Bayreuth and live with you here in the same house (e.g. the parson's where she is staying at the moment: the village offers a selection of modest but pretty rooms). My sister, about women you can ask Ree, would prefer seclusion precisely for this period in order to brood over her little novella eggs. She finds the thought of being in your and my proximity extremely attractive. --There! And now candor "even unto death!" My dear friend! I am not tied down in any way and could most easily change my plans if you have plans. And if I am not to be together with you, simply tell me that, too -- and you don't even have to give any reasons! I have complete confidence in you: but that you know.

If we harmonize, our healths will harmonize, too, and there will be some secret advantage somewhere. I have never yet thought that you should read to and write for me; but I should like very much to be permitted to be your teacher. Finally, to tell the whole truth: I am now looking for human beings who could become my heirs; I am carrying around a few ideas that are not by any means to be found in my books -- and am looking for the most beautiful and fruitful soil for them.

Just look at my selfishness!--

When I occasionally think of the dangers to your life, your health, my soul is always filled with tenderness; I cannot think of anything that brings me so close to you so quickly. -- And then I am always happy to know that you have Ree and not only me for a friend. To think of you two together walking and talking is a real delight to me.--...

 Faithfully your friend,

Nietzsche

July

July 2 to Lou:

My dear friend, how bright the sky above me is now! Yesterday at noon it was like a birthday party around here: you said yes, the loveliest gift anyone could have given me at this moment; my sister sent cherries, Teubner sent the first three proof sheets of The Gay Science; on top of all that, I had just finished the very last part of the manuscript, thus ending six years' work (1976-1882) --- all of my "free thinking." And what years! What tortures of every kind, what periods of loneliness, of disgust with life! And as a homemade remedy against all this, against life as much as death, I brewed my own potion, those ideas of mine with their little patches of unclouded sky above them. Oh dear friend, whenever I think of all this I am deeply moved, and can't understand how it could possibly have worked out so well. I"m all full of self-pity and a feeling of victory. For it is a victory, and a total one; even my physical health has returned. I've no idea how, and everyone tells me I look younger than ever. Heaven protect me from stupidity! -- But from now on, when you advise me, I'll be in good hands and need have no fear.

 As regards the winter, I have been thinking seriously and exclusively of Vienna; my sister's plans for the winter are independent of mine, and we can leave them out of considerations. The south of Europe is now far from my thoughts.

 I don't want to be lonely any more and wish to rediscover how to be human. This is a lesson I'll have to learn from scratch!

 Nietzsche to Malwida Around July 2 (draft)

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 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. Incidentally: Ree should have married her; and I for my part have certainly urged him all I could. But the effort now seems in vain. At one final point he is an unshakable pessimist; and how he has remained faithful to himself at this point, against all the objections of his heart and of my reason, has in the end won my great respect. The idea of the propagation of mankind seems intolerable to him: it goes against all his feelings to add to the number of the wretched. For my taste, he has too much pity at this point and too few hopes.

Nietzsche to Lou July 3:

 But you will now find that there was no need for my whole hush-hush to begin with? I analyzed it today and found as its basic cause: mistrust toward myself. I was downright bowled over by the fact of having acquired a "new person" after overly strict seclusion and renunciation of all love and friendship. I had to keep silent because it would have thrown me every time to speak about you (as it did at the good Overbecks.) Now, I tell you this for laughs. The way with me is always a human, all too human one, and my foolishness grows with my wisdom.

 *Binion writes that Nietzsche was paying Lou “a grandiose compliment with his "best intentions," however heedlessly of hers. For he set the value of what was his to impart too high for his sanity-- and yet no higher than was just: tragically, he alone in his day and age knew how far above that day and age he stood.”

Nietzsche to Gast: July 13, 1882

 The poem called "To Suffering" was not my work. It is one of those things that completely overwhelm me. I've never been able to read it without tears: here is a voice I've been waiting for ever since childhood. The poem is by my friend Lou; you haven't heard about her before. She is a Russian general's daughter, twenty years old, keen as an eagle, brave as a lion, and yet a very girlish child who may well not live long. I owe her to Frl. von Meysenbug and Ree. She's visiting Ree just now; after Bayreuth she's coming here to Tautenburg, and in the fall we'll move together to Vienna. She's amazingly ripe and ready for my way of thinking.

 Dear friend, you'll surely do us 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. Besides, she has an unbelievably firm character and knows exactly what she wants -- without consulting or caring about the world's opinion.

 July 20 to Lou (Mid)

 Well, my dear friend, all is well till now, and a week from Saturday we shall see each other again.

 I have thought of you much, and have shared with you in thought much that has been elevating, stirring, and gay, so much so that it has been like living with my dear friends. If only you knew how novel and strange that seems to an old hermit like me! How often it has made me laugh at myself!

 As for Bayreuth, 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 find even the music of Parsifal endurable (otherwise it is not endurable). I would like you to read beforehand, my little work Richard Wagner in Bayreuth; I expect friend Ree has it. I have had such experiences with this man and his work, and it was a passion which lasted a long time -- passion is the only word for it. The renunciation that it required, the rediscovering of myself that eventually became necessary, was among the hardest and most melancholy things that have befallen me.

 And how happy I am, my beloved friend Lou, that I can now think of the two of us -- "Everything is beginning, and yet everything is perfectly clear!" Trust me! Let us trust one another!

 With the very best wishes for your journey.

 Your friend Nietzsche

 Geist? What is geist to me? What is knowledge to me? I value nothing but impulses -- and I could swear that we have this in common. Look through this phrase, in which I have lived for several years -- look beyond it! Do not deceive yourself about me-- surely you do not think that the "freethinker" is my ideal! I am...

Sorry, dearest Lou!

F.N.

 Bayreuth

 On July 21, Lou travelled to Bayreuth, connecting along the way in Jena with Elisabeth. Carrying with her Paul Ree's ticket to the concert, thrilled with her plan to live with Nietzsche and Ree the next year, and finally free of her mother's chaperoning, Lou was ready to test her independence. In her talks with Nietzsche and Ree, Lou had glimpsed the possibility of a much more extreme jettisoning of social convention than Malwida offered in her salon of young women. In Bayreuth she expanded her circle.

On the train to Bayreuth, Lou quickly established the familiar form of speech with Elisabeth. This initial warmth was short-lived, however, because it soon became obvious that the two women organized their lives around basically opposed world views.

Prior to the meeting of Elisabeth and Lou, Nietzsche had kept from his mother and sister the more radical aspects of his life and philosophy. Bringing these two together in the context of the Wagner circle inevitably led to a collapse of Nietzsche's carefully orchestrated secrecy. To Lou Elisabeth was the epitome of the pious, conventionally religious woman whose purpose as she became sensitive to being thirty-four years old, was marriage to Bernard Forster, a career antisemite and German nationalist. To Elisabeth Lou was the "Emancipated Woman," a threat to everything she held sacred, and especially a threat to her poor dear brother Fritz.

In Bayreuth Lou was included in the life of the Wagner household, Wahnfried, meeting Wagner, Cosima, who visited with Lou at the request of Malwida, and Nietzsche's friends the Overbecks.

In her memoirs, she describes the setting at Wagner's house, Wahnfried:

 I saw a good deal of their family life, in spite of the flood of guests around them from all over the world. Things were always brightest and gayest around the centerpoint of Richard Wagner -- who was often overshadowed because of his small stature, but would spring into sight from time to time life a bubbling fountain; whereas Cosima, due to her height, stood out from everyone past whom her infinitely long train glided-- both encircling her and creating a certain distance.

 With the introduction of Malwida, Lou was able to have long conversations with Cosima. But she was much more interested in the young men who surrounded the master, especially her countryman, also from St. Petersburg, Paul Joukowsky. During the concert Joukowsky was living with Malwida and Sigfried Wagner's tutor, Heinrich von Stein, Ree's college friend who would become a member of Lou's Berlin circle the following year.

  H.F. Peters writes, "It must have rankled Elisabeth to see these two Russians frolicking so close to the master's throne while she, because of her brother's feud with Wagner, had to keep a certain distance. Was not Lou ridiculing her brother by so blatantly associating with his enemies? And the stories one heard about the girl! It was rumored that she had taken off her dress in public and had permitted Joukowsky, who was also a noted dress designer, to design a dress right on her body. She was also said to have attended nightly seances as the only lady present. God knows what went on then! It was not hard to imagine what kind of girl Lou was.”

But Lou, of course, was not "that kind of girl" at all, and the friendship with Joukowsky was very different from the heterosexual flirtation assumed in the literature. Joukowsky was living with a Neapolitan fisherman named Peppino.

Paul von Joukowsky, the son of a Russian poet, had joined the Wagner circle in 1879, coming from a literary group in Paris centered around Turgenev, where he met and became romantically involved with the American novelist Henry James. James' biographer Fred Kaplan writes, "Turgenev introduced James to Paul Joukowsky in April 1876. James fell briefly in love. Gifted with wealth, a distinguished literary father, and a minor talent as an amateur painter, the languid, drifting, handsome Joukowsky ...seemed 'one of the pure flowers of civilization.' Despite his dilettantism and political nihilism, James found him irresistibly attractive."

But James was discrete about homosexuality, and was unable to tolerate Joukowsky's overtness among the Wagnerians. He had refused to sign a petition pleading leniency for Oscar Wilde: "never a friend, James had no sympathy for a man who blatantly disregarded normal standards of discretion when homosexuality was illegal,"28 and so when he came to join Joukowsky in Italy in 18??, he quickly left in dismay. "He was appalled by the openly homosexual and adulterous activities in the Wagner entourage. Joukowsky had become a Wagner worshipper, perhaps a lover of Wagner."29

Lou wrote to Ree about her new friend; he responded, "for surely he will next want to marry you. Enfin Lou, even then I want to remain your friend.30 Binion, assuming Lou was flirting, says that Ree's response was whimpering with jealousy; a gay interpretation reads this line much more playfully.

Lou attended the first performance of Parsifal, specially produced for the patrons before the public concerts began. Much to Wagner's dismay, King Ludwig had only a few weeks before announced that we would not attend. Wagner had built a special secret entrance for the king. Nietzsche's absence was noted as well by Wagner, who refused to allow his name to be spoken.

On July 20 Nietzsche wrote:

 As for Bayreuth, 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 find even the music of Parsifal endurable (otherwise it is not endurable). I would like you to read beforehand, my little work Richard Wagner in Bayreuth; I expect friend Ree has it. I have had such experiences with this man and his work, and it was a passion which lasted a long time -- passion is the only word for it. The renunciation that it required, the rediscovering of myself that eventually became necessary, was among the hardest and most melancholy things that have befallen me.

 In Genoa on January 30, Nietzsche had responded to a suggestion from Elisabeth that he attend the summer festival, “But I -- forgive me -- will come only on the condition that Wagner personally invites me and treats me as the most honored guest at the festival."

 And then, on February 3:

Just a few lines, my beloved sister, to thank you for your good words about Wagner and Bayreuth. Certainly those were the best days of my life, the ones I spent with him at Tribschen and through him in Bayreuth .... But the omnipotence of our tasks drove us apart, and now we cannot rejoin one another --we have become too estranged.

 My Wagner mania certainly cost me dear. Has not this nerve-shattering music ruined my health? And the disillusionment and leaving Wagner -- was not that putting my very life in danger? Have I not needed almost six years to recover from that pain? No, Bayreuth is for me out of the question. It was only a joke, what I wrote you the other day. But you must go to Bayreuth, all the same. That is of great importance to me.

 Nietzsche to Gast July 25:

So, my dear friend, I'm to have music too! Good things are pouring in this summer -- it's as if I had a victory to celebrate. And so I do: think how since 1876 I've been, body and soul, more of a battlefield than a human being.

 Your melancholy words, "always a bridesmaid, never a bride," weigh heavily on my heart. There were times when I thought the same about myself. But apart from the other ways in which we're different, I'm more easily pushed around than you.

You, of course, will be the subject of the utmost discretion; introduced as an Italian friend whose name is a secret.

 A remark in your letter makes me realize that all the jingles of mine which you know were written before I met Lou...But perhaps you also feel that, as "thinker" and "poet" as well, I must have had a certain presentiment of Lou? Or is it "coincidence"? Yes! Kind coincidence.

 July 31:

 Rée wrote about moving Gillot's picture: "only then it was as if he were holding you in his arms, and as I couldn't view that with a friendly eye I put you beside him."

 August

When the festival was over, Lou and Elisabeth had planned to return together to Nietzsche, but Lou had a head cold and so Elisabeth went on ahead to Naumberg where Nietzsche was eagerly awaiting news of the event. So negative was Elisabeth about Lou's behavior that Nietzsche sent a telegram calling off their meeting. Lou, crossing messages, wrote to Nietzsche suggesting that they wait out the rain together in Jena, and sent regards to "your sister, who is now almost mine too." Lou, hurt, wrote back; Nietzsche reconsidered: “I wanted to live alone. But then the dear bird Lou flew by, and I took it for an eagle. And wanted to have the eagle about me. Do come, I am suffering too much for having made you suffer: we shall bear it better together.”

On the same day, Nietzsche wrote to Peter Gast the beginning of his concern about Elisabeth's story:

One day a bird flew by me, and I, superstitious like all solitary people who stand at a turning of their way, believed I had seen an eagle. Now the whole world is at pains to prove to me I am mistaken -- and there is urbane European prattle about it. Who is better off now -- I, who as they say was 'fooled," who spent a whole summer in a lofty world of hope on account of this bird of omen, or those who are 'not to be fooled'?...Now I am 'a bit in the wilderness' and pass many a sleepless night. But no despondency! And that demon was, like everything that now crosses by path (or seems to), heroic-idyllic.

 Nietzsche sent Elisabeth on to Jena to meet Lou, at the home of a clergyman, Heinrich Gelzer. At the Gelzer home, Elisabeth, simmering with righteous indignation, began to lecture Lou on her behavior, and a fight followed. Elizabeth reported the event to Nietzsche, who wrote "violently" to Lou,34 asking her to leave, but again he reconsidered. She wrote in her journal "I knew that if we got together, which in the storm of emotions we are first both avoiding doing, we would soon enough find each other over and beyond all petty prattle, given our deeply kindred natures."

 Lou, Nietzsche and Elisabeth spent three weeks in Tautenberg.

There was a bad quarrel and then a small tragic scene every five minutes. They ate together under a lime tree, walked in the pine forests, sat on a bench by Nietzsche's cottage, talked in Lou's room which had a red cloth draped over the lamp to save Nietzsche's eyes. During this period Lou kept a diary for Paul Ree, and wrote a collection of 190 aphorisms, which Nietzsche edited, called Stibbe Nest-Book."

 August 18. Lou diary (quoted half from Martin, half mentioned in LB as a letter to Ree)”

 The characteristically religious aspect of our characters is what we share; it has perhaps burst forth so strongly in us because we are free spirits in the most extreme sense. In the free spirit, religious feeling can no longer refer to anything godlike or to any heaven outside itself...

 We will live to see him as the prophet of a new religion, one which recruits heroes as disciples. How similarly we think and feel about all this, literally taking the words from each other's mouth. We've talked ourselves to death these past three weeks,and strangely enough he's now able to talk almost ten hours a day....It's strange, but our conversations have led us automatically toward those chasms, those dizzying places, where one once climbed alone to gaze into the abyss. We've constantly chosen to be mountain goats, and if anyone had heard us, he would have thought two devils were conversing.

August 21, Diary, Lou:

. . . his goals appeal to him to have been thought outside him, to have a separate existence, and to have to be suffered by him and, second, that the submission to those goals takes the form of self-immolation.

On August 26, Nietzsche took Lou to her train. They changed the plans to live together with Paul to Paris from Munich, planning to meet there in October. Lou had planned to meet Heinrich von Stein, but instead went to Stibbe with Ree. That same day, Nietzsche went home to Naumburg.

In the last days of August Nietzsche set Lou's "Life Prayer" poem to music.

Nietzsche to Lou: End of August ((Mid):

I left Tautenburg one day after you, very proud at heart, in very good spirits-- why?

I have spoken very little with my sister, but enough to send the new ghost that had arisen back into the void from which it came.

 In Naumburg the daimon of music came over me again -- I have composed a settling of your "Prayer to Life".

 Lastly, my dear Lou, the old, deep, heartfelt pleas: become the being you are! First, one has the difficulty of emancipating oneself from this emancipation too! Each of us has to suffer, though in greatly differing ways, from the chain sickness, even after he has broken the chains.

 In fond devotion to your destiny -- for in you I love also my hopes.

 September

 The new ghost, however, was had not been banished as Nietzsche hoped; Elisabeth at first refused to leave Tautenburg, claiming that she didn't want their mother to see her eyes, which were red from crying, but she soon joined Nietzsche in Naumburg. The tense family situation exploded on September 8; Nietzsche fought with his mother, and left for Leipzig after she called him "a disgrace on his father's grave."

Meanwhile, Lou spent September in Stibbe with Ree, studying Nietzsche's writing, especially Human, All Too Human. Nietzsche, anticipating his time together with the Trinity, and siding with Lou over his family, wrote to Overbeck:

 If you have read the "Sanctus Januarius" you will have remarked that I have crossed a tropic. Everything that lies before me is new, and it will not be long before I catch sight also of the terrifying face of my more distant life task. This long, rich summer was for me a testing time; I took my leave of it in the best of spirits and proud, for I felt that during this time at least the ugly rift between willing and accomplishment had been bridged. There were hard demands made on my humanity, and I have become equal to the hardest demands I have made on myself. The whole interim state between what was and what will be, I call 'in media vita'; and the daimon of music, which after long years visited me again, compelled me to express this in tones also.

 But my most useful activity this summer was talking with Lou. There is a deep affinity between us in intellect and taste -- and there are in other ways so many differences that we are the most instructive objects and subjects of observation for each other. I have never met anyone who could derive so many objective insights from experience, who knows how to deduce so much from all she has learned. Yesterday Ree wrote to me, 'Lou has decidedly grown a few inches in Tautenburg" -- well, perhaps I have grown too. I would like to know if there has ever existed before such philosophical candor as there is between us. L. is now buried behind books and work; her greatest service to me so far is to have influenced Ree to revise his book on the basis of one of my main ideas.. Her health, I fear, will only last another six or seven years.38

 Tautenburg has given Lou an aim -- she left me a moving poem, "Prayer to Life."

 Unfortunately, my sister has become a deadly enemy of Lou; she was morally outraged from start to finish, and now she claims to know what my philosophy is all about. She wrote to my mother: "In Tautenburg she saw my philosophy come to life and this terrified her: I love evil, but she loves good. If she were a good Catholic, she would go into a nunnery and do penance for all the harm that will come of it." In brief, I have the Naumburg "virtuousness" against me; there is a real break between us -- and even my mother at one point forgot herself so far as to say one thing which made me pack my bags and leave early the next day for Leipzig. My sister (who did not want to come to Naumburg as long as I was there and who is still in Tautenburg quotes ironically in this regard, "Thus began Zarathustra's Fall." In fact it is the beginning of a start.

 Nietzsche to Elisabeth September:

 . . . If only I could give you some idea of the cheerful self-confidence which inspired me this summer. Everything worked out well, often unexpectedly, just when I thought things had gone wrong. Lou is very content also (she's hard at work and knee-deep in books). What means a great deal to me is that she has converted Ree to a key conception of mind (as he himself reports); it's radically changing the foundations of his book. He wrote yesterday: "Lou has certainly grown a few inches in Tautenburg."

 It distresses me to hear that you are still suffering from the after-effects of those scenes, which I'd so willingly have spared you. Look at it this way: the excitement brought out in the open what might otherwise have long remained buried, namely that Lou had a rather low opinion of me and mistrusted me somewhat; and when I reflect more carefully on the circumstances in which we met, she may have been quite justified (taking into account the effect of several careless remarks by friend Ree). But now she undoubtedly thinks better o me -- surely that's the main thing, isn't it, my dear sister?...

 Perhaps I've already dwelt too long on this point. I thank you once more with all my heart for everything you did for me this summer; and I can perceive your sisterly benevolence just as clearly in those matters where we couldn't see eye to eye. Indeed, who can afford to have anything to do with such an antimoral philosopher! But two things are unconditionally forbidden me by my way of thought: (1) remorse, (2) moral indignation.

 Be nice again, dear Lama!

Nietzsche to Ree, September 15?:

My dear friend, it is my opinion that the two and the three of us are wise enough to be and stay good to one another. In this life, in which people like us so easily turn into frightening phantoms, let us be pleased and pleasant with one another, and be inventive in this -- I for my part have much to catch up on here, lone monster that I was....our dear Lou, my sister (as I have lost my natural sister, a preternatural one is due me).

 Nietzsche to Lou September 16:

Your idea of reducing philosophical systems to the status of personal records of their authors is a veritable "twin brain" idea. In Basel I was teaching the history of ancient philosophy in just this sense, and liked to tell my students: "This system has been disproved and it is dead; but you cannot disprove the person behind it -- the person cannot be killed. Plato, for example.

. . . The course of my life is decided already...

 Yesterday afternoon I was happy; the sky was blue, the air mild and clear, I was in the Rosenthal, lured there by the Carmen music. I sat there for three hours, drank my second glass of cognac this year, in memory of the first (ha! how horrible it tasted!), and wondered in all innocence and malice if I had any tendency to madness. In the end I said no. Then the Carmen music began, and I was submerged for half an hour in tears and heart beatings. But when you read this you will finally say yes! and write a note for the "Characterization of Myself."

 Come to Leipzig soon, very soon! Why only on October 2? Adieu, my dear Lou.

 Ree to Nietzsche September 17?:

 My dear, dear friend! . . . Just now and for all time nothing can part us, as we are bound in a third party to whom we bow down -- not unlike medieval knights, only with better cause.

 September 26 to Lou:

 How are your eyes? -- Maybe you should go swimming a bit every few days; we have two swimming pools here with a comfortable temperature.

 (he continues about music, putting Life-Prayer to music)

 But what am I prattling about, my dear Lou, so much with the fountain pen! To be continued orally. And when?

 Wishing you well from the heart

October

 On October 2, Lou and Ree came to Leipzig; the same day in Naumburg, Elisabeth, who had been stewing about Lou throughout September, sent a fourteen page letter, the "pure truth about Lou," to Clara Gelzer: “Their talk of living together is sheer drivel; even assuming that the girl had been quite ideally pure-minded, her habits of life were so different from ours. Fritz is so painfully orderly.”

In Leipzig, the Trinity lived the life style that they intended for the following year, as an intellectual circle with friends sympathetic to their cause. They were visited by Gast, Romundt, Georg Ree and Stein; they went to the theater and a seance. They were far from the defining ethics of Lou's home in St.Petersburg, Nietzsche's in Naumburg, from Malwida's idealistic circle in Rome -- and from the Wagner group in Bayreuth.

 Nietzsche to Overbeck October:

 . . . The renewal of my Genoese solitude might be dangerous. I confess that I would be extremely glad to tell you and your wife at length about this year's experiences -- there is much to tell and little to write.

 Lou and Ree left recently -- first, to meet Ree's mother in Berlin; from there they go to Paris. Lou is in a miserable state of health; I now give her less time than I did last spring. We have our share of worry -- Ree is just the man for his task in this affair. For me personally, Lou is a real trouvaille; she has fulfilled all my expectations -- it is not possible for two people to be more closely related than we are.

 As for Koselitz (or rather Herr "Peter Gast"), he is my second marvel of this year. Whereas Lou is uniquely ready for the till now almost undisclosed part of my philosophy, Koselitz is the musical justification of my whole new praxis and rebirth -- to put it altogether egoistically.

 November

 Early in November, Nietzsche wrote to Lou's mother to ask permission for the Paris living arrangement, which had initially been planned with Mrs. Ree in attendance. At this time he sent to Lou the Columbus poem.

 On November 5th, Lou went to Berlin with Ree. Nietzsche wrote to Overbeck:

 For me personally, Lou is a real lucky find; she has fulfilled all of my expectations -- it would not easily be possible for two people to be more akin than we are."-- check this quote with above) and to Romundt, "Lou, fully absorbed in religious-historical studies is a little genius; to look on a little now and then and to help along is a joy to me.

 And to Overbeck early in November, Nietzsche wrote, “Perhaps I have never endured such melancholic hours as in the Leipzig autumn -- even though I have reason enough about me to be of good cheer.”

 Nietzsche to Lou November 8 (Col):

Two days ago I also wrote to your mother (pretty long at that).

I also sent two letters of inquiry to Paris. --

What melancholy!

 I feel every stirring of the higher soul in you, I love nothing in you but these stirrings. I'll abstain from all familiarity and nearness, if only I can be sure of one thing: that we are united in that place which few coarse souls attain.

 I'm speaking obscurely? Once I have trust, then you'll see that I have words too. Until now I've had to be silent.

 Spirit? What is spirit to me? What is knowledge? I guess nothing but drives -- and I'd like to swear, that we have something in common. Look through the phase I've been in the last few years -- look behind it! Don't underestimate me -- You don't really believe, that the 'free spirit' is my ideal? I am --

 Pardon, dearest Lou, be what you have to be.

 On November 15, Nietzsche started for Genoa, stopping en route to visit the Overbecks in Basel, where he "heard with horror"39 that Elisabeth was spreading still more gossip about the Jena episode.

 Nietzsche announced to the Overbecks that all was over with the Trinity, but Ida Overbeck recalled, "He still expected letters and pinned hopes on them, asked whether none had come, ever feared I might be keeping something from him. He was painfully affected." 40 On November 23, he wrote Gast, "Cold. Sick. I am suffering."

 * Binion writes that Nietzsche "opened hostilities on November 8; by November 15 he was announcing to the Overbecks that everything was over with the Trinity. There is no reason given for the sudden reversal of plans, other than Binion's hint that "Perhaps from the Heinzes, whose library he used, he heard that talk was spreading in Basel.”

 Check the date on this quote, which is critical:

 “If I banish you from me now it is a frightful censure of your whole being...you have caused damage, you have done harm , not only to me but to all the people who have loved me. This sword hangs over you."

 Also the date of Lou's aphorism: "Two friends are most easily separated by a third."42

 Nietzsche to Ree End of November:

But my dear, dear friend. I thought you'd feel just the opposite and be secretly glad to be rid of me for a while! There were a hundred moments this year...when I felt that you are paying too high a price for our friendship. I've already had much too great a share of your Roman discovery (I mean Lou) -- and it seemed to me all along, especially in Leipzig, that you had a right to treat me a bit coldly.

 Think as well as possible of me dearest friend, and please ask Lou to do the same. I'm deeply devoted to both of you -- and believe I've proved this more by my absence than by my presence.

 Proximity makes one insatiable, and after all I'm a demanding person as it is.

 We'll see each other again from time to time, won't we? Don't forget that as of this year I'm suddenly low on affection, and hence very much in need of it.

 Write me in full detail about what concerns us most, -- what "has come between us" as you say.

 November 24

 Yesterday I wrote the enclosed letter to Ree: and just as I was going to bring it to the post office -- something occurred to me, and I ripped up the envelop. This letter, which concerns only you, would perhaps cause more difficulties for Ree than for you; to make it short, read it, and it is completely up to you whether Ree should read it. Take this as sign of trust my purist will to trust between us.

 And now, Lou, dearest heart, clear the skies! I want nothing more than clear skies in all aspects; otherwise I'll have to fight my way through, no matter how hard it is. But a lonely one suffers terribly because of suspicion about a pair of people he loves -- especially when its a suspicion of a suspicion which they have against his whole being. Why has all cheerfulness been lacking until now in our speaking? Because I had to do violence to myself! The clouds on our horizon lay upon me.

 Maybe you know how unbearable the desire to shame everything is to me, to accuse everything and to have to defend oneself. One does much wrong, unavoidably -- but one also has the opposite strength to do well, to find peace and joy.

 From Binion, addition to this letter:

 I want nothing but pure, clear sky, in every last corner of it. Otherwise I shall scrape through hard as this may prove -- but, being so lonesome, I suffer frightfully from any suspicion about the few people I love, especially when that suspicion concerns a suspicion against my whole being. Why has all serenity been wanting in our association so far? Because I had to do myself too much violence: the cloud on our horizon lay upon me! You perhaps know how unbearable all wanting to shame, all accusing and having to defend oneself, is to me. One does much wrong, inevitably -- but one has also the glorious counterpower of doing good, of creating peace and joy. I feel every stirring of the higher soul in you -- and love nothing about you but such stirring. I am glad to renounce all intimacy and nearness if only I may be sure that where we feel at one is just where common souls do not attain. Am I speaking darkly? Should I have the confidence, you will learn that I have the words too. So far I have always had to keep silence.

* Binion suggests here that the "suspicion suspected" was her suspicion voiced in Jena, i.e., the "low design" idea, the wild marriage. Ree adds that Nietzsche wanted an apology for Jena. Lou would not apologize and Nietzsche sunk into despair...Question here is why is the information already known about Jena and forgiven suddenly cause for so much added despair? At some point Nietzsche had to hear that the pederasty rumors were part of the issue.....was it this early?? What else would account for the sudden excess in his language?)

Affects are devouring me. Dreadful pity, dreadful disillusion, dreadful feeling of wounded pride -- how can I stand it any longer? Isn't pity a feeling out of hell? What should I do? Every morning I despair of lasting the day. I no longer sleep -- what good does eight hours' walking do? Where do I get these violent affects from ! Oh some ice! But where is there ice left for me? This evening I'll take opium till I lose my mind. Where is there a person left whom one could respect! But I know you all through and through.

 Nietzsche to Lou Nov/Dec (Col):

I have to write you a small, nasty letter. In the name of heaven, why do these 20 year old girls think who have pleasant feelings of love and have nothing better to do than to lay in bed here and there and be sick? Should one perhaps run after these little girls to chance boredom and flies away from them?? To accidentally spend a nice winter with them? Charming: but what do I have to do with nice winters? If I should have the honor of being of such service.

 November

Do we want to grow angry with each other? Do we want to make a bigger noise? I don't at all, I wanted cheery skies between us. But you are a small gallows bird! And I used to think you were the embodiment of virtue and honorableness.

I didn't know until this year, how mistrustful I am. Namely, against myself. Dealing with others has ruined dealing with myself.

 You wanted to ask me something more?

 I like your voice the most when you beg. But one doesn't hear this often enough.

 I will be deferential.

 Oh, this melancholy! I'm writing nonsense. How abhorrent people seem to me today! Where is there a sea, in which one can really still drown. I mean a person.

December

In December, Nietzsche's anger at Lou rises to a new peak, along with his disappointment over her not being philosophically what he had hoped:

Before the middle of December:

Whether I suffered a lot is nothing against the question, whether you will find yourself again, Dear Lou, or not-- I've never dealt with so poor a person as you are

unknowing -- but sharp-witted

rich in using out what's known

without taste, but naive in this shortcoming

honest and just in small matters, out of stubbornness

usually; on the larger scale, which affects the entire stance towards life, dishonest (sick as a result of too much work, etc.)

without any sensitivity for giving and taking

without spirit and incapable of love

in affect (not effect) always sick and near to madness

without thankfulness, without shame toward benefactors

unfaithful and in conversation leaving yourself at the mercy of others

incapable of the politeness of the heart

repelled against pureness and the purity of the soul

without shame always embarrassed in thought, against oneself

violent in particular

undependable

not well behaved

crude in things of honor

monstrous the negative (*?)

a brain with the first signs of a soul

character of a cat -- the predator clothed as a house pet

nobleness as reminiscence of familiarity with nobler people

a strong will, but without a large object

without diligence and purity

without bourgeois uprightness

cruelly displaced sensuality

overdue childish egoism as a result of sexual atrophy and delay

of enthusiasm capable

without love to people, but love to god

in need of expansion

crafty and full of self-restraint in reference to the sensuality of men.

* This list illustrates Nietzsche's split between lofty philosophy and his own "Naumburg virtue," between being the dynamite to destroy existing values in theory while in practice wanting "bourgeois uprightness," wrecking the very foundations of existing Platonic-Christian morality, while being afraid that his mother and sister would find out that he was planning to live (Platonically....) with a woman, if in fact that was what the rumor was at this time.... Isn't this contradiction in Nietzsche what caused the grief for both of them? Lou was always willing to live her life in defiance of convention (a tendency that was supercharged in her long talks with Nietzsche during the summer), whereas Nietzsche was obsessed with secrecy and fear of gossip. This theme parallels her fight with Gillot who wanted her to be intellectually adventuresome, but proper in her behavior.

 Before the middle of December:

Today I will only criticize you that you didn't warn me soon enough about yourself. In Lucerne I gave you my work on Schopenhauer -- I told you that my principles were contained in it and that I believed them to be yours as well. You should have read it then and said No! -- much would have been spared me! A poem much as 'On Pain" is on your lips a deep untruth. --

You see, I acted appositely: I wrote a letter about it to Mrs. O(verbeck) to ask her to give you information (which was certainly described by me ) about my character so that you don't expect anything from me that I can't fulfill.

I have a big heart for the difference between people. It is only unbearable to adore somebody because of traits which are the opposite of those he has.

Don't say anything dear Lou on your behalf: I've already allowed more to your behalf as you were able to -- indeed before myself and before others.

People such as yourself can only be bearable through the high goals of others.

How pale your humanity seems next to that of friend Ree. How poor you are in honor, thankfulness, piety, politeness, admiration -- shame -- in order to speak of higher things. What would you answer if I were to ask you: are you well-behaved? Are you unable to betray?

 Do you have no feeling for the fact that when someone such as I is in your presence that it costs him much energy?

 I could make it much easier for myself with you -- except when you beg?

Are you upright? Sensitive in relationship to giving and receiving?

 * This letter finally sounds completely like Elisabeth language in her biography. These are the Naumburg virtues: "thankfulness, piety, politeness, admiration, shame....." These are the virtues necessary for a disciple, what Nietzsche really wanted Lou to be -- obsequious.....the very opposite of everything Lou said about herself in the Gillot letter. The comparison with Ree will change later, when he discovers that Ree was perhaps the guilty one and not (just?) Lou....

Middle of December:

I never doubted that you wouldn't someday cleanse yourself in a heavenly way from the dirt of those humiliating deeds.

 Every other man would have turned away with disgust from such a girl: I too had it (WFN: check this phrase), but managed to overcome it over and over again to stay the truth: it disturbs me to see a nature capable of nobility in her perversion.

 That gave me sympathy.

 I lost that little truth that I had: my good name; the trust of a few people; I shall lose perhaps my friend R(ee) -- I lost the whole year due to the terrible tortures which have hold of me even now

 In Germany I found nobody to help me and now it's as if I'm banned from Germany and what hurts me the most is -- my whole philosophy is exposed due to -- I don't have to be ashamed in front of myself for this thing: the strongest and most heartfelt feelings of this year I've had for Lou, and there was nothing in this love that belonged to the erotic. At the very most I could have made God jealous.

Strange! I thought that an angel was being sent to me in return, as I turned my attention once again to people and to life -- an angel who should soothe things in me that had become hard because of pain and loneliness, and above all an Angel of courage and hope for everything that I still have before me -- in the meantime it wasn't an angel.

 Finally I don't want anything else to do with her. It was a completely useless waste of love and heart. And to say the truth: I'm rich enough for that.

* "My whole philosophy is exposed..." is probably one of the key issues in Nietzsche's complaint against Lou and Ree, that they discussed his secret philosophy publicly....the exact nature of the "dirt of those humiliating deeds" is vague.... Important here is the question of when Nietzsche gave up the search for a cosmological proof of Eternal Recurrence, how ridicule over his search to make that idea literal got back to him.

Middle of December (Draft):

If I should send you away from me now it would be a terrible grade for your whole being! You have dealt with one of the most patient and well-meaning of people... Write other letters to me. Concentrate on something better; concentrate on yourself!

 I've never been wrong about somebody before: and in you is that drive to a holy self-addiction, which is against the drive to obedience -- You've mistaken this drive (through I don't know what kind of a curse) for its opposite...

 If you give vent to everything wretched in your nature, who then can still deal with you!

 You've inflicted damage, you've inflicted pain -- and not just you, but all other people who love me. This sword hangs over you.

 You have in me the best advocate, but also the most merciless judge! I demand that you judge yourself and that you determine your own punishment.

 These are all things that happen in order to overcome them -- in order to overcome one's self.

 Yes, I was angry with you: but why single out this detail? I was angry with you all five days -- and believe me I've always had a good reason for that. But how could I be able to live among people now if I didn't know how to overcome my repugnance for so many people?

 I am insulted not just by actions but much more by characteristics.

 I had decided for myself back in Orta to reveal my whole philosophy to you. Oh, you have no idea what kind of a decision that was: I believed I couldn't make a better present to someone.

 I tended back then to consider you a vision and manifestation of my earthly ideal. Please note: I have terrible eyesight.

 I think that nobody can think better of you, but also not worse.

 If I had created you, I certainly would have given you better health, but much more beyond that, which is far more worthy -- and perhaps a bit more love to me (although that has the absolute least importance) and it would have been the same with friend Ree -- neither with you nor with him can I speak even a single word about matters of my heart. I imagine, you don't know at all what I want? But this forced noiselessness is almost suffocating, because I am fond of people.

 * The distinction between the "drive to self addiction" and the "drive to obedience." Obedience, a necessary quality in Nietzsche's idea of a disciple, is the very last quality Lou had any interest in.

 Middle of December--Draft 2

 (On the whole I've never been wrong about somebody before).

 I credited you with higher feelings than other people: that and that alone was what bound me to you so quickly. After everything that you had told me this confidence was allowed. I would only hurt you and accomplish nothing if I told you what I call my holy self-addiction. -- Strange! I would still believe more or less that you are capable of these higher and most rare feelings: some accident in your upbringing and development lames the good will for it intermittently. -- Think about it: this cat-like egoism that can't love anymore, this feeling of life in nothingness to which you proclaim yourself is exactly that which repels me in people: worse than something evil. (Things that one has in order to overcome them, in order to overcome one's self.) And if I understand you somehow: these are all tendencies that are capricious and were forced upon you -- in so far as they aren't symptoms of your illness (about which I have a lot of painful thoughts in the back of my mind).

 In Orta I had decided to guide you step by step to the consequence of my philosophy -- You as the first person whom I held capable of it. Oh, you have no idea what a decision, what effort that cost me! I've always done a lot for my pupils: the thought of reward in any sense always insulted me. But what I wanted to do here, now, in regard to the increasingly bad state of my strength, that was beyond all former efforts. A prolonged structure and construction. I never thought of asking you first about your willingness: You weren't supposed to notice how you came to this task. I trusted those higher impulses which I believed you to have.

 I thought of you as my heir.

 As far as friend R(ee) is concerned: it was like very time (even after Genoa): I can't stand looking at this slow disintegration of an extraordinary nature without feeling ireful. This lack of a goal! and therefore the small desire for the means, for the work, this lack of diligence, even on scientific consciousness. -- I see everywhere mistakes in upbringing. A man should be raised to be in one sense or another a soldier. And woman to be in one sense or another the woman of a soldier.

 Spiritus and portemonnaie. (spirits and wallets)

 * Woman of a soldier is about the last role Lou would care to play. Am I missing something here, or is "self-addiction" which Nietzsche calls holy that which he was criticizing Lou for having in the previous letter? -- "that drive to a holy self-addiction, which is against the drive to obedience".

.Mid December:

My dears, Lou and Ree

 Do not be upset by the outbreaks of my 'megalomania" or of my "injured vanity" -- and even if I should happen one day to take my life because of some passion or other, there would not be much to grieve about. What do my fantasies matter to you? (Even my truths mattered nothing to you till now.) Consider me, the two of you, as a semilunatic with a sore head who has been totally bewildered by long solitude.

 To this, I think, sensible insight into the state of things I have come after taking a huge dose of opium -- in desperation. But instead of losing my reason as a result, I seem at last to have come to reason. Incidentally, I was really ill for several weeks; and if I tell you that I have had twenty days of Orta weather here, I need say no more.

 Friend Ree, ask Lou to forgive me everything-- she will give me an opportunity to forgive her too. For till now I have not forgiven her.

 It is harder to forgive one's friends than one's enemies.

 Lou's "justification" occurs to me...

 Middle of December:

My dear Lou: don't write letters like that to me! What do I have to do with this wretchedness? Please note: I wish that you would raise yourself up before me so that I didn't have to despise you.

 But Lou what kind of letters are you writing! Revenge-lustful schoolgirls write like that! What do I have to do with this pitifulness! Please understand: I want you to raise yourself up before me, not that you reduce yourself. How can I forgive you, if I don't first recognize that being in you again for which you could ever possibly be forgiven?

 No, my dear Lou we are a long way still from 'forgiving'. I can't shake forgiveness out of my shirt-sleeves, after the offense had four month's time to work its way into me.

 Good-bye, my dear Lou. I won't see you again. Protect your soul from such actions and make good to others and especially my friend Ree what you couldn't make good to me.

 I didn't create the world and Lou: I wish I had -- then I would be able to bear all the guilt that things turned out between us the way they did.

 Good-bye dear Lou. I didn't read your letter to its end, but I'd read too much already.

 December 20, approx. to Lou and Paul (Col): (Note: other translation of letter above)

 I am in order to be a free spirit in the school of affects. That is the affects are devouring me. A horrible sympathy, a horrible disappointment, a horrible feeling of wounded pride -- how do I stand it? Isn't sympathy a feeling from Hell? What should I do? I despair every morning about how I'm to survive the day. I don't sleep anymore: 8 hours marching doesn't even help! Where do I these strong affects come from? Oh, for some ice. But where is there ice for me? Tonight I will take so much opium that I'll loose my senses. Where is there someone whom I could honor? But I know you all through and through.

 Please don't get upset about the eruptions of my 'superiority complex' or my injured vanity. And if I should someday for some reason accidentally take my life, there wouldn't be much to mourn for there. Of what concern is my fantasizing to you, my you and Lou? Even my truths were of no concern to you until now). Go ahead and discuss between yourselves, that I'm in the end a mind-suffering half mad cannon that long loneliness drove completely crazy.

 And then to the point, as I say, about my understanding glimpse in the situation of things after I'd taken - out of desperation -- a huge dose of opium. But instead of loosing my senses, they seem to finally come to me. By the way, I really was sick for weeks; and if I say, we had 20 weeks of Orta weather, I won't need to say anything else.

 Friend Ree, please beg Lou to forgive me of everything -- shell give me a chance yet to forgive her. Because until now I've not forgiven her anything.

 One forgive one's friends with more difficulty than one's enemies.

 That reminds me of Lou's defense.

 Strange! So long as someone defends themselves before me, it is always the case that I'm supposed to be wrong. I know this in advance, so it's no longer interesting to me.

Is Lou to be a misjudged angel? I'm used to it: this year everyone is upset about me, next year they'll rejoice because of me.

 Should Lou be a misunderstood angel? Should I be a misunderstood ass?

 in opio veritas

Long live wine and love!

 Middle of December to Rée:

 Dear friend, I call Lou my living sirocco: not for a single moment with her together have I had the clear sky that I need with and without people. She unites in herself all the human qualities that repel me -- disgusting and horrible -- They don't set well with me -- and now since Tautenburg I've taken on the torture to love her! a love on whose account no one need be jealous -- at the very least the Lord above.

 This is thus always a problem for the thousand faceted artist of self-overcoming. R(hode) called me that recently.

 On Christmas eve, Nietzsche returned a letter from his mother unopened.

 Last week of December to Rée:

I'm writing this in the clearest weather: please don't mistake my reason for the nonsense in my recent opium letter. I'm not crazy and I don't suffer from a superiority complex. But I should have friends who would warn me in time about such desperate things like those from summer.

 Who could have guessed, that her words heroism 'fighting for a principle', her poem "On Pain", her stories about fighting for knowledge are just deceit? (Her mother wrote me in summer: L(ou) had the greatest thinkable freedom).

 Or is it different? The Lou in Orta was a different being from the one that I later found again. A being without ideals, without goals, without duties, without shame. And on the lowest level of humanity, despite her good head.

 You told me yourself, she had no morals -- and I said, she had a more stringent one for me than anyone else did! and she brought something more than daily and hourly to sacrifice.

 In the mean time I see that she's only out for amusement and entertainment: and whenever I think, that questions of morality belong to that, then I'm taken over by -- to put it mildly -- outrage. It didn't set well with her at all, that I forbid her the word 'heroism of knowledge' -- but she should been honest and said: 'I'm legions away from that.' Heroism has to do with sacrifice and duty by the day and hour, and after that much more: the whole soul has to be of one thing, and life and happiness just as much against it. I thought Lou was such a person.

 Please listen, friend, to how I see things now! She is a complete disaster -- and I am its victim. In spring I thought, a person had been found who was able to help me: for which not a good intellect but a first class morality is necessary. Instead we discovered a being, which wants to amuse itself and is shameless enough to believe, that the highest spiritus on earth are just good enough for that.

 The result of my mistake is for me, that I have less than before the means of finding such a person, and that my soul, which was free, is now burdened with a weight of disgusting memories. For the whole dignity of my life's purpose has been placed in question by a superficial and unmoral, thoughtless and spiritless being like Lou, and that my name --my reputation is spotted. (check this line)

I believed you had convinced her to come to my aid.

 Nietzsche to Ree Middle of December:

 I don't understand anymore, D(ear) F(riend), how can you stand being in the presence of such a being! For heaven's sake, pure air, and mutual highest respect! Otherwise . . .

 Dec 31. Letter to Ree. She speaks little of Nietzsche, reminisces of her year with Ree, writes how their friendship like a garden blossoming with thousands of blooms. She does not mention Tautenburg.

 Much later Lou learned that Nietzsche had been unhappy about the rumors he started: "What I've done can't be forgiven.”

 Nietzsche to Overbeck December 25:

 This last morsel of life was the hardest I have yet to chew, and it is still possible that I shall choke on it. I have suffered from the humiliating and tormenting memories of this summer as from a bout of madness -- what I indicated in Basel and in my last letter concealed the most essential thing. It involves a tension between opposing passions which I cannot cope with. This is to say, I am exerting every ounce of my self-mastery; but I have lived in solitude too long and fed too long off my "own fat," so that I am now being broken, as no other man could be, on the wheel of my own passions. If only I could sleep! -- but the strongest doses of my sedative help me as little as my six to eight hours of daily walking.

 Unless I discover the alchemical trick of turning this -- muck into gold, I am lost. Here I have the most splendid chance to prove that for me "all experiences are useful, all days holy and all people divine"!!!

 All people divine.

 My lack of confidence is now immense -- everything I hear makes me feel that people despise me. For example, a recent letter from Rohde. I could swear that if we had not happened to have earlier friendly relations, he would now pronounce the most contemptuous judgments on me and my aims.

Yesterday I also broke off all correspondence with my mother; I could not stand it any more, and it would have been better if I had not stood it for as long as I have. Meanwhile how far the hostile judgments of my relatives have been spread abroad and are ruining my reputation -- well, I would still rather know than suffer this uncertainty.

 My relation with Lou is in the last agonizing throes -- at least that is what I think today. Later -- if there will be any "later" -- I shall say something about that too. Pity, my dear friend, is a kind of hell -- whatever the Schopenhaurians may say.

 I am not asking you "what am I to do?" A few times I thought of renting a small room in Basel, visiting you now and then, and attending lectures. A few times I also thought of the opposite: driving my solitude and renunciation to its ultimate point and --

 Well, let that be. Dear friend, you with your worthy and wise wife -- you are almost the last foothold I have left. Strange!

 May you two fare well.

 1883

Lou lived for four years with Paul. Friends called him her "Hand Maiden.”They settled in Berlin, when the plan to move to Paris fell through when Turgenev died. They spent a summer in Upper Engadine, traveling there in a postal carriage, "slowly and peacefully."

 Nietzsche Early 1883:

 I had the best intentions of remaking her in the image I had formed of her.

Nietzsche to ? February 1883

 I won't conceal it from you: I'm in a bad way. Darkness has closed in on me again...For a short time I was completely in my element, basking in my light. And now it's over. I believe I'm surely done for unless something (I have no idea what) happens. Like somebody hauling me out of Europe. I see myself now -- me with my physiological turn of mind -- as the victim of an atmospheric disturbance to which all Europe lies exposed. How can I help it if I have an extra sense, and therefore a new and terrible source of suffering? Just to think of it like that eases things...Everything I've hinted at in my letters is only peripheral. I have such a horrible bag of painful, horrible memories to carry!

 Thus I haven't been able to forget, even for an hour, that my mother called me a disgrace to the grave of my father.

 Nietzsche to Gast February 1883

 The incredible burden of the weather (even old Etna is beginning to belch) transformed itself into thoughts and feelings of frightful intensity. And out of my sudden release from this burden, in the wake of ten absolutely bright and bracing January days, Zarathustra was born, the most emancipated of my offspring. Teubner has already started printing. I did the transcribing myself. -- Schmeitzzner reports that during the past year all my books have sold better, and there are many other signs of growing interest.

 Forgive me for this babbling; you know what else is on my mind and in my heart just now. For several days I was violently ill... I'm better now, and I even think that Wagner's death is the most substantial relief I could have been granted. It was hard having to be, for six years, the opponent of the man I had respected most...Last summer I found that he had taken away from me everyone at all worth influencing in Germany and had begun drawing them into the muddled, desertlike malignancy of his old age....

 Nietzsche to Overbeck, Feb 9?, 1883

 I think I shall inevitably go to ruin unless something happens, I have no idea what .... I have such a manifold burden of torturesome and hideous memories to bear. Thus for example it has not left my mind for one hour that my mother called me a shame on my father's grave. Other examples I shall keep to myself -- but a pistol barrel is to me now a source of relatively pleasant thoughts.

Nietzsche to Gast February 19, 1883, Rapello

As for your remarks about Lou, they gave me a good laugh. Do you think then that my taste in this differs from yours? No, absolutely not! But in this case it has little to do with "charming or not charming"; the question was whether a human being of real stature should perish or not.

 Nietzsche to Overbeck, early March 1883

 My severance from my family is beginning to appear to me as a true blessing; oh, if you only knew all I have had to overcome on this score (since my birth)! I do not like my mother, and hearing my sister's voice upsets me; I have always fallen ill when together with them.

Nietzsche to Overbeck Feb 9?, 1883

 I am very ill...No! this life! And I am the advocate of life!!..Nothing helps me; I must help myself or I am done for.

 Nietzsche to Overbeck March 22?, 1883

 At the very base, immovable black melancholy....I no longer see any point at all (check underline here) to living even another half year, everything is full, painful degoutant. I forego and suffer too much....I shall do nothing good any more, so why do anything!

 In Genoa, Lou began falling back "into proper focus." 44

 Nietzsche to Gast April 6, 1883, Genoa:

 . . . But I am a soldier -- and this soldier, in the end, did become the father of Zarathustra! This paternity was his hope; I think that you will now sense the meaning of the verse addressing Sactus Januarius: "You who with the flaming spear split the ice of my soul and make it thunder down now to the sea of its highest hope."

Nietzsche to Gast April, 1883 (Fus) About Wagner...

 At that time (1869) we loved one another and wanted the world for each other -- it was really a deep love, without mental reservations.

 Nietzsche to Gast, April 21, 1883

 In view of the possible danger of giving you a moment of nausea and under orders that you burn this letter immediately, I will justify myself for the use of the word "contempt" which you find so strong and incredible. I have never let myself be guided by the opinions of others but I am lacking in the disdain for human beings and the fortunate dowry of a thick skin -- and therefore I have to admit that at all times of my life I have suffered greatly regarding the opinion that others have of me. You must consider that I come from a family circle which has disapproved of and rejected my development; it was only as a consequence of this that my mother just a year ago called me "an affront to the family" and "a shame to my father's grave." My sister wrote to me at one time that if she were a Catholic she would go into a cloister to redeem the wrongs that I have created through my thinking. Yes, she has announced open hostility to me up to a point where I will have to turn around and make every effort to become a "good and true human being". Both of them consider me a "cold hearted egoist", Lou also had this opinion until she got to know me better, that I was a "mean and low character always ready to exploit others for my own ends." Cosima talked about me as a spy who would worm himself into the trust of others and then escape when he has gotten what he wants. Wagner is rich in evil thoughts; but what do you think of the fact that he has exchanged letters regarding this (even with my doctors) to express his conviction that my changed way of thinking is the result of my unnatural aberrations, hinting at pederasty -- My new writings are interpreted in Universities as evidence of my "decline"; one has heard too much about my illness. But that hurts me less than when me friend Rohde feels them to be "cold-comfortable" and probably "very advantageous to my health." -- Lastly: only now, after the publication of Zarathustra, will the worst come because I have with my "holy book" challenged all religions -- Ree has always had a very touching modesty towards me, this I will very plainly confess to you.

 Out of the World into the Forest! That's the end of it!

 Very Truly Yours,

 Summer, 1883, Sils Maria:

 My relatives and I -- we are too different. The precaution I took against receiving any letters from them last winter cannot be maintained any more (I am not hard enough for that). But every contemptuous word that is written against Ree or Frl. Salome makes my heart bleed; it seems I am not made to be anyone's enemy (whereas my sister recently wrote that I should be in good spirits, that this was a 'brisk and jolly war").

 * Footnote re Podach (p. 215): After she had prepared him....by "lighting the candles," he lent himself to a step which the break in his friendship alone would never have induced him to take: he wrote a wounding letter, in his sister's name as well as his own, to Lou Salome's mother. His sister wrote to Ree's mother, and, to crown everything, Nietzsche offended Ree's brother (Georg), whom he had met no more than casually in Leipzig. It is well known that the incident nearly led to a duel with pistols. The potential duel with Georg is frequently mentioned, but no one so far has observed that a duel with a 7/8th blind man is hardly a duel. While Nietzsche was in Sils Maria (doublecheck dates here), Ferdinand Tonnies (umlaut), known as a "Nietzschean," moved in with Lou and Ree, thus living out the form of the Trinity originally envisioned. They rented a floor in a rooming house in Flims; on July 11, 1883, Tonnies wrote to a friend: (Paulsen??)

 We are living her as a most debonair trio. Miss Salome runs the household with a superior assurance and tactful finesse positively admirable. She is really an altogether extraordinary being: so much cleverness in a twenty-one (sic)-year-old girl would almost make your flesh creep were it not for her truly tender disposition and utter demureness. She is a phenomenon that must be seen from close up to be believed. And a single look suffices to annihilate any thought of a 'woman of loose ways," as the preacher says: cut off both my hands if I am mistaken! Her grasp of religion and of the moral content of nationality is deep and strong, her power of expression significantly rich. She is a genius.

 Meanwhile, Nietzsche, still seething with anger and despair, turned back and forth between siding with his sister and finding her an enemy as well.

 Nietzsche to Overbeck, July 1883

Things are moving again. My sister wants her revenge on this Russian-- well and good, only so far I have been the victim of her every initiative. She does not even notice bloodshed and the most brutal possibilities hardly an inch off.

 Nietzsche to Overbeck, July 27, 1883

 The separation from you threw me back into the deepest melancholy, and the whole return trip I was lost to evil black sentiments, including true hate for my sister, who for one year now has deprived me of all self-control with ill-timed silence and ill-timed talk: so that I have wound up a prey to pitiless vengefulness, whereas my innermost way of thinking precisely rejects all avenging and punishing: -- this conflict in me is driving me step by step to madness.

 Nietzsche to Ida Overbeck, July 29, 1883

 I have gone through hellish days and nights on account of something first learned by me three weeks ago. And do not worry about my false footing with my sister; the truth is that all my footings so far with everyone have been false: she was at least as much affronted as I was, with good right too, and if now she means to work it out for Lou to be sent back to Russia, she will be doing more good if she succeeds that I with my asceticism. She was too considerate of me last year, so that the most incriminating facts of this matter, which she kept back from me in Tautenburg, became known to me only three weeks ago...Of a sudden Dr. Ree steps into the foreground: to have to relearn about someone with whom I shared loved and trust for years if frightful.

 This letter of July 29 changes the nature of "the offense", moves Ree to the foreground, marks Nietzsche's change to wishing to have Lou expatriated. It also proposes that in the first week of July, Nietzsche came to learn of something new.

 August to Gast? 1883? -- a couple of days after August 26th letter to Gast: (WFN check exact date in Podach)

 Dear friend, the parting from you threw me back into the deepest melancholy, and during the whole of my return journey, I could not shake off my black and evil feelings, one of which was a veritable hatred of my sister, who, by being silent at the wrong moment and by talking at the wrong moment throughout the whole year, has deprived me of the fruits of the best victories I have won over myself, so that I have, in the end, become the victim of a ruthlessly revengeful sentiment, although my innermost mind has foresworn revenge and punishment. This inner conflict is bringing me step by step nearer madness (could you, perhaps, do something drastic to make my sister appreciate this point?) and I feel it in the most terrible manner. Nor do I know how a journal to Naumburg would diminish the danger. On the contrary, horrible moments might ensue, and my long-nourished hatred might emerge in speech and action. And in that case, I, far more than the others, would be the victim. Even now it is inadvisable for me to write anything to my sister, except letters that are quite harmless (one of the last I sent her was full of cheery verses). Perhaps my reconciliation with her was the most fatal step in the whole affair -- I now realize that it led her to believe that it gave her a right to be revenged on Fraulein Salome.iiiiv

 Overbeck wrote to Gast on July 31, 1883, expressing concern for his friend:

 Now he takes in stories about atrocities of every description of which he professedly had no inkling whatever till now, joins his sister in schemes for vengeance, and torments himself over the retrospective lights now cast on the whole affair by his imagination, so wild to begin with but now perpetually prodded. You can guess how his solitude is now shaping up, with what demons it is now peopling itself: it were a thousand times better he quit it. For the time being we have urgently begged him to put a veto on all further communications for his sister....Now it as if we were witnessing a self-immolation.

 Nietzsche to Gast August 26, 1883

 For a year I have been incited to emotions of a kind I have abjured with the best will. I really think I have mastered them, at least in their grosser aspects of vengefulness and resentment.

 Nietzsche to Malwida August, 1883, Sils Maria, Engadin (Mid)

 According to everything I have heard now -- ah much too late! -- these two people Ree and Lou are not worthy to lick my boots. Excuse this all too manly metaphor! It is a protracted misfortune that the R., a thorough liar and crawling slanderer should have ever crossed my path. And for how long have I been patient and sympathetic with him! "He is a poor fellow, and one must drive him on" -- how often have I told myself this whenever his impoverished and dishonest manner of thinking and living have disgusted me! I am not forgetting the annoyance I felt in 1876 when I heard that he would be coming with you to Sorrento. And this annoyance returned two years later -- I was here in Sils Maria, and my sister's announcement that he would be coming made me ill. One ought to trust one's instincts more, even the instincts of revulsion. But Schopenhauer's 'pity" has always been the main cause of trouble in my life -- and therefore I have every reason to be well disposed toward moralities which attributes a few other motives to morality and do not try to reduce our whole human effectiveness to 'fellow feelings."...one has to keep a nice tight rein on one's sympathy, and treat anything that goes against our ideal (for instance, such low characters as L. and R.) as enemies.

 Nietzsche to Lou's mother

 I will not say what pains I took to sustain even the last vestige of that image and how much I have had to forget even the last vestige of that image and how much I have had to forget and even forgive in this. Still less do I mean to tell you, her mother, what an image was left to me in the end.

 "After sending off his letter to Georg Ree" (check date and enter this letter, Rudy gives no date for this one....), Nietzsche wrote to Elisabeth:

 Your brother is really quite unhappy. No, I am not made for enmity and hate: and since this matter has gone too far for a reconciliation with those two to be possible any more, I no longer know how to live; it is on my mind continually. Enmity is incompatible with my whole philosophy and way of thinking: to have entered the lists of the hostile (and against such poor folk) drags down my every aspiration. Never before did I hate anyone -- not even Wagner, whose perfidy went well beyond Lou's. For the first time I felt humbled.

 * This letter finally (!!) links "Wagner's perfidy" with Lou's gossip, making the link with the pederasty rumors, and bringing up the question of whether or not the original "offense" including suggestions of pederasty.....

 Page 108, Rudy does not give a date to this lovely letter to Ida:

 . . . one more word on Miss Salome. Quite apart from the idealistic light in which she had been presented to me...she is and remains for me a being of the first rank, about whom it is a pity forever. Given her energy of will and originality of mind, she was headed for something great; given her practical morality, though, she may well belong rather in a penitentiary or madhouse. I miss her, for all her bad qualities: we were disparate enough for something useful to have been always sure to come out of our talks; I have found no one so unprejudiced, so clever, so well prepared for my sort of problems. I have felt ever since as if condemned to silence or humane hypocrisy in my dealings with everyone.

 * Beginning in December 1884, into the Spring, Josef Paneth was tracking Nietzsche around the Engadine, and sending letters to Freud about what he was learning. This is the place to introduce Nietzsche's relationship to Freud, which is usually separated in the Lou literature by twenty five years....have to do this carefully!! Match up the long letter that exists, quoted in Elisabeth's book from Paneth to his fiance Sophie Schwab. Freud destroyed his letters. This link with Nietzsche through Paneth contradicts Freud's statements about being unaware of Nietzsche.....on the other end, the literature that I have seen mentioning Paneth does not take into account what Nietzsche's state of mind was at the time that Paneth was with him. Putting Paneth in here, in the context of Nietzsche rather than Freud, gives a new spin to that material....will see if it works.

1884

Nietzsche to his mother, Feb 1884, draft

 Whatever may be said against the girl -- and surely much more than my sister says -- the fact remains that I have found no more gifted, more reflective creature. And though we never agreed (any more than did Ree and I), after every half hour together we were both happy over the lot we had learned. And I did not score my highest achievement these past twelve months without cause. We were warned about each other amply: and little as we loved each other, just as little did we need to give up a relationship in the highest sense useful to us and the world...That the two behaved vilely toward me is true, but I had forgiven them, as I had forgiven my sister worse.

Nietzsche to Malwida Written from Venice between Apr. 21- June 12,84

 It is essential that she (Elisabeth) should leave for Paraguay as soon as possible. Later,, very much later, she will come to realize how much her ceaseless filthy suspicions about my character (it has been going on for two years!) have damaged the most decisive period in my life. Ultimately there remains for me the very uncomfortable task of righting the wrong that my sister has done Dr. Ree and Frl. Salome (soon Frl. Salome's first book will be appearing -- on 'religious emotion" -- the very theme for which I discovered in Tautenburg her extraordinary talent and experience; it gladdens me that my effects at that time should not have been entirely waster). My sister reduces a rich and original creature like her to 'lies and sensuality" -- she sees in Dr. Ree and Frl. Salome nothing but two "rotters"; it is of course against this that my sense of justice revolts, whatever good reasons I may have for thinking that the two of them have deeply offended me. It was very instructive for me that my sister, in the end, brought just the same blind suspicious to bear on me as on Frl. Salome; only then did I realize that all the bad qualities which I had ascribed to Frl. S. went back to that squabble which occurred before I knew Frl. S. more closely--how much my sister much have misunderstood and added to what she heard then! She has no understanding of human beings at all -- heaven forbid that one of Dr. Forster's enemies should ever get into a discussion with her about him!

 Once more asking your forgiveness for bringing up this old story again! I wanted only to prevent you from having your own feelings influenced by that horrible letter which I wrote you last summer. Extraordinary people like Frl. Salome deserve, especially when they are as young as she, to be treated with every consideration and sympathy. And even if I myself for whatever reasons, and unable to wish for any new approach toward closer relations from her side, I shall nevertheless disregard all personal considerations in the event of her position becoming difficult and desperate.

Above letter, Rudy dates Early May, 1884, his translation:

 I am chafing over that inhumane letter I sent you last summer; I had been made downright sick by unspeakably repulsive goading. Since then the situation has changed in that I have broken with my sister radically: for heaven's sake do not think of mediating and conciliating: between a vengeful anti-Semitic goose and me, conciliation is impossible....Later, much later, she will come to see by herself how much she has harmed me with her continual dirty insinuations against my character those two ears -- in the most decisive epoch of my life. Now there remains for me the very touchy task of making good in some measure with Fr. Ree and Miss Salome what my sister (!) has made ill....My sister reduces such a rich and original creature (as Lou) to lies and sensuality,' sees no more in Dr. Ree and her than 'two duds.' Against this my sense of justice now revolts, though I may have good ground for considering myself to have been insulted by both. It was most instructive of my sister to have cast suspicion on me of late just as blindly as on Miss Salome: I then first realized that everything bad believed by me about Miss Salome goes back to that squabble that preceded our closer acquaintance: how much my sister may have heard wrong or imagined! She lacks any and all knowledge of people...Extraordinary people like Miss Salome deserve, especially when so young, all consideration and sympathy. And even if I, for various reasons am in no position yet to hope for a new contact between us, I do mean to disregard all personal considerations on my side should her situation shape up ill and grow desperate.

 Nietzsche on Heinrich von Stein

To Franz Overbeck, September 14, 1884

 At last, at last, a new man who belongs to me and instinctively respects me! Admittedly, at the moment too wagnerise...if only I can possess enough young people of a very particular quality.v

1885

Nietzsche to Elisabeth Mid-May, 1885

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 Ree) 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...vi

 Background on von Stein:

 On October 20, 1879, a man came to Wahnfried, seeking a new tie between Wagner and Nietzsche, whom he so venerated: Heinrich von Stein, a writer and philosopher, born in Coburg in 1857, was hired as Siegfried's tutor. At last, another young man who could be taken into the family! The baron, from an ancient Franconian dynasty, a slender giant with blond hair, a small moustache, big blue eyes, who looked more like a soldier than a philosopher, charmed everyone and was instantly claimed by the Master for himself. This lovely hope was similar to Nietzsche in many ways: equally young, equally modest, equally quick to blush at off-color jokes, and passionate for all his stiffness. Von Stein also took part in the festive life of the family in Naples. 45

 Background notes from Binion p. 126-127:

Lou went to Munich with Stein, and asked him to intercede with Nietzsche for a reconciliation, as well as to show him her new novel which Binion says "is a secret message to Nietzsche...the declaration of a love that could never be. In the spring of 1884 the hapless lovers communicated indirectly"... Stein visits Nietzsche in Sils for "three enchanting days"; Nietzsche told his mother Stein "spoke with the highest regard of Dr. Ree's character and of his love for me -- which did me much good."

 * Would Stein have met Josef Paneth at this time, while visiting Nietzsche? That will take some fishing, but would be most interesting. Which of Nietzsche's friends did Paneth meet? Elisabeth published two letters of Paneth's to Sophie, the first the true one, and the second in a reprinting of her Nietzsche book, doctored to make her brother look better in relation to Paneth.

 Nietzsche to von Stein, October 15, 1885

 Yesterday I saw Ree's book about conscience -- how empty, how boring, how false!46 One really out to speak only of things which are the stuff of one's experience.

 I felt very differently about the seminovel by his soeur inseparable Salome, whom I could at once jokingly picture. Every formal aspect of it is girlish, soft, and -- in the pretense that an old man is supposed to be telling the story -- downright comic. But the matter itself has its serious side and its loftiness; and even if it is certainly not the eternal feminine which draws the girl on, then it is perhaps the eternal masculine.vii

Sources:

 Mid (Christopher Middleton Selected Letters of FN)

Fus (Peter Fuss and Henry Shapiro N: A Self Portrait from his Letters

Col (Nietzsche Breifweschsel III, Ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, translated by .... )

Dok (DOK quotes are taken from other books. Copy of DOK exists at Stanford for further work).

RB: Binion's translations from Frau Lou.