Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 1844-1900
German philosopher, scholar and writer

Born in R�cken, Saxony, the son of a Lutheran pastor, he proved himself a brilliant classical student at the universities of Bonn and Leipzig. He was appointed Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Basle at the age of 24 and became a Swiss citizen, serving briefly as a medical orderly in 1870 in the Franco-Prussian War but returning to the university in poor health. His first book Die Geburt der Trag�die (1872, Eng trans The Birth of Tragedy, 1909), with its celebrated comparison between 'Dionysian' and 'Apollonian' values, was dedicated to Richard Wagner, who had become a friend and whose operas he regarded as the true successors to Greek tragedy. However, he broke violently with Wagner in 1876, nominally at least because he thought the Christian convictions expressed in Parsifal were 'mere playacting' and political expediency. In 1878 he was forced to resign his university position after worsening bouts of his psychosomatic illnesses and spent most of the next 10 years at various resorts in France, Italy and Switzerland writing and trying to recover his health. In 1889 he had a complete mental and physical breakdown, probably syphilitic in origin, and he was nursed for the next 12 years, first by his mother at Naumberg then by his sister Elizabeth at Weimar. He never recovered his sanity. In the 16 years from 1872 he had produced a stream of brilliant, unconventional works, often aphoristic or poetical in form, which have secured him an enormous, if sometimes cultish, influence in modern intellectual history. The best-known writings are: Unzeitgem�sse Betrachtungen (1873-76, Eng trans Thoughts Out of Season, 1909), Die Fr�hliche Wissenschaft (1882, Eng trans The Joyful Wisdom, 1910), Also sprach Zarathustra (1883-92, 'Thus Spake Zarathustra'), Jenseits von Gut und B�se (1886, Eng trans Beyond Good and Evil, 1907), Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887, Eng trans A Genealogy of Morals, 1897), and Ecce Homo (his autobiography, completed in 1888 but withheld by his sister and not published till 1908). One cannot derive systematic 'theories' from these often highly-wrought literary works but the characteristic themes are the vehement repudiation of Christian and liberal ethics, the detestation of democratic ideals, the celebration of the �bermensch (superman) who can create and impose his own law, the death of God, and the life-affirming 'will to power'. His reputation suffered when his views were taken up in a simple-minded and perverted form by the German Nazis, but he is now regarded as a major, though very individual, influence on many strands of 20th-century thought, including existentialism and psychoanalysis, and on figures as various as Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Thomas Mann, W B Yeats, Karl Mannheim and Michel Foucault.

Bibliography: Peter Bergman, Nietzsche (1987)