Chapter 16: Friedrich Nietzsche

1844-1900

The life I am living is really dangerous because

I am one of those machines that could explode.

Friedrich Nietzsche

In the town square in Turin, Italy on 3 January 1889, Friedrich Nietzsche threw his arms around the neck of a horse being beaten, lost consciousness, and turned the bend to madness.[1] His landlord, Davide Fino, found the fallen philosopher in the square and took him home. That night Nietzsche kept everyone awake, singing, shouting, and banging on the piano. He composed a series of mad post cards, most of which were confiscated by the Turin post office. Of those that got through, one was to the Vatican signed “the Crucified” and one was to his old friend Franz Overbeck, a professor of church history at Basel: “I am just having all anti-Semites shot,” [2] Nietzsche wrote, and signed the letter Dionysos. When his former colleague, Jacob Burckhardt, received a four-page clearly unstable letter from Nietzsche written in tiny, almost illegible script, he immediately consulted Overbeck, who set out that day for Turin in time to keep a frightened Fino from having Nietzsche arrested. Nietzsche’s experience in the town square of Turin recalls similar sudden transformations from seeming sanity to syphilitic madness experienced by Schumann, Baudelaire, Wolf, and Maupassant.

Overbeck reported the details of the rescue mission in Turin to Nietzsche’s friend Peter Gast, saying he must be silent about a few matters to “any soul who was the sick man’s friend”—at least for now. Nietzsche had broken into tears and embraced Overbeck. Then he sang loudly, raving, uttering “bits and pieces from the world of ideas in which he has been living, and also in short sentences, in an indescribably muffled tone, sublime, wonderfully clairvoyant. Unspeakably horrible things would be audible, about himself as the successor of the dead God, the whole thing punctuated, as it were, on the piano, whereupon more convulsions and outbursts would follow.”[3] Nietzsche, the clown of the new eternities: the breakdown was so complete that Overbeck wondered if it would have been a genuine act of friendship to have taken his life.

The next day Overbeck persuaded Nietzsche to accompany him to Basel pretending that there was to be a great festival in his honor. Overbeck described a “quietly terrifying” train trip. They were helped and accompanied by a dentist who said he was used to dealing with madmen, and, as it would happen, by the French novelist André Malraux’s grandfather’s brother Walter, who told a young Malraux this story.

Short of money, they had to travel third class. A peasant woman with a hen in a basket was in their compartment with them. Walter feared a violent incident. As they were going through the St. Gotthard tunnel, a thirty-five minute trip in complete darkness, Nietzsche began to chant a poem, his last, “Venice,” accompanied by the sound of the hen pecking at the basket. Walter thought some of Nietzsche’s poetry was mediocre but this one—“well, by God, it was sublime.”[4]

In Basel Professor Nietzsche was admitted to the nerve clinic of Dr. Wille, an expert on General Paralysis of the Insane. The sign-in sheet recorded: Friedrich Nietzsche, Professor at Basel at age of 23. 1866. Syphilit. Infect. Scholars who find Nietzsche’s last works to be the most mature expression of his philosophy oppose suggestions that there were signs of impending madness. The story of Nietzsche’s sudden plummet from the most advanced thought of his time to raving dementia is often told as if there were a razor’s edge demarcation between sanity and tertiary syphilis, as if on 3 January armies of spirochetes woke suddenly from decades of slumber and attacked the brain, instead of the biological reality that paresis is a gradual process presaged over many years. There were times before the well-known episode with the horse when Nietzsche was showing clear anticipatory signs of paresis, and times in the asylum when he seemed so normal that his friends wondered if it might all be a ruse. Gast observed: “The question of whether one would be doing Nietzsche a favor if one reawakened him to life must be left aside. . . . I have seen Nietzsche in certain conditions where it seemed to me—a terrible thought!—that he was faking madness, as if he were glad that it had ended thus. It is highly probable that he could write his philosophy of Dionysus only as a madman.”[5] Overbeck agreed: “I could not help having the horrifying thought, at least momentarily—though this happened during several of the periods in which I witnessed Nietzsche’s mental illness—that his madness was simulated.’[6]

Many, perhaps most, Nietzsche scholars believe that Nietzsche’s exquisite writing of his last months (and years) could not have been the product of a madman. Scholar Claudia Crawford represents this approach well in an essay on Nietzsche’s final production. She argues that his excesses in the last year, especially in the last quarter of 1888, in Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, The Case of Wagner, and in his notes and letters, were not “symptoms of megalomania and impending madness” or “signs of degenerative madness,”[7] but rather the conscious wielding of a grand style of prophecy and apocalypse. Nietzsche’s language was appropriate to carry out his plan to assassinate two millennia of anti-nature, to play out “the psychological aim of becoming a redeemer on a par with Jesus and Socrates.”[8]  Here Nietzsche was confronting humanity with the most difficult demand ever made of it: “the attempt to raise humanity higher, including the relentless destruction of everything that was degenerating and parasitical.”[9] He possessed and expressed the “will to power” as no one had ever done.

However, since the syphilis texts tell us that the last expressions of sanity before paretic dementia sets in can be characterized by mystical vision, messianic prophecy, grandiose self-definition, clarity of expression, and extreme disinhibition, while all the time maintaining exquisite precision of form, then this remarkable final late work of Nietzsche’s was not incompatible with or contrary to what we would expect from the paresis that was about to annihilate him. Over and over in those last works are images of tightly controlled energy and immanent detonation. The final chapter of Ecce Homo, “Why I am Destiny,” proclaims a crisis, decades of worldwide conflagration, wars “such as have never been seen on earth, and the name Friedrich Nietzsche will be associated with it all: ‘I am not a philosopher. I am dynamite!’—boundless brilliance. The old god has abdicated: ‘I shall rule the world.’”[10] He threatened to constrict the Reich in an iron shirt and provoke it to a war of desperation. On 18 December 1888 Nietzsche wrote to his friend Carl Fuchs: “Never before have I known anything remotely like these months from the beginning of September until now. The most amazing tasks as easy as a game; my health, like the weather, coming up every day with boundless brilliance and certainty. I cannot tell you how much has been finished—everything. The world will be standing on its head for the next few years: since the old God has abdicated, I shall rule the world from now on.”[11] On Christmas Day he promised in two months to be the best-known name on earth. He saw himself as a machine about to blow apart. Thomas Mann characterized Nietzsche’s soaring intellect at that time as “blasted with ecstasy.”[12] Karl Jaspers describes a mystical light, a dangerous shuddering at the boundary in this last work.[13] Since Nietzsche never sold more than a few hundred copies of any of his books during his lifetime,[14] his final proclamations seem grandiose. And yet his influence on every aspect of Western culture has been so profound that we have to ask if his most extreme self-aggrandizement has not proven understated.

Sigmund Freud acknowledged the influence of paresis when he praised Nietzsche’s last achievements. On 28 October 1908 the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society devoted the evening to Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, just published posthumously. Freud said (and Otto Rank recorded in the Minutes):

Nietzsche was a paretic. The euphoria is beautifully developed, and so on, and so on. However, this would oversimplify the problem. It is very doubtful whether paresis can be held responsible for the contents of Ecce Homo. In cases in which paresis struck at men of great genius, extraordinary accomplishments were achieved until a short time before the outbreak of illness (Maupassant). The indication that this work of Nietzsche is fully valid and to be taken seriously is in the preservation of mastery of form.[15]

Illness became his fate, Freud said. (Thomas Mann went one step further: “His destiny was his genius. But there is another name for this genius: disease.”[16])  Freud continued: “The degree of introspection achieved by Nietzsche had never been achieved by anyone, nor is it likely ever to be reached again.”[17] And he continued: “The most essential factor must still be added: the role that paresis played in Nietzsche’s life. It is the loosening process resulting from paresis that gave him the capacity for the quite extraordinary achievement of seeing through all layers and recognizing the instincts at the very base. In that way, he placed his paretic disposition at the service of science.”[18] Alfred Adler agreed; in paresis one can find extraordinary accomplishments.

            At the asylum Nietzsche was able to recognize his mother Franziska, who with Overbeck arranged to have him transferred from Wille’s clinic to the psychiatric clinic of Jena University closer to her. There the head of staff, Dr. Stutz, concluded that “the data confirm progressive paralysis as being the correct diagnosis. There can hardly be any doubt on the subject.”[19] The initial exam was conducted by Dr. Ziehen, the chief house physician. The examination at Jena revealed a scar on the penis, a possible indicator of a prior syphilic chancre. John Stokes wrote that the chancre resolves with “at most only the most superficial and minute scar,”[20] whereas an elaborate scar would indicate another venereal infection, chancroid. Nietzsche’s handwriting showed tremor when he was upset. He gesticulated and grimaced continually while speaking. For the first five months he continued to be agitated and frequently incoherent. He smeared his feces and drank his urine. He screamed. At other times, he would seem perfectly normal. He received mercury rubs. According to the belief of the time that family would only further agitate a paretic, Nietzsche’s mother was not allowed to visit for six months just as Clara Schumann had not been allowed to visit Robert in the asylum.

            Nietzsche was admitted to the Jena clinic with this entry: “type of Illness: Paralytic mental illness.” Otto Binswanger, the head of the clinic at Jena, was an expert in General Paralysis of the Insane. His publications included “Contributions to the Pathogenesis and Differential Diagnosis of Progressive Paralysis” and “Brain Syphilis and Dementia Paralytica, Clinical and Statistical Studies.” Professor Binswanger once presented Nietzsche to his class as a case study of paresis. Binswanger kept Overbeck informed of Nietzsche’s condition. Nietzsche, he wrote, spoke more coherently, with fewer outbreaks of screaming, and some delusions and auditory hallucinations. The outlook for recovery was small.

In March of the following year, Nietzsche was released from the clinic into the care of his mother, who watched over him until she died in 1897. Then his sister, Elisabeth, with the help of her mother’s maidservant, Alwine, took over until the end. From early 1894 Nietzsche was house-bound. In 1895 he began showing signs of increasing physical paralysis. Overbeck recalled his last visit to Nietzsche at the end of September. His friend was half-crouching in the corner, only wanting to be left in peace. Before, he had been dreadfully excited, roaring and shouting.

            One of the arguments against Nietzsche’s having had neurosyphilis has been that he existed in the twilight zone of insanity for eleven years after the onset of paresis.  However, syphilis texts tell us that the course of paretic neurosyphilis can range from three to six months in extreme cases to as many as thirty years or more in slowly deteriorative types.[21]  This slow-moving or “stationary paresis” is different from the type known picturesquely as “galloping paresis.” Relevant to the episode with the horse, John Stokes wrote that trauma can incite paretic manifestations in a case that otherwise would have remained quiescent.[22] 

            Nietzsche died of a stroke on 25 August 1900. He was buried with a traditional Lutheran funeral, a mockery of his philosophy. No autopsy was performed. Elisabeth confessed that at the time of her brother’s death she never thought of permitting a dissection, and in fact no physician had suggested it. Beside, she added, at that time the “disgusting suspicion” of syphilis had not yet emerged. Of course, syphilis was part of the medical record, although it is quite possible that the diagnosis had not been shared with the family, and the doctors saw no reason to make it public.

No archivist has had more mixed reviews than Elisabeth Nietzsche. She began her collection of Nietzsche’s manuscripts as an adoring little sister, filing her brother’s first literary attempts in her treasure chest. That trove grew to be the Weimar Archive, a lovely building Elisabeth established to house her brother’s papers and her brother as well; he spent his last insane years living upstairs. Elisabeth raised money, negotiated publishing contracts, and managed a staff of workers (mostly Nazis after Hitler came to power) who catalogued his work. She published eight books and eighty-one articles, including a three-volume biography of Nietzsche and a ten-volume pocket edition of Nietzsche’s work. She became known throughout Europe as a woman of letters and the guardian of Nietzsche’s legacy, on a par with Cosima Wagner similarly watching over the creative estate of her late husband Richard. Elisabeth was nominated three times for the Nobel Prize.

But Franz Overbeck warned that Elisabeth was a different kind of sister: a dangerous one. It is Overbeck’s review that has lasted. Why has Elisabeth been so completely vilified by scholars? As a devout Lutheran, a rabid anti-Semite, and a fierce nationalist who revered Hitler, Elisabeth was uniquely unsuited to represent a man who was anti-anti-Semitic and anti-patriotic, who wrote God’s obituary and the script for demolishing everything she held sacred. Nietzsche’s attempts to keep his mother and sister from knowing how far he had traveled from the hometown Christian virtue failed. Over the years Elisabeth avoided the increasingly dire contradictions between her morality and her brother’s by twisting truth at every step to match her wished-for image of reality.

The Nobel committee would have made a big mistake if they had honored her as a archivist since she edited as she pleased, changing letters to make them read the way she thought they should have been, rarely even bothering to cover her tracks. Biographers now refer to her politely as an unreliable witness, or with less restraint as a compulsive and pathological liar, singularly nasty, bigoted, and bloody-minded. Her compiled editions of Nietzsche’s work, in particular The Will to Power, included passages from his notebooks that he might never have wanted published. Scraps of writing from a waste basket left in his room in Sils Maria found their way into his published works, freely edited. But Elisabeth’s worst failing was to put the archive in the service of Adolf Hitler.

Elisabeth’s first meeting with Hitler took place in February 1932 in Weimar’s National Theater, where a play about Napoleon co-authored by Benito Mussolini (who later donated money to the Nietzsche archive) was being staged, thanks in part to Elisabeth’s machinations. Hitler, who had come to town accompanied by storm troopers, heard that Nietzsche’s sister would be at the theater. He approached her box with an armful of red roses. While she was initially cool to him because she (rightly) assumed he would be defeated for the presidency by Hindenburg, who ran for election one more time at eighty-five to oppose the upstart extremist, she began to sing his praises after he took over a year later: “We are drunk with enthusiasm because at the head of our government stands such a wonderful, indeed phenomenal personality like our magnificent Chancellor Adolf Hitler.”[23] His fascinating eyes seem to stare right through you, she recalled. When she died, Hitler laid a laurel wreath on her coffin.

The Nietzsche legend as created by Elisabeth had no place for syphilis, so it is ironic that word of his disease might never have reached the public if she had not attempted to cover it up. Her first blunder was to allow access to Nietzsche’s medical records at Basel and Jena to the respected Leipzig neurologist and psychiatrist P.J. Möbius. If Elisabeth had hoped for a sympathetic portrait of the last illness from Möbius, she was sadly deceived. In 1902 he published On the Pathological in Nietzsche in which he not only revealed the diagnosis, though by innuendo rather than by name, but far worse, he suggested that the first indications of mental instability, caused by syphilis, appeared as early as 1881 with the “lightning” inspiration for Thus Spake Zarathustra.

Elisabeth probably did not know the diagnosis at the time; if she had known it, she would not have given Möbius access to the records. Dr. Wille would have had no reason on Nietzsche’s admission in Basel to tell the distressed mother the origin of her son’s illness, nor would the doctors at Jena. Once the story was out, though, Elisabeth tried all the damage control she could devise. An aggressive pathographer, Möbius warned the public against the sick philosopher. Only those that are intellectually deaf, he warned, can miss the undertones of progressive paralysis in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. “If you find pearls do not imagine that it is all one chain of pearls. Be distrustful, for this man has a diseased brain.”[24] The creeping onset of late syphilitic disease was superimposed on Nietzsche’s already morbid mental state, declared Möbius. Elisabeth flew into a rage, calling his accusation a “disgusting calumny,” not even so much because he revealed her brother’s disease as because he suggested that he had been infected by a prostitute. Philosopher and psychologist Karl Jaspers credited Möbius with being the first to recognize the incisive transformation in Nietzsche beginning in the early eighteen eighties, but he concluded that Möbius’s insight was so encumbered with absurdity that it did not gain approval.

Möbius interviewed many of Nietzsche’s friends from student days looking, unsuccessfully, for stories of any sexual activity. He concluded rather lamely that although Nietzsche’s attraction for sex had been abnormally weak, “and he lacked the sex-urge which a healthy male needs in order to devote himself to a woman,”[25] he must have been curious enough to try sex at least once. Biographer R. C. Hollingdale had an opposite idea: that Nietzsche was “highly sexed and inordinately attracted to women,” yet there is no record, or even hint, of his ever having gone to bed with a woman of his own class -- or with any woman, we might add. That Nietzsche was inordinately attracted to women goes against all the known evidence.

Elisabeth did not give up in her attempts to cleanse the record of the ignoble diagnosis and its probable disreputable cause. If she could not stop the gossip about syphilis, she could at least put the prostitute rumor to rest. For this task in 1923 she engaged one of Nietzsche’s doctors, Health Commission Vulpius, who had assisted Binswanger at Jena. Vulpius’s finding of an inflammation of the left iris had confirmed for him the diagnosis of progressive paralysis: “The right pupil was considerably wider open than the left one, which was extremely deformed, but both showed no reaction to light. Slight adhesions of the somewhat discolored left iris with the front lens capsule were mostly dissolved after the insertion of a grain of atropin into the corner of the eye.”[26]

“I too was deeply moved upon meeting the shadow of a man whose writings I had studied with lively enthusiasm as a student,” Vulpius recalled. “So it is understandable that I approached my patient not only with medical but also with psychiatric interest which in turn led Frau Dr. [honorary] Förster-Nietzsche to entrust me with writing a critique of her brother's medical history and the unsavory controversy connected with it.”[27] Vulpius’s cooperative and fanciful theory at least satisfied Elisabeth with an alternative to sexual transmission: 

The causal toxin must have once entered Nietzsche's system, namely without his knowledge. The most obvious and likely occasion for this assumption was his service as a volunteer medical corpsman in the 1870 campaign, and especially perhaps the final transporting of influenza and diphtheria patients under the most unfavorable hygienic conditions. To overcome his lively disgust and probably in the belief that he was thereby enjoying some disinfecting protection, he smoked in the ambulance. How easily a transmission of the poison could have taken place if he ever set down his cigar in order to help a patient in the crowded vehicle![28]

As far-fetched as the cigar theory sounds, spirochetes from a mucous patch in the mouth could be transferred on a cigar. Joseph Rollet, a doctor from Lyon, demonstrated that secondary syphilis is contagious in ways other than sexual by observing a glassblower with an infectious mucous patch in his mouth who infected a coworker when he passed a glassblowing pipe. By 1864 Rollet had fifteen such case studies, thus establishing the contagiousness of secondary syphilis. But Vulpius had no reason to think Nietzsche was infected in this way (perhaps he was humoring Elisabeth), and there is one sufficient reason why he was not: Nietzsche served as a volunteer medical corpsman only in 1870, whereas Möbius claimed to have in his possession letters from two Leipzig doctors who had treated Nietzsche for syphilis in 1867. This information about the Leipzig letters was provided by psychiatrist Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum in a monograph published in 1946. He had written “Nietzsche as a Psychiatric Problem” in 1931. In this monograph he stated that a Berlin psychiatrist had told him about the treatment by these known doctors. Walter Kaufmann included this information in his section on Nietzsche in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy.[29] And according to Hollingdale, Richard Blunck in a study of young Nietzsche “reproduces evidence which makes it impossible to doubt that Nietzsche was treated for a syphilitic infection by two Leipzig doctors during 1867.”[30] In the clinical records Nietzsche is reported to have said he was infected twice in 1866, so treatment the following year fits a reasonable time-line for secondary syphilis. Although the information about the Leipzig treatment is not substantiated, there is no reason to doubt Möbius’s word  that he had these letters in his possession as he said.

Elisabeth noted that Nietzsche had “cholera” twice in 1867, either incident being a possibility for a secondary syphilitic fever. Another possibility is that he was infected earlier and first treated only then. There was no sharp turn toward chronic illness in 1867. In fact Nietzsche’s medical history contains suspicious conditions much earlier. Between 1861 and 1866, for example, he complained of headaches, pains in the neck, chest, and throat, hoarseness, rheumatism, and spells of coughing which has led to speculation of early meningitis following a syphilitic infection.

Elisabeth’s next ploy was to get the diagnosis discredited. In May 1905 she assigned Peter Gast, who was working for her in the archive, the job of writing to Franz Overbeck, on his deathbed, requesting him to acknowledge that the diagnosis of syphilis found in the medical records at Jena was based on a remark he had made at the time of Nietzsche’s admission. Overbeck angrily answered at once that Professor Binswanger had told him in February 1890, after swearing him to secrecy, that there was no doubt in his mind about the syphilitic origin of Nietzsche’s paralysis. “I have kept Binswanger’s confidence, except in your case, Mr. Gast.”[31] This correspondence was another of Elisabeth’s blunders. By trying to erase the diagnosis, she unwittingly documented a confirmation. When she asked Ida Overbeck to obtain a deathbed confession, Ida refused and soon after sued Elisabeth for libel for accusing her husband of losing a manuscript of the missing part of the Will to Power in Turin. In 1922 Binswanger stated that although the origins of Nietzsche’s disease could not be known, the diagnosis of progressive paralysis could not be doubted. According to present science, Nietzsche had a syphilitic infection of the central nervous system.[32]

            Indefatigable Elisabeth also attempted to explain away Nietzsche’s paralysis as an effect of drugs. A “Javanese soporific,” thought to be liquid hashish, was given to him in the summer of 1881 by a Dutchman who told him never to take more than a few drops in a glass of water. Elisabeth tried it and it had an exhilarating effect, but she came to dislike the feeling and implored her brother to be moderate in its use. In 1885 Nietzsche admitted he had taken a few drops too many and had flung himself to the ground, exhilaration passing over into a spasmodic laughter. According to Elisabeth, Professor Wille at Basel told her that Nietzsche was experimenting with soporifics not yet tried by science. All of this was revealed only after Möbius’s book was used by Elisabeth to promote the theory that Nietzsche’s paralysis was a “hashish paralysis.”[33] She also suggested that the sleeping medication Nietzsche took left him excited in the morning.

            Despite Elisabeth’s best efforts, the diagnosis would not disappear.

One of the most frequently quoted theories for where Nietzsche was infected with syphilis is also one of the least likely. In February 1865, while a student at the University of Bonn, he took a short vacation by himself to Cologne. A porter who was asked to take him to a restaurant brought him to a brothel instead. Nietzsche recounted this story of the adventure to his friend Paul Deussen: “I found myself suddenly surrounded by half a dozen apparitions in tinsel and gauze, looking at me expectantly. For a short space of time I was speechless. Then I made instinctively for the piano, as being the only soulful thing present. I struck a few chords, which freed me from my paralysis, and I escaped.”[34]

“According to this story and everything else I know about Nietzsche,” Deussen wrote, “I am inclined to believe that the words which Steinhart dictated to us in a Latin biography of Plato apply to him: mulierem nunquam attingit[35]”--he never touched a woman. Nietzsche’s unambiguous antipathy to these prostitutes might lead to the conclusion that the Cologne brothel is the last place where he might have come in contact with syphilis. Yet this very brothel has entered the popular literature as the most probable place of infection, with numerous biographers stating it as fact.

The reason for this twist is to be found in Dr. Faustus, a novel by Thomas Mann. The protagonist, Adrian Leverkühn, is modeled on Nietzsche. The brothel episode as recounted to Deussen is a key scene. "That up to then he had 'touched' no woman was and is to me an unassailable fact," says the narrator. But Mann changes one detail: in his story, Adrian is touched on the cheek by one of the prostitutes. In Nietzsche's account of the episode, repulsion is key, but in Mann’s fiction, repulsion switches to obsessional attraction. Adrian travels in search of the woman with the fatal touch and chooses to be infected with the "exhilarating but wasting disease,” even though she warns him away. “And, gracious heaven, was it not also love, or what was it, what madness, what deliberate, reckless tempting of God, what compulsion to comprise the punishment of sin, finally what deep, deeply mysterious longing for daemonic conception, for a deathly unchaining of chemical change in his nature was at work, that having been warned he despised the warning and insisted upon possession of this flesh?”[36]

In an essay on the inspiration for Dr. Faustus, Mann reveals the reason why his fictional Nietzsche/Leverkühn waited an entire year after the brothel encounter before looking for the prostitute. After saying that Nietzsche was “twice infected” with syphilis, he wrote: “The medical history preserved at Jena gives the year 1866 for the first of these misadventures. In other words, one year after he had fled from the house in Cologne he returned without diabolic guidance, this time to some similar place and contracted the disease (some say deliberately, as self-punishment) which was to destroy his life but also to intensify it enormously.”[37]

But Thomas Mann was guessing, as was R.C. Holllingdale in turn: “How he contracted it remains strictly a matter for speculation, although the problem is surely not a very difficult one: a young man in Nietzsche's situation could hardly have come in contact with the disease anywhere but in a brothel.” Angus Fletcher expresses the scholarly confusion: "Nietzsche's own account of this experience was ambiguous or changeable, and finally unreliable. Did he touch the woman at the brothel, or only the piano?"[38]  But there is nothing ambiguous in Nietzsche’s statement: “I struck a few chords, which freed me from my paralysis, and I escaped.” Scholarship has come full circle to fault Nietzsche for that which he did not say.

More relevant details about Nietzsche’s private life when he was a student come from a most unexpected source: Carl Gustav Jung. Jung pursued Nietzsche’s life story, especially that which pertained to his sexuality and his disease, with the passion and tenacity of a private investigator, gathering information from confidential interviews with people who had known Nietzsche personally. In his memoir Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung tells how Nietzsche’s experience was central to his own personal journey, in particular the critical descent into his own unconscious. He never published what he learned, except for a few scraps in the memoir, but he did speak of it to others, and so there are notes to be found in transcripts of conversations—in the minutes of the Wednesday meetings of Freud’s Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and in the course notes (1,544 published pages) taken at a seminar that Jung conducted in English on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra between 1934 and 1939.[39]

In the memoir Jung related that his interest in Nietzsche had started when he was a medical student. He delayed reading Nietzsche because of a “secret fear” that he might be like him, that he might be forced to recognize that he too was a “strange bird” with a morbid second personality, a thought that threw him into a cold sweat. Nietzsche could afford to be a “sport of nature” because he was published and spoke many languages, whereas Jung with only his Basel dialect felt vulnerable to criticism.

Although Nietzsche had taken a leave of absence from Basel for his health nineteen years before Jung began his investigation, there were still people who had known him and were able to recall unflattering tidbits, such as the way he pretended to be a nobleman writing stylistic exaggerations that got on the nerves of the Basel academics.[40] In the Zarathustra seminar Jung recalled that Nietzsche walked around Basel in a gray top hat, dressed to imitate Englishmen who came to Switzerland. “He did not wear a veil, but otherwise he was a complete English gentleman from the storybook, a perfectly ridiculous sight. That was adorning himself! For nobody in Basel ever dreamt of walking about like that.”[41]

In the Zarathustra seminar, Jung recounted (from the correspondence between Nietzsche and Overbeck) a dream that Nietzsche had about a toad:

Now in this correspondence, he mentions the fact that Nietzsche always suffered from a peculiar phobia that when he saw a toad, he felt that he ought to swallow it. And once when he was sitting beside a young woman at a dinner, he told her of a dream he had had, in which he saw his hand with all the anatomical detail, quite translucent, absolutely pure and crystal-like, and then suddenly an ugly toad was sitting upon his hand and he had to swallow it. You know, the toad has always been suspected of being poisonous, so it represents a secret poison hidden in the darkness where such creatures live—they are nocturnal animals. And the extraordinary fact is that it is a parallel to what actually happened to Nietzsche, of all people—that exceedingly sensitive nervous man had a syphilitic infection. That is a historical fact—I know the doctor who took care of him. It was when he was twenty-three years old. I am sure this dream refers to that fatal impression; this absolutely pure system infected by the poison of the darkness.[42]

Along with the fantasy improvisation on Nietzsche’s dream, this passage contains two very important bits of information relating to the syphilis question: that Jung knew the doctor who treated Nietzsche and that Nietzsche was infected when he was twenty-three, which would be in 1867, the same date Möbius gave for the two treatments in Leipzig. It takes only a little digging to establish that Jung knew Otto Binswanger. Otto’s nephew Ludwig Binswanger was a colleague of Jung’s and a member of  Freud’s Wednesday evening group. Ludwig Binswanger had used Jung as a subject in his word association experiments. In February 1908 (the year of the two meetings of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society concerning Nietzsche), Jung and Ludwig Binswanger visited famous uncle Otto together. The date is confirmed by a postcard that Jung mailed to Freud from Jena, signed by himself and Ludwig Binswanger.[43]

While talking about how Nietzsche maintained distance from his friends, Jung revealed a surprising personal connection with Franz Overbeck: “Overbeck always handled Nietzsche with gloves; I knew him. He was a typical, refined historian, a very learned man, and in all his ways exceedingly polite and careful not to touch anything that was hot; he appreciated the great genius in Nietzsche, but the man Nietzsche he handled most carefully.”[44] Jung added that, when insane, Nietzsche produced the most shocking erotic literature that Elisabeth destroyed, but Overbeck saw it and, Jung hints, discussed it with him: “there is plenty of evidence of his pathological condition.”[45] Curiously, Jung did not specify what was so shocking that he would have deemed it pathological.

Jung corresponded with Elisabeth, though these letters were probably quite formal. And he had an opportunity to speak, at least on one occasion, with Lou Andreas Salomé, Nietzsche’s sometime friend and confidant, when they both attended the Third Psychoanalytic Congress in 1911.

What Jung had learned through his private sleuthing about Nietzsche was revealed indirectly at the 1 April 1908 meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Paul Federn stated: “According to a reliable source, Nietzsche had at certain periods of his life homosexual relations and acquired syphilis in a homosexual brothel in Genoa.”[46] In the 28 October 1908 meeting, Federn again mentioned a report that Nietzsche was homosexually active and infected that way. Freud then gave the source of that report: “Jung claims to have learned that Nietzsche acquired syphilis in a homosexual brothel.” Freud added, “Completely cut off from life by illness, he turns to the only object of investigation that is still accessible to him and which, in any event, is close to him as a homosexual, i.e., the ego.”[47]

Freud was still alluding to this allegation in 1934 when he tried to dissuade his younger friend Arnold Zweig from writing a romanticized novel about Nietzsche: “In the first place one cannot see through anyone unless one knows something about his sexual constitution, and with Nietzsche this is a complete enigma. There is even a legend that he was a passive homosexual and had acquired syphilis in a male brothel in Italy.

[INSERT FIGURE 16.2]

Nietzsche’s sexual history remains a mystery. Most biographers have portrayed him as chaste, at best unlucky at love, and possibly clandestinely involved with female prostitutes, though here with little to go on. Joachim Köhler’s biography reveals a homoerotic Nietzsche, at home in the expatriate gay communities of Messina.[48] The intense, intellectual friendship of Lou Salomé with Nietzsche and his friend Paul Rée in the summer of 1882 reads differently if she is seen as the friend of two gay men and as Nietzsche’s biographer-to-be, rather than as rejecting his amorous advances. Nietzsche wrote that he might consider marriage when he was on his way to meet Lou—but a two year marriage at most, and he did tell their mutual friend Malwida von Meysenbug that he would consider himself duty bound to offer Lou his hand in marriage if they were all to live together in Paris as they had planned. However, it is unlikely that his proposal meant more than that, and Lou’s motivations for repeating a proposal story are unknown.[49] Nietzsche at one point suggested that Paul Rée should marry her, assuming that Lou might have been tempted. Details of ménage aside, Nietzsche had great plans for Lou, who was to be his disciple, and heir who would carry on his work if he was destined for a short life.

That summer he confided to Lou the deep philosophical secret of the Eternal Return and his plan for Zarathustra, the illumination that Möbius called his first flash of pre-paretic consciousness. It was, perhaps, Nietzsche’s electric excitement and misery at that time that led Möbius to see a warning. Nietzsche wrote: “Each cloud contains some form of electric charge which suddenly takes hold of me, reducing me to utter misery.”[50] He thought he ought to be in a Paris electricity exhibition. “Perhaps I am more receptive on this point, unfortunately for me, than any other man on earth.”[51] He told Peter Gast in August 1881 that he felt  “like a zig-zag doodle drawn on paper by a superior power wanting to try out a new pen.”[52] “On my horizon thoughts have- arisen, the like of which I have never seen before. . .  Sometimes I think the life I am living is really dangerous because I am one of those machines that could explode. . . .Each time I had wept too much the previous day while I was walking, and not tears of sentimentality but jubilation. I sang and talked nonsense, possessed by a new attitude. I am the first man to arrive at it.”[53] 

Lou was an avid listener; if anyone had heard them talking, she recalled, he would have thought two devils were conversing. But Nietzsche, angry at reports from Elisabeth of loose talk about him at the Wagner Parsifal festival in Bayreuth that summer, broke off the relationship after warning Lou: “If I banish you from me now, it is a frightful censure of your whole being. . . .  this sword hangs over you”[54]  He came to regret that break later when he saw through Elisabeth’s reports and realized Richard Wagner was the one spreading tales, but the damage was done.

The Nietzsche period was a painful part of Lou’s life, off limits when she joined the Freud group in 1911, though she may have discussed it in confidence with Freud. In 1895 Lou had published the first in-depth study of Nietzsche. Although many reviews were splendid, Elisabeth predictably accused Lou of revenging herself upon poor invalid.  Nietzsche when he could not longer defend himself. 

Whether or not Lou knew of Nietzsche’s syphilis (and how much Nietzsche related it to his own progressing illnesses) is unknown. But she certainly knew about it after Möbius’s veiled revelation in 1902, just as it was common knowledge, avidly discussed, in the Freud entourage by 1908. When Lou attended the Third Psychoanalytic Conference in Weimar in 1911, she brought with her the mystique of having been close to Nietzsche in her youth. A picture taken of the attendees of that event on the lawn in front of the conference center shows Freud seated in the middle, (standing on a box) with Jung crouching a bit not to look taller than Freud. Lou is wearing a fur wrap in the front row; in the back is her lover, the Swedish psychotherapist Poul Bjerre. In 1905 Bjerre had published  The Insanity of Genius (Der geniale Wahnsinn), a book about Nietzsche that agreed with Möbius in suggesting that the first warnings of paresis were seen years before the final breakdown. Bjerre identified bacterial syphilis poison as the cause of the paralysis. (Had he heard in time for publication of Schaudinn’s viewing of the spirochete that year?) Two conference attendees, Hans Sachs and Ernest Jones, visited Elisabeth Nietzsche on a break.

We can only imagine what conversations may have taken place about Nietzsche, his insanity, his genius, his sexuality, and his syphilis, as Freud, Jung, Lou, Bjerre, Hans Sachs, Ernest Jones, and others strolled together on the lovely lawns of the Weimar conference center.

In her published doctoral dissertation, Pia Volz has provided the most complete medical history for Nietzsche, including a long list of hypothesized diagnoses: epilepsy, apoplexy, hereditary mania, premature brain atrophy, paranoia, schizophrenia, and inadvertent self-poisoning. As usual with the mania and depression of syphilis, numerous scholars have suggested a bipolar disorder.  She favors syphilis—a significant vote given the comprehensiveness of her research into Nietzsche’s condition.[55]

Over the decades, many explanations, from the plausible to the bizarre, have been proposed for where, when, why, and how Nietzsche was or was not infected, and what he knew about it. Here are a few of the various theories: he infected himself without sexual relations (Hildebrandt); he infected himself with prostitutes as a form of subconscious self-punishment (Brann); he was saddled with a false diagnosis (Sigfried Mandel); he thought he was cured (Angela Livingstone); he didn’t know he had it (Walter Kaufmann); it was not syphilis at all but a repressed memory of childhood abuse (Alice Miller); it was only a miserable sexual accident (Otto Rank); all his ills were psychosomatic (Hildebrandt again).  Novelist Stefan Zweig wrote darkly that Nietzsche mistook for illumination the poisonous germ of the waiting catastrophe. Rudolph Steiner, who visited Nietzsche at the end, had a vision of him as a reincarnated Franciscan monk who had spent his days kneeling in front of an altar until his knees were a mass of bruises; the pain tied him to his physical body so that in the next incarnation, he had no desire to be in the body at all.[56] Topping the list, Nietzsche himself once remarked that it was to Wagner’s music that he owed his nervous decline.

            “O blissful moment! O exquisite festival! O unspeakable holy duty!”

When Pastor Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, a preacher’s son and Prussian court preacher, baptized his first child, born on 15 October 1844 and named for King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, whose birthday he shared, the father had no idea that he, his royal patron, and his new son would all end their lives mentally ill. In 1844 there was only jubilation at the birth of a first child to the pastor and his young wife Franziska. Two years later Elisabeth Therese Alexandra, named for three princesses, was born.

Family harmony was destroyed when revolution swept Europe in 1848. Pastor Nietzsche retired to the library in a deep depression following news that his King had given in to demands of the revolutionaries. It soon became obvious something else was wrong when he suffered convulsions and loss of memory. In extreme pain, after eleven months of illness, with blindness and incoherence at the end, he died at age thirty-six. The cause of death was stated as “softening of the brain.”

When he was four years old Nietzsche was taken to a professor of ophthalmology at Jena, who noted the unequal diameter of his pupils, a trait he inherited from his mother. Ronald Hayman noted that the circumstances of Pastor Nietzsche’s death could argue for Nietzsche’s having congenital syphilis, but despite his not speaking until very late, his headaches, myopia, and rheumatism, “the evidence is not conclusive.”[57] Congenital syphilis is usually obvious because of lesions at birth, or the famous Hutchinson Triad (eyes, ears, notched teeth), but it is possible for the child to be normal and the disease remain hidden until adulthood. Usually it first shows up in patients over the age of fifteen, although there are cases of congenital syphilis not appearing until age sixty. According to syphilologist Burton Peter Thom, in this form of syphilis “as in acquired syphilis no organ or tissue of the body is exempt.”[1] But congenital syphilis seems very unlikely with Nietzsche.

Nietzsche left home to attend Schulpforta, a well-known Protestant boarding school, then the university in Bonn, and later Leipzig. Appointed at an unusually young age to a professorship of Classical Philology at the University of Basel, he was off to a promising career as a philologist when his health declined and he took a year’s sick leave in 1876. Three years later, he requested a permanent leave of absence for same reasons of health. For the next ten years he traveled from place to place in Italy and Switzerland in search of “clear skies” and relief from his agonies, living frugally on his pension and a small inheritance.

While the question of when the warning signs of paresis first appeared has dominated the syphilis debate, a second issue of whether Nietzsche’s physical torments before and during his decade of wandering were caused by syphilis has received little recognition. The assumption has been that if he had syphilis, it was latent, and his attacks, characterized by days of headaches, vomiting, and exhaustion, were typical migraines. Nietzsche’s letters and notebooks are filled with reflections on pain as a reason to wish for death and conversely as an inspiration for life. (What initially endeared Lou to him was her youthful poem on this theme, “To Pain” which he set to music.) Selected collections of his letters edit out the extent that day-to-day physical pain dominated his correspondence. If his attacks were caused by syphilis, then his archive is the most profound and eloquent record of a syphilitic that exists.

In June 1875, Nietzsche complained to his friend Carl von Gersdorff: “The stomach would no longer be subdued even by the most absurdly rigorous diet. . . .  Recurrent headaches of the most violent sort, lasting for several days Vomiting that lasted for hours even when I had eaten nothing. In short the machine looked as if it wanted to break down and I will not deny that I have several times wished that this could be the end."[58]

Nietzsche spent the summer holiday that year at the clinic of a specialist in disease of the stomach, Dr. Wiel, in the Black Forest, who diagnosed “gastric catarrh” with dilation of the stomach that kept significant blood from reaching the brain. A morning enema was prescribed and a diet of roast meat three times a day, raw eggs, and red wine. Leeches were applied to his head. His stomach was better by July, but the doctor could obtain no such results with Nietzsche’s other complaint: “a nervous disorder.” That December he wrote to his friend Rohde of the time he spent in bed in real torment, exhausted, with no appetite left of life. How hard life is; it hardly seems worth it, this torture. Nietzsche had an episode so severe that he feared brain damage was at the root of his troubles. 

 To Elisabeth he complained in 1876: “My dear sister; things are not right with me, I can see that! Continuous headache, though not of the worst kind, and lassitude. Yesterday I was able to listen to Die Walkürie, but only in a dark room—to use my eyes is impossible.”[59]  He consulted a doctor in Naples who assured him he had no brain tumor, only treatable neuralgia.

In 1877, he wrote to his mother: “My head still seems to be short of blood; I have done too much thinking over the past ten years which, as is well known, has worse effect that just ‘doing too much work.’”[60] And to Elisabeth: “I was so unwell! Out of fourteen days, I spent six in bed with six major attacks, the last one quite desperate.”[61] He added that he must leave Basel University if he were not to sacrifice his health entirely.

In May 1877 he went to Bad Ragaz for four weeks, seeing the doctor and taking remedial baths. Overbeck visited, and Nietzsche told him that it was out of the question to begin teaching again in the fall. In June he wrote to Elisabeth: “My head is in a far worse state than we thought.. . . any mental strain is immediately harmful. You cannot believe how weary and unwilling to work the head and eyes are.”[62]  In St. Moritz he tried drinking waters “as a remedy against deeply entrenched nervous illness.”[63] His eyes now had to be within two inches of the paper he was writing on.

To Malwida von Meysenbug he wrote from four thousand feet above sea level: “I do lie sick in bed here as in Sorrento and drag myself around in pain, day after day; the thinner the air is, the more easily I endure it. I have not begun a treatment with St. Mortiz waters, which will keep me busy for several weeks.”[64]

In September Nietzsche returned to Basel. One of his most troubling complaints, the condition of his eyes, points to syphilis. In October he consulted with Dr. Otto Eiser, who sent him to a colleague, an ophthalmologist, Dr. Gustav Kruger, who found bilateral inflammation of the inner layers of the eyes and diagnosed chorioretinitis which, after iritis, is the most frequent syphilitic affection of the eye.[65]

Another examination by Dr. Alfred Graefe in Halle yielded a further pessimistic opinion: Nietzsche must not read or write for several years, must avoid bright light, wear blue sunglasses, avoid spicy foods, coffee, and heavy wine, and must not exert himself mentally or physically. Eiser for his part prescribed quinine and wrote to Richard Wagner, who hypothesized that Nietzsche’s eye problems were due to excessive masturbation. Eiser later suggested that Human, All too Human marked the beginning of Nietzsche’s mental decline. After seeing the two doctors, Nietzsche extended his medical leave from the university for six more months. Eiser reported that Nietzsche told him he had engaged in sexual relations several times on doctor’s orders and had been infected with gonorrhea (Tripper) twice, but never had syphilis. Since syphilis hard to distinguish from gonorrhea then, this statement does not prove the absence of disease. Or he may have been withholding the information from Eiser, who was well connected and tended to take patient confidentiality lightly.

Eiser’s prognosis was pessimistic when Nietzsche consulted him in February. He told Overbeck that he had never discounted brain disease in Nietzsche’s case; indeed, observations of a colleague, Rudolf Massini, made it seem probable. Massini suggested that Nietzsche be relieved of part of his teaching duties because of he was experiencing an intense over-stimulation of his nervous system.  In September 1878, Nietzsche’s publisher Ernst Schmeitzner recorded a dismal image: “Nietzsche had broken down and he looked frightful. He was in a state of collapse.”[66]

In 1879 Nietzsche had a septic inflammation under his fingernail, which got worse. He wrote home: “Monday bad, Tuesday the attack, Wednesday bad, Thursday and Friday new, very violent attack not wanting to stop, today shattered and exhausted.”[67] Teaching caused him too much mental strain. On the worst days he mentioned attacks of cramp, which made him keep his right eye closed for several hours, and which spread all over his body. 

He confirmed that his eyes were not good enough for teaching. A headache lasted six days. One night he thought he was dying. He took a cold water cure. He considered resting for five years. “You can have no idea of the convulsions in my head or the fading in my eyes.”[68] “My life is more torture than convalescence. . . .  If only I were blind! This stupid wish is now my philosophy. Because I should not read and I do—just as I should not think –and I do.”[69]  He returned to Basel and consulted an oculist who confirmed the deterioration of his eyes.

On 2 May 1879, he took a health leave of absence from teaching, suggesting in parting that Basel’s weather might be responsible for his headaches: “abominable, noxious Basel, where I have lost my health and will lose my life.”[70] Elisabeth wrote that she hardly recognized her dear brother, so exhausted and prematurely aged was he.

Nietzsche finished The Wander and his Shadow, telling Gast that he knew mental effort would induce agonizing headaches. He wrote in small notebooks while walking, then transcribed them despite great pain. About twenty of the longer thought sequences (“unfortunately really essential ones”) were lost in his pencil scrawl. “I have to steal and collect minutes and quarter of an hour of ‘brain energy’ as you call it, steal them from a suffering brain.”[71] He counted his attacks: before year end he had logged in 118 days of pain. At Christmas, after three days of vomiting, he went into a coma. Afterwards, he thought he would die.

               To Eiser in January, he complained: “My existence is a fearful burden: I would have long thrown it over if I had not been making the most instructive tests and experiments on mental and moral questions in precisely this condition of suffering and almost complete renunciation. . . . On the whole I am happier than ever before. And yet, continual pain; for many hours of the day a feeling closely akin to sea-sickness, a semi-paralysis which makes it difficult to speak, alternating with furious attacks.”[72]

January 1880 he wrote to Malwida: “For my life’s terrible and almost unremitting martyrdom makes me thirst for the end, and there have been some signs which allow me to hope that the stroke which will liberate me is not too distant. As regards torment and self-denial, my life during these past years can match that of an ascetic of any time; nevertheless, I have wrung from these years much in the way of purification and burnishing of the soul—and I no longer need religion or art as a means to that end.”[73]

To Franz Overbeck (in Latin in the original):  “I am desperate. Pain is vanquishing my life and my will. What months, what a summer I have had! My physical agonies were as many and various as the changes I have seen in the sky. In every cloud there is some form of electric charge which grips me suddenly and reduces me to complete misery. Five times I have called for Doctor Death, and yesterday I hoped it was the end—in vain. Where is there on earth that perpetual serene sky, which is my sky? Farewell, friend.”

Again to Overbeck:  “My dear friend, I think you haven’t written to me in a long time. However, perhaps I deceive myself, the days are so long, I no longer know what I will do with each day: I’ve lost interest in everything. Deep down, an unmovable black melancholy. Also weariness.  Most of the time in bed; it’s the most sensible thing for me. I have become quite thin which is surprising. I have a good trattoria now and would like to build myself up again. But the worst is: I don’t see any more why I should live even another half a year, everything is boring, painful, degoutant. I’ve suffered and sacrificed too much and have a sense of the imperfection, the mistakes, and the mishaps of my entire spiritual past life which is beyond all understanding.”

Nietzsche celebrated the New Year [   ] with “one of the most violently painful attacks of my illness.”[74] In February he wrote from Genoa: “Fever, chill, sweating at night, acute headaches, constant chronic exhaustion, no appetite, dull palate.”[75] He had reached a low point, saying he would rather kill himself than live through another such winter. 

Nietzsche complained to Overbeck from Sils Maria:  “Even my Genoese years are a long, long chain of self-conquests for the sake of that aim and not to the taste of any human being that I know. So, dear friend, the ‘tyrant in me,’ the inexorable tyrant, wills that I conquer this time too (as regards physical torments, their duration, intensity, and variety, I can count myself among the most experienced and tested of people; is it my lot that I should be equally so experienced and tested in the torments of the soul?)[76]

From Ecce Homo: “In the midst of torments which accompany an uninterrupted, three-day cranial pain together with troublesome vomiting of phlegm, I possessed a dialectician’s clarity par excellence and very deliberately thought things through for which I am not enough of an acrobat, not cunning and not cool enough under healthier conditions.”[77]

            At the end of 1888, Nietzsche was experiencing electrified energy, writing new work at white-hot temperature, fearing madness and death, and reflecting continually on illness and pain as it both demoralized and instructed him. He thought of a future time when his work would be understood and appreciated. In all these things, we see a parallel with Van Gogh that same year. Pure creative inspiration, mental illness, or paretic disinhibition: whatever the combination, the result in each case was astonishing.

[1] Christopher Middleton found citizens of Turin who say that the horse incident may have happened several days before the collapse. In any case, the onset of Nietzsche’s insanity was sudden. Christopher Middleton, ed. and trans. Selected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche (Chicago, 1969), 352.

[2] Middleton, 346. 7 January 1889.

[3] Middleton, 353.

[4] André Malraux, Anti-Memoirs (New York, 1968), 23.

[5] Graham Parkes, Composing the Soul: Reaches of Nietzsche’s Psychology (Chicago, 1994), 373. Gast to Overbeck 20 February 1890.

[6] Parkes, 373.

[7] Claudia Crawford, “Nietzsche’s Psychology and Rhetoric of World Redemption: Dionysus versus the Crucified,” in Jacob Golomb, ed., Nietzsche and Depth Psychology (Albany, NY, 1999), 272.

[8] Crawford, 272.

[9] Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, ed. R.J. Hollingdale (New York, 1979). ** need page

[10] footnote **

[11] Middleton, 335. To Carl Fuchs.

[12] Thomas Mann, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy,” 141. **need info and also put into bib; see later fn on Mann.

[13] Karl Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophical Activity (Tucson, 1965), 95.

[14] See William Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon (Chicago, 1995) for a summary of the number of copies of each book that was sold in Nietzsche’s lifetime.

[15] Herman Nunberg and Ernst Federn, eds., Minutes of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society, Vol. II. 1908-1910, (New York, 1967), 30.

[16] Thomas Mann, Late Essays, 144.  **need info and add to bib

[17] Minutes, II, 31.

[18] Minutes, II, 32.

[19] Erich Podach, The Madness of Nietzsche (New York, 1931) 236.

[20] Stokes, Syphilology, 479. Joseph Earle Moore included looking for a genital scar in his instructions for syphilis examinations of the prospective members of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

[21] Stokes, Syphilology, 1002.

[22] Stokes, Syphilology, 1002.

[23] H.F. Peters, Zarathustra’s Sister (New York, 1985), 220.

[24] Podach, 61.

[25] Sandor L. Gilman, ed., Conversations with Nietzsche (New York, 1987), 258.

[26] Gilman, 257.

[27] Gilman, 257

[28] Health Commissioner Vulpius, commissioned by Elisabeth Forster  Nietzsche, 1899. Gilman, 257-58.

[29] Walter Kaufmann, entry on Nietzsche in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5.  (New York, 1967). 

[30] Hollingdale, 33.  He refers to Blunck, Friedrich Nietzsche. Kindheit und Jugend.

[31] Peters, 184-85. 

[32] Pia Daniela Volz, Nietzsche im Labyrinth seiner Krankheit: Eine medizinisch-biograhische Untersuchung (Würzburg, Germany, 1990), 227.

[33] Podach, 58.

[34] Recounted to Paul Deussen, published in Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche (Leipzig, 1901).

[35] Gilman, 24.

[36] Thomas Mann, Dr. Faustus (New York, 1948),155.

[37] Mann, Essays, 145.

[38] Angus Fletcher, “Music, Visconti, Mann, Nietzsche: Death in Venice” in Harrison Thomas, ed., Nietzsche in Italy (Saratoga, CA, 1988), 303.

[39] I am grateful to Dr. Joseph Henderson, a member of Jung’s Zarathustra seminar group, for comments Jung made about Nietzsche in the seminar.

[40] C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York, 1989),    **need page

[41]Jarrett, James, ed., Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1934-1939 by C.G. Jung, Vol. I (Princeton, 1988), 637.

[42] Jung, Notes, 609. Baudelaire wrote of the devil in Flowers of Evil: “Each day his flattery makes us eat a toad, and each step forward is a step to hell.”

[43] John Kerr, A Most Dangerous Method: The Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein  (New York, 1993), 175-76.

[44] Jung, Notes, 635.

[45] Jung, Notes, Vol II, 1492.

[46] Minutes, I, 359.

[47] Minutes, II, 31.

[48] Joachim Köhler, Zarathustra’s Secret (New Haven, 2002). 

[49] See Rudolph Binion, Frau Lou (Princeton, 1968) for more details about the alleged marriage proposal.

[50] Hayman, , Nietzsche: A Critical Life (New York, 1982), 235.

[51] Hayman, 235.

[52] Hayman, 235.

[53] Hayman 232.

[54] Angela Livingstone, Salomé: Her Life and Work (Mt. Kisko, New York, 1984) 53.

[55] Volz, see 298-305 on syphilis.

[56] Colin Wilson, Rudolf Steiner: The Man and His Vision. (Great Britain: Aquarian Press, 1985).

[57] Hayman, 24.

[58] Hayman, 179. Letter to Carl von Gersdorff, June 1875.

[59] Middleton, 146. To Elisabeth, 1 August 1876.

[60] Middleon, 155.

[61] Middleton, 156.

[62] Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life (New York, 1982), 194.

[63] Hayman, 195.

[64] Middleton, 160.

[65] According to Thompson: “There are at first yellowish patches of exudates scattered over the choroid. Later they may become white, due to atrophy of the choroids and be surrounded by a zone of pigment.” Retinitis is usually an extension from disease of the choroid.  Syphilis, 357.

[66] Hayman, 206.

[67] Hayman, 210.

[68] Hayman, 211.

[69] Hayman, 211.

[70] Hayman, 212.

[71] Hayman, 215.

[72] Hayman, 219.

[73] Middleton, 171.

[74] Hayman, 255.

[75] Hayman, 261.

[76] Middleton, 214.

[77] Jaspers, 113.