In the second part [of Zarathustra] I have cavorted like a clowning acrobat almost. The detail contains an incredible amount of personal experience and suffering which is intelligible only to me – there were some pages which seemed to me to drip with blood.
Letter to Peter Gast from Sils-Maria, end of August 1883
Promoter of free spirits though she was, Malwida could not excuse Lou’s bad behaviour. Taking Nietzsche’s side against her former protégée, she invited him to recuperate by visiting her in Rome. He packed up his heavy trunk of books, now weighing 104 kilos and christened ‘the club foot’. He arrived on 4 May 1883 to meet up with Elisabeth, who had been continuing to work on closer relations with her brother.
Elisabeth and Malwida never saw themselves as rivals. Throughout the following month their cooperative care was sufficiently soothing for Nietzsche to cease taking chloral hydrate drops for his insomnia. Malwida’s money paid for healthful trips into the springtime landscape of the campagna around Rome with its wildflowers, rough farmhouses and skimpy remnants of ruins. When their carriage clattered them back to the museums of Rome, of all the artefacts he saw, Nietzsche was most moved by two virile busts of Brutus and Epicurus and three landscape paintings by Claude Lorrain1 nostalgically evoking the Golden Age. The canvases had been inspired by the artist’s own trips into the campagna.
The absurdity of the author who had declared God dead finding spiritual nourishment in the stronghold of the Roman Church was not lost on Nietzsche. He upset the two women by occasionally referring to himself as the Anti-Christ. He was gripped by revulsion at the sight of people climbing the steps of St Peter’s on their knees, and he used it as a symbol of religious idiocy when he wrote the next part of Zarathustra.2
June came. Rome fell into its settled monotony of oppressive heat. He thought of summering in Ischia, like an ancient Roman; but instead he and Elisabeth travelled to Milan where they parted company, for him to travel on to Sils-Maria. It was a fortunate change of plan. In a month, Ischia was shaken by an earthquake that killed more than two thousand people.
Nietzsche did his best thinking in the open air. Place was vitally important to him. On the day he arrived back in his beloved alpine hamlet he greeted the place; ‘Here my muses live … this region is blood and kin to me and even more than that.’3 It led him to describe the process of inspiration that, for him, was inextricable from sense of place:
‘Does anyone at the end of the nineteenth century have a clear idea of what poets in strong ages called inspiration? If not, I will describe it. – If you have even the slightest residue of superstition, you will hardly reject the idea of someone being just an incarnation, mouthpiece, or medium of overpowering forces. The idea of revelation in the sense of something suddenly becoming visible and audible with unspeakable assurance and subtlety, something that throws you down and leaves you deeply shaken – this simply describes the facts of the case. You listen, you do not look for anything, you take, you do not ask who is there; a thought lights up in a flash, with necessity, without hesitation as to its form, – I never had any choice. A delight whose incredible tension sometimes triggers a burst of tears, sometimes automatically hurries your pace and sometimes slows it down; a perfect state of being outside yourself … All of this is involuntary to the highest degree, but takes place as if in a storm of feelings of freedom, of unrestricted activity, of power, of divinity … This is my experience of inspiration; I do not doubt that you would need to go back thousands of years to find anyone who would say: “it is mine as well”. –’4
*
The second part of Zarathustra came to him during the ten days between 28 June and 8 July 1883. ‘All parts conceived on strenuous marches; absolute certainty, as if every thought were being called out to me.’5
Like the first part, it is divided into the small, intensely compressed sections that he could manage to organise while on his four-or six-hour walks and transfer into his notebooks without any practical help. The landscape of his inspiration took the path round the two little lakes of Silvaplana and Silsersee whose intensely turquoise water formed the shimmering floor to the luminous overhang of steep-sided mountains capped with eternal snows. It was a completely self-contained world from which Nietzsche continued to tell the story of Zarathustra, whose home was by Lake Urmi and who went into solitude in the mountains, and who referred to his aphoristic pronouncements as summits, or mountain peaks.
Nietzsche hardly emerges from the pages of Zarathustra Part II as an example of his own ideal: the ‘Yea-sayer’ who has managed to repudiate jealousy and revenge by turning ‘It was thus’ into ‘I wished it so.’ Zarathustra II is full of allusions to Lou and Rée. It is peppered with sudden, furious outbursts accusing his enemies of murdering him. They make no sense within the narrative of the book.
In the section called ‘Of the Tarantulas’, Lou and Rée are clearly identified as the tarantulas by the symbol of the trinity on their backs. ‘Divinely sure and beautiful’, when the tarantula bites him she takes his soul and makes it giddy for revenge.6
The text is interrupted by three poems. He had written the first, ‘The Night Song’, earlier when he was in Rome and the carriage rides through the arcadian landscape of the campagna had roused his regret at his distance from the age of heroes, his yearning for the past, and his yearning for love.
In the second poem, ‘The Dance Song’, Zarathustra sees young girls dancing in a meadow. He awakens sleeping Cupid, who dances with the girls. Life speaks to him through words that Lou had used to him, telling him she is merely a woman and no virtuous one at that. Woman by nature is fickle, wild and changeable, she tells him, and woman rejoices in this. But men yearn for profundity, fidelity and mystery in women and so they endow the female sex with these virtues and covet what they have imagined.
He reproaches her that when he gave her his greatest secret she valued it at naught. ‘Thus matters stand between the three of us … She is fickle and stubborn; often I saw her bite her lip and comb her hair against the grain. Perhaps she is evil and false and in all things a female; but when she speaks ill of herself, precisely then she seduces the most.’
The third and final poem, ‘The Tomb Song’, opens with the view from his window in Venice across to the Island of the Dead. In its tombs have been buried his youth, together with ‘the gentle marvels of love’ and ‘the songbird of my hopes’.
He curses his enemies who have cut short his eternity and stolen his nights, condemning him to sleepless torment.
When the book was finished, he found himself astonished at how autobiographical the text was. It took him by surprise to see how his own blood dripped from the pages, but he felt certain that only he would be able to see it.7 In his next book he was to pursue the idea that all philosophy (not only his own) was autobiography.
*
Lou wished to engineer a meeting but she dared not do it directly. Knowing that Nietzsche was in Sils-Maria, she and Rée took up residence in the little village of Celerina, close by. They were travelling with a comparatively new acquaintance, a young man named Ferdinand Tönnies who was dazzled to have been taken up as the third member of the Trinity. Tönnies would eventually become a founding father of German sociology but for now all his books and his glories were before him and he was simply an emotional greenhorn who felt excited and privileged to occupy the third room in the hotel.
Nietzsche had never set eyes on Tönnies, so Lou and Rée sent him out to Sils-Maria to extend the olive branch. But when he caught sight of Nietzsche taking the air, swathed in his customary heavy defences against the light of the sun and the electricity in the clouds, and further wrapped in ‘my azure solitude with which I draw circles around myself and sacred boundaries’, Tönnies did not dare approach. And so the summer passed without rapprochement.
Time was already softening Nietzsche’s hatred of Lou. He had opened the door to her. He had shown her the tightrope. She had almost had the courage to mount it. Although she had not risen to the ultimate challenge, she had been the closest to understanding, and she remained the cleverest animal he knew. If he were to be faithful to his own idea of the eternal recurrence, which demanded that one should, on looking back on the past, turn every ‘It was’ into ‘I wanted it thus’, he must say ‘yes’ to Lou’s almost-commitment and continue to cherish it.
If he was to live up to his own ideal of the Yea-sayer who accepts his fate he must also acknowledge his own part in the actions of the war between Elisabeth and Lou. The rancour and resentment that he had felt against Lou now switched to hatred of Elisabeth, as he further realised how she had manipulated him. Her malice, lies and concoctions had drawn him into an extended and dishonourable campaign of vengeance against Lou and Rée. Worse even than the stupid letters she had incited him to write and the fabrications she had caused him to believe was the fact that Elisabeth had succeeded in making him untrue to himself. Once more he had succumbed to chain-sickness, to sentiment and resentment and misplaced loyalty to a dishonest past.
He loathed how Elisabeth had managed to stir up in him a steady resentment precisely at the time when his deepest conviction was to denounce all envy, jealousy, vengeance and punishment and instead to affirm, to be one who wants nothing other than as it is. Elisabeth’s own resentment, her squid-ink jealousy had clouded his brain with ‘evil, black feelings; among them there was a real hatred of my sister, who has cheated me of my best acts of self-conquest for a whole year … so that I have finally become the victim of a relentless desire for vengeance, precisely when my inmost thinking has renounced all schemes of vengeance and punishment. This conflict is bringing me step by step closer to madness – I feel this in the most frightening way … Perhaps my reconciliation with her was the most fatal step in the whole affair – I now see that this made her believe she was entitled to take revenge on Fräulein Salomé. Excuse me!’8
Elisabeth sent him a gleefully triumphant letter telling him how much she was enjoying this ‘brisk and jolly war’. It led him to observe wearily that he was not made to be anyone’s enemy, not even Elisabeth’s.
Previously he had cut all communication with his mother and Elisabeth. If he did so again, this would be another negative act, a nay-saying. Instead, he would keep contact in a neutral way, send letters reporting on his laundry needs and requesting small items, like sausages. This would be a yea-saying. He would retain his integrity, while sustaining the illusion of a connection.
But this convenient compromise was soon upset. In September he received an urgent call from Franziska, summoning him to return home to Naumburg. Elisabeth, the stubborn Llama, was talking of going to Paraguay to throw in her lot with the anti-Semitic agitator Bernhard Förster.
Franziska did not want to lose her housekeeper-daughter. And Nietzsche was appalled by the idea of Elisabeth joining her future to a ranting demagogue whose moral and political views he abhorred. Besides, it lent a whole new layer of dishonesty to Elisabeth’s rapprochement with him over the past year: all the time of the supposed reconciliation in Rome and afterwards, she had been hiding from him that she was corresponding with the tin-pot racist whom she knew he despised. ‘I do not have his enthusiasm for “things German”, and even less for keeping this “glorious” race pure. On the contrary, on the contrary –’9
Bernhard Förster was a year older than Nietzsche, a handsome, upstanding blood-and-soil patriot of military carriage and correct tailoring. He was notably hirsute: exceptionally thick combed-back brown hair sprang from a high V-shaped forehead. His eyebrows jutted, his fine moustaches maintained a perfect horizontal. From his chin flowed the long, wavy brown beard of an Old Testament prophet, though he would not have enjoyed the Semitic comparison. His eyes were unsettling, their irises almost transparent; the colour of glacier ice. The eyes of an idealist fixed on far horizons. He was a fanatical proselytiser for open-air hiking, vegetarianism, the health-giving properties of gymnastics, and the abolition of alcohol and vivisection. A man of strongly held convictions rather than a man of intellect, he dreamed, like Nietzsche and Wagner, of remaking Germany, but while they both envisaged accomplishing this through cultural means,
Förster’s approach was racial. The Jewish race constituted a parasite on the body of the German people. Purity of blood must be restored. Förster and Elisabeth had known each other vaguely for some years through their mothers, both Naumburg widows and pillars of the church. Elisabeth had no reason to pursue the acquaintanceship until the failure of her stint as housekeeper for her brother in Basle brought it home to her that she could neither count on a future with him, nor on marriage to any of his immediate circle. A dreary future caring for her elderly mother stretched before her. Ageing spinsters, however virtuous, commanded neither power nor social status in Naumburg. She must find a husband without delay.
She had met Förster at the Bayreuth Festival of 1876. Afterwards in Naumburg she took the trouble to dazzle him. She initiated a correspondence based on her fervent support of his cause. ‘All my knowledge is but a weak reflection of your own tremendous mind … My talents are practical. That is why all your plans and magnificent ideas excite me: they can be translated into actions.’10
Once she started on the correspondence, it is comical to trace how quickly she infuses her letters with the personality of a jolly, gallant, madcap girl, ever more warmly devoted to Förster and to his politics. He remained correct, formal and myopically unaware of what was going on. Eventually she had to catch his attention by sending him money for the anti-Semitic cause and talking up her own fortune. Even so, it took him a long time to understand that he was being offered a bride whose dowry was sufficient for the realisation of his dream.
In May 1880, Förster sent her a copy of the anti-Semitic petition he was planning to present to Bismarck. He asked her to collect signatures. She collected with a will. The petition begged that the Jews who were ‘destroying Germany’ be deprived of their vote, excluded from the legal and medical professions, and that further Jewish immigration be halted and those un-naturalised be expelled in the name of the purification and rebirth of the human race and the preservation of human culture. A total of 267,000 signatures were collected. The petition was ostentatiously transported through the streets of Berlin by horse and carriage, to be presented to Bismarck, who refused it. A year later, a furious and frustrated Förster launched into an anti-Semitic tirade on a Berlin tram that led to a bloody fist fight, causing him to lose his teaching job at the Gymnasium, whereupon he co-founded the Deutscher Volksverein (German People’s Party), a thuggish, racist party spouting nationalism and misapplied evolutionary theory. German soil had been forever polluted by the sons of Abraham and worshippers of the Golden Calf. The Volksverein party would set up a New Germany, a colony of pure-blooded Aryans on soil that had never previously been racially contaminated. He spent two years wandering South America, searching for the ideal spot.
Elisabeth corresponded with him regularly. When he told her that five thousand marks might purchase a handsome piece of land in Paraguay, she offered to send him the sum, coyly apologising lest a gift of money insult him. Upset by the hardness of his life in Paraguay, she offered him eight hundred marks so that he could hire a servant. ‘In the Middle Ages people gave the tenth of their possessions to the Church as a mark of their respect for the highest ideals. Why should you refuse to accept my offering?’ She went on to inform him that her fortune comprised twenty-eight thousand marks. In case he had missed the point, she described herself as a very practical woman and an excellent housewife, just the sort of helpmeet, in fact, desperately needed by a brave pioneer. She judged him well. Her money was not sufficient to finance the entire venture but it was far more than any other believers had yet offered.
Förster returned to Germany. He recruited colonists. He wrote pamphlets. He undertook tours of the country. He gave speeches whose scripts, like the scripts of all good rabble-rousers, included ‘Applause!’ or ‘Lively applause!’ at appropriate points.
Wagner had refused to sign Förster’s 1880 petition. Though Wagner had his own anti-Semitic prejudices, he had nothing but contempt for the man, considering him tiresome, uncultured and not very intelligent. But this was not the general view in Bayreuth, where Nietzsche’s old enemy Hans von Wolzogen, the editor of Bayreuther Blätter, was delighted to give Förster a platform to publish his ridiculous articles (the one on education proposed that all existing girls’ schools should be shut down by the police on the first day his party came to power). The newspaper opened up useful access to the Bayreuth Patrons’ Societies up and down Germany. This became Förster’s main network, providing the audiences for his applause-prompted speeches.
September 1883 was an unhappy month in Naumburg. While Nietzsche and his mother were united in trying to dissuade Elisabeth from throwing in her lot with Förster, his mother and Elisabeth joined against Nietzsche in a campaign to get him to cease his blasphemous philosophising, take up a respectable life and return to university teaching. Might he not also cease to associate with people who were ‘not nice’?
Franziska and Elisabeth were hounding him, he was having no effect on the obstinate Llama’s decision to marry the appalling Förster and he had spent a whole month enduring her insufferable racism and blinkered self-righteousness. It was time to leave.
On 5 October, he left for Basle, where he could always count on sound advice concerning Elisabeth and his finances from the Overbecks.
Somewhat restored, he departed to winter by the sea. Though still spellbound by the idea of Columbus’s discovery of new worlds, he returned to Genoa only perfunctorily before moving on. He gave as his reason (which was patently untrue) that he was too well-known in the city to enjoy the ‘azure solitude’ necessary to creativity.
He settled in Nice, where he took a little room in the modest Pension de Genève on the petite rue St Etienne. He loved the hills behind Nice for their stern wind. He praised the wind as a redeemer from earthly gravity. Sometimes he took the train or tram along the coastline through St Jean Cap Ferrat and Villefranche, clambering up the rugged heights from which he could see, or imagined he could see, the dark blue smudge of Corsica interrupting the glossy horizon of the sea. He placed great significance on the fact that his pulse beat at the same rate as Napoleon’s: a slow, inexorable sixty to the minute. In this brisk landscape, with Napoleon taking Columbus’s place as the Argonaut of the spirit, he was again visited by whirlwind inspiration. It gave him the third part of Zarathustra over another period of roughly ten days.
Zarathustra travels by ship from the Isles of the Blessed across the sea. Eventually he reaches the original town that he visited in the first book, but it is no more receptive or fruitful than it was the first time around. He returns to his cave, where he enlarges on the idea of the eternal recurrence as the great affirmation of life that is sufficient to generate huge joy in the present, thus conquering nihilism. He ends the book – which he thought would be the final book of Zarathustra – with a blasphemous parody of the last book of the New Testament, the Revelation of St John the Divine. He calls it ‘The Seven Seals’ and it consists of an ecstatic and mystical poem of seven verses celebrating his marriage to Eternity in a nuptial ring of recurrence. Each of the seven verses ends with the same words;
‘Never yet have I found the woman from whom I wanted children, unless it were this woman whom I love: for I love you, O Eternity!
‘For I love you, Oh Eternity!’
*
He finished the book on 18 January. A fortnight previously he had been visited in his pension by Dr Julius Paneth, a young Viennese-Jewish zoologist. Paneth knew Nietzsche’s books and he came to pay homage to the author. Paneth expected a prophet, a seer, an orator fortissimo furioso. Like Lou, he was astonished to find an unusually mild man, ostensibly uncomplicated and friendly. There wasn’t a trace of the prophet about him. They spent six hours in conversation, during which Nietzsche was natural, quiet, innocuous and unselfconscious. Though he was serious and dignified, he was humorous too, and responsive to humour. Their talk began with some perfectly banal conversation about the weather and the boarding house. When the conversation turned to the subject of his thoughts and his books, Nietzsche’s manner did not alter, but remained at a steady and courteous pianissimo. He told Paneth that he had always felt he had a mission, and that he had the capacity for seeing images when he closed his eyes, very vivid ones, which were always changing. There was an inspirational quality to them but physical discomfort, such as illness, turned them ugly, frightening and unpleasant.11
Nietzsche made another new acquaintance just a couple of months after he had finished the third part of Zarathustra. She confirms that he was as unassuming and self-effacing as Julius Paneth had discovered. Resa von Schirnhofer12 was a wealthy twenty-nine-year-old feminist who had travelled to Nice having just finished her first semester of study at the University of Zurich, one of the first universities to admit women students. In due course, Resa would write a doctoral thesis comparing the philosophical systems of Schelling and Spinoza. She came to Nice at the suggestion of Malwida von Meysenbug, who had not entirely given up on finding Nietzsche a bride.
Resa took up Malwida’s introduction with mixed feelings. She admired The Birth of Tragedy but she had seen the notorious photograph of Nietzsche and Rée harnessed to Lou’s cart. She was among the many to whom Lou had shown it at the Bayreuth Festival of 1882, and her reservations concerning the photograph led to a certain embarrassment on meeting Nietzsche, but her doubts were dispelled almost immediately by ‘his serious professorial appearance’ and his guileless sincerity. During the ten days she spent on the Riviera between 3 and 13 April 1884, they were together most of the time.
By now, Part III of Zarathustra had been finished and sent off to the printer. Nietzsche might be expected to speak only of himself and his work but instead, he took great interest in her reading programme. He recommended many French authors: the brothers Goncourt, Saint-Simon on history, Taine on the French Revolution and Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir. He told her that Stendhal had announced ‘with astounding certainty’ that he would become famous forty years later and Nietzsche fully expected the same to happen to him.
However great the mental distance was between the philosopher and the student, she found him above all kind, natural, humorous and very human. He was a person of exquisite sensitivity, tenderness and courtesy. He was scrupulously well mannered towards everybody he met, but even more so to ladies old and young. It made him a popular guest at the Pension de Genève, where they referred to him as ‘the dear, half-blind professor’ and performed small kindnesses for him that might make his life easier. Resa soon felt so free with him that she chattered about anything. When she told him that she sometimes had interesting dreams, he solemnly advised her to keep paper and pencil on hand at night, as he did himself. He placed importance on dreams and the significance of nocturnal thoughts, ‘since at night we are often visited by rare thoughts, which we should record immediately on awakening in the night, for by morning we can usually not find them again, they have fluttered away with the nocturnal darkness’.13
While it was an affectionate relationship, it was no more than that. Nietzsche’s passions were not ignited as they had been by Lou. Resa and Nietzsche did not argue as equals. There was a communion but not a kindred intelligence. She brought out in him the teacher who had so enjoyed instructing young minds at the Pädagogium. He spoke to her seriously but carefully so as not to overextend her. In a conversation on objectivity, he warned her that it was impossible to be free of prejudices. She must always be aware of that. One discards prejudices only to fall into new ones.
He gave her a present of the three parts of Zarathustra inscribed ‘In nova fert animus’ (‘The spirit carries one to new things’). He took her on the walk up Mont Boron that had been one of his inspirational walks during the composition of Zarathustra III. Even here, he did not play the mystic or the didact. Clouds of butterflies rose from the fragrant thyme at their passing. Below them, the green curl of Nice’s Baie des Anges scintillated with white-painted ships. He talked of them taking the boat to Corsica.
When they had nearly reached the top, French sentries blocked their steps and turned them back. They had strayed onto forbidden ground, trespassed on Fort du Mont Alban, the ancient fortification that had kept lookout over the territorial squabbles between France and Italy throughout the previous three hundred years. Nietzsche was delighted by this toy-soldier encounter. His excited mood was further heightened by the sudden rise of a mistral wind that dispelled the clouds and their electricity, leaving the blue sky clear and free. He led her down to a little café, where he introduced her to vermouth. He accompanied her nose-wrinkling sips with a whimsical commentary in rhyming couplets on their adventure in the ridiculous world around them, starting with the subject of the bewachte Berg, the well-guarded mountain.
He invited her to accompany him to a bullfight in Nice. She had her reservations, but he assured her that here the corrida was governed by an official regulation that prohibited the use of horses, or the killing of bulls. The six bulls that succeeded each other in the ring seemed to know the rules just as well as the matadors. Soon the tame skirmishes seemed so absurd that both were seized by uncontrollable laughter. When the primitive orchestra struck up the music from Carmen, it had an electrifying effect on Nietzsche. In an instant, he travelled from hysterical laughter to ecstasy. He called her attention to the pulsating rhythms and she understood the power the music exercised over him. It stirred her blood as well, and she wrote that she was surprised it raised, even in her animal-loving soul, a strong desire to see a real corrida de toros with its stylised cruelty and wild, Dionysian glorification of heroic death.
He recited ‘The Tomb Song’ to her and he asked her to read him ‘The Dance Song’, which Zarathustra sings while Cupid and the girl are dancing in the meadow. She saw in it ‘A transparent web woven from threads of melancholy, it hovers tremblingly over the dark abyss of the longing for death.’
Afterwards, he remained silent and sad for a long time.
They had spent ten days together. A week after Resa left Nice, Nietzsche travelled to Venice. Here Heinrich Köselitz (alias Peter Gast) was continuing, with Nietzsche’s ill-judged encouragement, to whip his small musical talent into writing an opera. On reading the score, Nietzsche criticised it almost as harshly as von Bülow had once criticised his own musical efforts, but Peter Gast took Nietzsche’s pronouncements in a humbler spirit. He even changed the title and the language of the libretto at Nietzsche’s suggestion. The Italian Il matrimonio segreto (The Secret Wedding) became the German Der Löwe von Venedig (The Lion of Venice). This unnecessary wielding of power over the hapless Gast was maybe a manifestation of Nietzsche’s own collapse of confidence following the printing of the first three books of Zarathustra.
His publisher was unenthusiastic about all three. Even Jacob Burckhardt, who had understood and greatly valued the first two parts, was sufficiently embarrassed on being asked his opinion on the third to respond evasively by wondering whether Nietzsche was thinking of trying his hand at play-writing?
Nietzsche’s health took a sharp decline over the summer. His eyes pained him greatly and there were bouts of vomiting that lasted for days on end. The doctors had no new answers for his eyes, or for his ruined stomach, or for any prospects of sleep. And so he resorted again to self-medication, relying heavily on powders of chloral hydrate, a powerful hypnotic drug and sedative used to relieve insomnia and to reduce anxiety. Incorrect doses of this drug produce nausea, vomiting, hallucinations, confusion, convulsions, breathing and heart irregularities: all the symptoms, in fact, that Nietzsche was taking it to relieve.
*
Desperation led him back to his beloved Sils-Maria, where he had made his room in Gian Durisch’s house his own by paying for it to be decorated in a wallpaper he had taken a fancy to, a floral patterned paper in soothing tones of green, brown and blue.14 The room is as small and as simple as one could possibly imagine. A low ceiling, a tiny window, a narrow bed, a small rustic table in front of the window, a bootjack that in his day often had a boot jammed in it. There was barely room to cram in the ‘club foot’, the 104 kilos of books.
Resa von Schirnhofer called on him in Sils-Maria in mid-August. Her summer semester at university had finished and she was walking with a fellow-student back from Zurich to her native Austria. Resa was shocked to see a dramatic change in Nietzsche, both physically and in his conversation, from their days together in Nice.
He was ill for much of her visit but there came a moment when he was fit enough to take her on the walk to the Zarathustra rock, some forty-five minutes from Gian Durisch’s house. The matter-of-fact Nietzsche was gone. Speaking fierily and urgently, he poured out ‘an abundance of ideas and images in dithyrambic pronouncements’; Resa is careful to stress that although his conversation was both changed and startling, Nietzsche spoke without either megalomania or boastfulness. He spoke with naïve and boundless astonishment, as if the flow was something puzzling to him, an influence beyond his control. He told her that it set his entire being in vibrant unrest.
When they left the Zarathustra rock and turned to go home through the woods, a herd of cows came charging down the hillside towards them. Resa was frightened of cows and she began to run. Nietzsche simply pointed his famous constant companion, the umbrella, at them, waving it back and forth. It put the cows to flight. He laughed, making Resa ashamed of her cowardice. She explained that when she was five years old, she and her mother had been charged by a bull and barely managed to escape. At this, Nietzsche grew solemn and expounded on the wave-effect, often through an entire life, of a nervous shock experienced in early childhood.
Resa did not see him the following day. He was confined to bed again. A day and a half later, she called in on Gian Durisch’s house to enquire after his health. She was led into the little low-ceilinged, pine-panelled dining room to wait.
Suddenly the door opened and Nietzsche appeared, looking weary, pale and distraught. Leaning against the doorjamb for support, he immediately began to talk of his intolerable condition. He complained that he got no peace. When he closed his eyes he saw only a ghastly growing jungle of ever-changing forms, a revoltingly luxuriant abundance of fantastic flowers constantly winding and twining in a speeded-up cycle of growth and disgusting decay. Resa had read Baudelaire. She wondered if he were taking opium or hashish.
Still leaning against the door, he asked her in a weak voice, with disquieting urgency, ‘Don’t you believe that this condition is a symptom of incipient madness? My father died of a brain disease.’
She was too confused and frightened to answer right away. In a state of almost uncontrollable anxiety, he urgently repeated the question. Paralysed by fright, she found nothing to say.
1 Claude Gellée (1604/5?–82), known as Claude Lorrain, French painter of arcadian landscapes referencing the Bible, Virgil and Ovid. His pictures, often studded with classical architectural fragments, figures and animals, were the chief inspiration for the English Picturesque landscape movement of the eighteenth century.
2 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, Section 4, ‘On Priests’.
3 Nietzsche to Carl von Gersdorff, 28 June 1883.
4 Ecce Homo, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, Section 3.
5 Nietzsche to Georg Brandes, 10 April 1888.
6 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, ‘Of the Tarantulas’.
7 Nietzsche to Peter Gast, end of August 1883.
8 Nietzsche to Franz Overbeck, received 28 August 1883.
9 Nietzsche to Franziska Nietzsche and Elisabeth Nietzsche, 31 March 1885.
10 Elisabeth Nietzsche to Bernhard Förster, January 1884.
11 Dr Julius Paneth describing visits to Nietzsche in Nice on 26 December 1883 and 3 January 1884.
12 Resa von Schirnhofer (1855–1948), born in Krems, Austria, author of a short, unpublished memoir of Nietzsche, Vom Menschen Nietzsche, written in 1937.
13 Resa von Schirnhofer, 3–13 April 1884, quoted in Gilman (ed.), Conversations with Nietzsche, pp. 146–58.
14 The ghost of the wallpaper remains in the room of the house, now the Nietzsche-Haus Museum in Sils-Maria.