Can an ass be tragic? – Can someone be destroyed by a weight he cannot carry or throw off? … The case of the philosopher.

Twilight of the Idols, ‘Epigrams and Maxims’, 11

It is not clear what exactly happened on the morning of 3 January 1889. The story is they saw him as usual leaving Davide Fino’s corner house on the Piazza Carlo Alberto. They were used to the sad and solitary figure wrapped in thought, often on his way to the bookshop, where he was known to sit for hours with the book pressed very close to his face, reading but never making a purchase. The piazza was full of tired old horses drooping between the traces of carts and cabs waiting for fares: miserable jut-ribbed nags being tormented into some semblance of work by their masters. On seeing a cabbie mercilessly beating his horse, Nietzsche broke down. Overwhelmed by compassion, sobbing at the sight of it, he threw his arms protectively around the horse’s neck, and collapsed. Or so they said. Crises are so quickly come and gone. Eyewitnesses see so many different truths.

Somebody must have known which house he lived in, for Davide Fino was summoned. The police, too. Had it not been for Fino, Nietzsche would have been taken off straight away and quite possibly lost forever in the dark labyrinth of Italian institutions for the insane, but Davide Fino brought him home.

Once in his third-floor room, Nietzsche let nobody in. For several days, he shouted, sang at the top of his voice, raved and babbled to himself. Day and night it went on. The Fino family climbed the stairs and listened. He handed them letters to post to the King and Queen of Italy, as well as the last delusional letters to Burckhardt and Overbeck. He grew inordinately excited at the piano, playing his Wagnerian music loudly and violently. He banged; he crashed. They turned their eyes apprehensively to the ceiling above, where his footfalls crept and jumped and stamped above their heads. He was dancing. Naked and capering, he was taking part in holy sexual frenzies, the orgiastic rites of Dionysus.

Fino contacted the German consul; he visited the police station; he consulted a doctor: Overbeck arrived on the afternoon of 8 January.

‘A uniquely terrible moment’ was how Overbeck described it. Even so, he caught Nietzsche during one of his comparatively calm periods. Over the next few days he would see far worse.

On entering Nietzsche’s room, he discovered his friend cowering on the corner of a sofa. Ostensibly he was proofreading the pages of Nietzsche contra Wagner. He was holding the printed sheets up close to his bewildered face, like a child pretending to read. He knew the actions expected for the task. The paper must be this far from his nose; he must scan from left to right and back again. The words on the page obviously meant nothing to him.

At Overbeck’s entrance, he rushed at him, embraced him violently and broke into sobbing. Then he sank back on the sofa, twitching, moaning and quivering. Overbeck was a quiet, steady man who was not given to emotional display but on seeing his old friend in this state his legs gave way; he staggered and almost collapsed.

The Fino family remained in the room with Overbeck and Nietzsche. The Turin psychiatrist Professor Carlo Turina, whom Davide Fino had consulted, had advised that when the patient was overexcited, bromide drops would calm him down.1 A glass of water stood on the table ready. Without fuss, they gave him some. It tamed the wild creature. Loftily, he began to describe the grand reception that was planned for him that evening. This happy interlude did not last long. Soon he was speaking in chopped-up scraps of words and bursts of sentences punctuated by sudden convulsive starts of buffoonery, obscenities, outbursts on the piano and leaping and dancing. Being so familiar with the world of Nietzsche’s ideas, Overbeck was more or less able to follow the references as they came and went. Nietzsche spoke of himself as the successor to the dead God, the clown of all eternities, the Dionysus torn to pieces. He twitched and jerked his body in orgiastic re-enactment of holy frenzy. And yet, all the while, there was an innocence about him. He did not arouse fear or horror in them, or even repulsion. Only immense pity. He, who had so often said that he considered the overcoming of pity a noble virtue.

When Overbeck had hastened over with Nietzsche’s letters to the Basle psychiatric clinic, Dr Wille had been in no doubt that Nietzsche must be brought to his asylum immediately. This would not be easy, he warned Overbeck. He would not be able to accomplish it alone. He must travel with a man experienced in the coaxing and calming of the delusional. A German dentist, cunning in such things, was hired.

During the short time in Turin before they left for Basle, Overbeck set to organising Nietzsche’s books and papers, so that they could be sent on by Davide Fino. Nietzsche lay in bed, refusing to get up. The only way the dentist could persuade him out of bed was by humouring his delusion of grandeur. Royalty was waiting! Receptions, pageants and musical entertainments were being prepared for him in the town! Nietzsche snatched up Davide Fino’s nightcap, put it on his head like some sort of royal crown, and fought when they wanted to part him from it.

The bustling streets of Turin and the milling concourse of the railway station produced a sufficient number of people to sustain the illusion of a royal reception. He was coaxed onto the train.

Problems arose on reaching Novara, where they had to change trains and wait three hours for the connection. Nietzsche wished to address the crowds and embrace his loyal subjects but the well-practised dentist persuaded him that it was more fitting for a great personage such as himself to preserve his incognito.

So long as they colluded with his delusion he was docile as a child, but then suddenly his mind would take him to another place and another jagged fragment would burst through. When they had little chance of following his line of thought, he became furious. They gave him chloral to sedate him through the night. As the train rushed through the dark St Gotthard tunnel running beneath the Alps, Overbeck heard Nietzsche’s voice clear and coherent singing the ‘Gondola Song’, one of his own poems that he had inserted into both his last books, Ecce Homo and Nietzsche contra Wagner.

At Basle a taxi was waiting. In his better days Nietzsche had known both Friedmatt, the Basle University Psychiatric Clinic, and its director Professor Wille, but he showed no signs of this as he entered. Dreading that recognition of the professor and the asylum would mean the discovery of his betrayal, Overbeck did not introduce the two men. Nietzsche enquired regally why this man had not been presented to him. It was not seemly to behave thus. On being told Professor Wille’s name, he greeted him with great courtesy and fell seamlessly out of the royal charade into a perfectly lucid and astonishingly accurate recollection of a conversation the two men had held seven years previously on the subject of Adolf Vischer, a religious maniac.

Overbeck was then dismissed by the professionals. There was no place for him while they went through the business of the medical examination and psychiatric evaluation.

‘For you, good people, I shall prepare the loveliest weather tomorrow,’ Nietzsche said as he was led off.

He ate his breakfast ravenously. They noted how much he enjoyed his bath. He remained eight days in the clinic while they tested him and prepared a report.

‘Body healthy and well developed. Muscular. Deep-chested. Heart sounds low-pitched, normal. Pulse regular 70. Pupillar disparity, right larger than the left, reaction to light sluggish. Tongue heavily furred. Exaggerated patellar reflex. Urine clear, acid, containing neither sugar nor albumen.

‘The patient asks often for women. Says that he has been ill for the past week and often suffers from severe headaches. Says he has had a few attacks. He felt exceptionally well and exalted during the attacks. He would have liked to embrace and kiss everybody in the street. He would have liked to climb up the walls. It is difficult to tie the patient’s attention down to anything definite; he only gives fragmentary and imperfect answers, or none at all.

‘No tremor and no speech disorder. The flow of speech constant, confused and without logical connection. Continues throughout the night. Often a high state of manic excitement. Considerable priapic content. Delusions of whores in his room.

‘At times he will converse quite normally but then lapse into jokes, dances, confusion and delusion. Occasionally breaks into singing, yodelling and screaming.

‘11 January 1889. The patient did not sleep at all during the night, talked without intermission, got up several times to clean his teeth, wash himself, etc. Over-tired in the morning … In the afternoon, out-of-doors, he is in a continual state of motor-excitement; throws his hat on the ground and occasionally lies down on the ground himself. – Talks confusedly and occasionally reproaches himself with having been the cause of several people’s ruin.

‘12 January 1889. After sulfonal, four or five hours’ sleep with several interruptions. When asked how he feels replies that he feels so incredibly well that he could only express it in music.’

After eight days, a pattern of sorts emerged. He was quieter when he was in bed. The manic, loud, disruptive behaviour was worse when he was up. Indoors the rages were vocal: aggravato fortissimo. Out of doors it was more physical, with a tendency to take off pieces of clothing and lie down on the ground.

*

Professor Wille was an authority on syphilis. Many of his patients in the clinic were suffering from the syphilis of the brain that may come in the later stages of the disease. The diagnosis appeared to be confirmed by a small scar on his penis and by Nietzsche telling them that he had ‘infected himself twice’. It was assumed he was referring to syphilis. They did not then have access to his medical records, which would have told them that earlier in his life, when he was in his right mind and examined by Dr Eiser, he had admitted that he had twice been infected with gonorrhoea.

By the end of eight days, Wille was confident in the diagnosis of paralysis progressiva, progressive paralysis and general paresis, the psychotic breakdown occurring in the last stages of syphilis. Overbeck now had the difficult task of informing Nietzsche’s mother that her son was in an asylum.

On receiving the news, Franziska immediately left Naumburg for Basle, arriving on 13 January. She stayed the night with the Overbecks and on the following morning she went to the clinic. Before she could see her son, she must be interviewed by the doctors. She had to give them Nietzsche’s familial and medical history.

‘Mother gives the impression of a limited intelligence,’ reads the report. ‘Father, a country parson, suffered from brain disease after falling downstairs … One of the mother’s brothers died in a nerve sanatorium. The father’s sisters were hysterical and somewhat eccentric. – Pregnancy and confinement quite normal …’3

Franziska was in no doubt of her duty and her desire. She wished to look after her son. They would not let her. Franziska Nietzsche was a small, slight woman in her sixties whose genteelly inactive life had not endowed her with much physical strength. Her taller son was forty-four, skeletally strong, well muscled, irrational, physically unpredictable and intermittently violent.

There was no question he required more than a mother’s care. Far be it from Franziska to disobey professional advice coming from a member of the male sex but she did manage a small victory in getting Nietzsche transferred to the psychiatric institution that was closest to her in Naumburg, the clinic in Jena.

Once again, it was decided that a professional escort was needed. A young doctor named Ernst Mähly was selected. As it was too much for one man alone, he would be accompanied by an attendant. Mähly had been one of Nietzsche’s students at Basle. He was ‘a secret and silent adept, filled with suppressed reverence for the daemonic herald of the Transvaluation of all Values, the creator of Beyond Good and Evil’.4 He also knew Otto Binswanger, the Principal of the Jena Clinic for the Care and Cure of the Insane. Mähly was surely the perfect link on this connecting journey. His mind must have the greatest chance of understanding the jigsaw fragments of speech and piecing them together into some sort of pattern that might provide clues to assist Professor Binswanger. A footnote to this episode is that when Ernst Mähly’s life eventually ended in suicide, his father placed the blame on Nietzsche’s influence.

On the evening of 17 January 1889, Nietzsche was for the second time organised into a journey to a railway station that would take him to an asylum. This time Overbeck was not to travel with him but he desperately wished to bid farewell to his friend. Overbeck experienced his second ‘horrible, unforgettable’ moment as he stood watching the little group walk across the station concourse in the wooden silence of a funeral procession. Nietzsche’s gait was unnaturally stiff, like an automaton. It was nine o’clock in the evening and the harsh, artificial station lighting lent their faces the gruesome, mask-like hollows of phantoms.

When the curiously rigid figure had managed the steps from the platform up to the carriage, Overbeck boarded the train and entered the reserved compartment to bid him farewell. Catching sight of him, Nietzsche uttered a roaring groan, and leapt up to embrace him convulsively. He told him he was the man he had loved most of all. Then Overbeck had to leave.

Three days later, Overbeck wrote to Peter Gast that he was tormented by feelings that he had done his friend wrong. He had known in Turin that it was all over. He ought not to have practised such underhanded tricks and deception upon his dear friend. Now, he must labour for the rest of his life under the terrible burden of having delivered Nietzsche to a future of asylums. He should rather have taken Nietzsche’s life, then and there, in Turin.

This was an extraordinary statement from a mild-mannered professor of theology, to whom murder was a very grave sin indeed. But his moral dilemma was further complicated as it crossed both friends’ minds that Nietzsche might be feigning madness. Both Gast and Overbeck knew his willingness to dispense with the conventional interpretations of reality, his lifelong interest in madness and madmen, and how he was drawn to the sacred tumult of the orgiastic god. From Empedocles to Hölderlin, to the madman seeking God with a lantern in Zarathustra, he had so often come up with the thought that only the fragile bark of madness could carry the human mind over the Rubicon that must be crossed to reach revelation. It was the price that must be paid. Madness was the only engine strong enough to drive change through the morality of custom. The ‘dreadful attendant’, it was the mask and speaking-trumpet of divinity. Plato had said that it was only through madness that the greatest good things had come to Greece. But Nietzsche went further. All superior men who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of ready-made moralities, if they were not actually mad, had no alternative but to feign madness.

‘I, too have been in the underworld, like Odysseus, and will often be there again; and I have not sacrificed only rams to be able to talk with the dead, but have not spared my own blood as well,’ he had written. ‘May the living forgive me if they sometimes appear to me as shades …’5

Struck as they were by the idea that their friend might be dipping into the underworld and donning the mask of madness to get to the other side, their suspicions could not hold out against the reality they observed over the next fourteen months when Nietzsche was confined in the Jena clinic. This was no mask, no Dionysian deception, no exaltation of the muses, no powerful mystery of thought. They had no doubt that they were observing the last wisps of an evaporating mind.

Nietzsche had already encountered the Jena clinic once before, when he was fifteen years old. He had seen and noted the vast institution on a summer holiday trip in 1859 when its sharp, grim outline had caused him to write melancholy and gruesome thoughts in his diary. Whereas the Basle clinic was a solid-looking bourgeois villa, not unlike Wahnfried in architectural style and scale, the Jena clinic was an enormous and forbidding pile, a towered and turreted institution of glaring orange and black brickwork. Inside, it bristled with prominent security features such as locks and bolts, padding in unusual places and heavily barred windows.

He was admitted as a ‘second class’ fee-paying patient. The decision was nominally made by Franziska but doubtless she turned for guidance to Overbeck, and he would have advised financial caution. The pension from Basle University had been drastically reduced from three thousand to two thousand francs. They had no idea how long he would be incarcerated. Second-class accommodation was certainly a prudent measure.

The institution’s director, Professor Otto Binswanger, had studied neuropathology in Vienna and Göttingen. At an unusually young age – he was not yet thirty – he had been appointed director of the Jena institution; he also held the post of Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Jena. He wrote numerous papers on brain syphilis and dementia paralytica. He was steeped in psychiatry and neuropathology; his father had held a similar position before him. There was no question that Nietzsche was in one of the leading institutions for his condition. Unfortunately, Binswanger did not examine Nietzsche on arrival. The diagnosis sent over with the patient from the Basle clinic was adopted: paresis and dementia paralytica, dementia and progressive paralysis as a result of tertiary syphilis.

Syphilis was no longer regarded as sent directly from God as a punishment for sinful sexual liaisons. Mental illness was no longer a matter of the brutal, overcrowded madhouses where inmates were treated like a cabaret of amusing zoo animals. Cures had not arrived but humane treatment had. Calm, calm and always more calm was Binswanger’s fundamental remedy. During the fourteen months Nietzsche spent in the Jena asylum, he was sedated and he was massaged with mercury ointment, the centuries-old remedy. There was no question of a cure or recovery. The condition was incurable. It was only a matter of waiting for the patient to die. This was expected to happen relatively quickly, in a year or two.

The fact that Nietzsche survived for eleven years, taken together with the absence of some of the expected symptoms of tertiary syphilis such as hair loss and nasal depression, make it a pity that Binswanger did not examine Nietzsche himself to confirm the diagnosis.6

Over the long months, Nietzsche continued psychotic, delusional, agitated and incoherent. He grimaced. There was unarticulated screaming with no external motive. Delusions of grandeur continued: he talked of councillors of legations, ministers and servants. There were also delusions of persecution. He saw a rifle aimed at him behind a windowpane and he cut his hand smashing the glass trying to get at it. ‘They’ cursed him in the night and used terrible contrivances against him. Fearful machinery was sometimes turned on him. Erotic delusions continued. One morning he reported that twenty-four whores had been with him in the night. He persisted in calling the chief warden ‘Prince Bismarck’. He sometimes called himself the Duke of Cumberland, sometimes the Kaiser. He said he had been Frederick William IV ‘the last time’. He told them that his wife, Frau Cosima Wagner, had brought him here. He often begged for help against nightly torture. He did not sleep on his bed but on the floor beside it. He twitched. He carried his head to one side. He ate enormously. By October, he had put on thirteen pounds. He broke a tumbler so as to protect his approaches with splinters of glass. He was incontinent. He urinated into his water glass. He smeared his faeces. He sometimes got away with drinking his urine. He chattered, screamed and groaned unnervingly. He could be heard from a long way away throughout the night. White hairs began to grow on the right side of his moustache.

During Binswanger’s classes, Nietzsche took his turn in being one of the patients exhibited as a teaching aid. He did not perceive this as any sort of humiliation. While he did not know what he was doing there, he obviously felt his importance as a personage. He behaved courteously to the medical attendants, repeatedly expressing gratitude, comporting himself towards them as a gracious master to his servants. He thanked them for his splendid reception. He tried to shake the doctor’s hand over and over again. Somewhere in his mind he knew that the doctor was of superior social standing, as he was himself.

When Binswanger wished to show off some disturbances in the patient’s walk, Nietzsche moved so slowly and lethargically that the symptoms could not be seen. ‘Now, Herr Professor,’ Binswanger scolded, ‘an old soldier like you surely can still march!’ Upon which Nietzsche began to pace along the lecture hall with a firm gait.7

There were calm intervals of pathetic charm. He asked the doctor with a smile, ‘Give me a little health.’

He had no idea where he was. Sometimes he was in Naumburg, sometimes in Turin. He conversed very little with the other patients. He stole books. He had his name written down on crumpled slips of paper. He would produce them and read his name aloud, ‘Professor Friedrich Nietzsche’, many times a day.

Just as, on leaving Turin, he had become attached to one of Davide Fino’s caps, now he became intensely possessive of one of the clinic’s caps. He wore it day and night and they dared not take it away from him. They assumed it was his royal headdress. He became irritated and agitated when they checked his pockets after a walk; he liked to fill them up with stones and all sorts of other small treasures.

After six months of sedation, his behaviour was sufficiently under control for his mother to be permitted to see him. She arrived on 29 July. It was judged best they should not meet in his room; nor should they meet in the ward for the insane, where he usually sat in the daytime. The meeting took place in the visitors’ room. He told her that this was where he gave lectures before a select public. A pencil and some paper were lying about. He shoved them into his pocket, whispering to her mysteriously but quite merrily, ‘Now I shall have something to do when I creep into my cave.’8

Six further months passed with little change. In December a noisy charlatan named Julius Langbehn got in touch with Franziska. Langbehn was convinced that he was able to cure her son. He needed complete control to implement his cure and so he must be allowed legally to adopt Nietzsche. Langbehn was the bestselling author of the latest book to proffer a cure for the collapsing state of German culture. Rembrandt as Educator (Rembrandt als Erzieher) leant heavily for its title on Nietzsche’s ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’. Langbehn’s solution to Germany’s crisis was back-to-the-soil Christianity as portrayed by the good, uncorrupted German peasant souls depicted in Rembrandt’s paintings. The fact that Rembrandt was Dutch did not appear to trouble him.

Langbehn had analysed Germany. Its problem was that it was overeducated. The professor and the expert, with their scholarship and their so-called ‘expertise’, must cease to be venerated. It would then follow, as night follows day, that the spiritual rebirth of Germany would be accomplished from within the fundamentally good German soul. Wisdom was to be found in the soil, in open air and in simple German hearts. The expulsion of foreign influences went without saying, particularly Jews. His book was the literary sensation of 1890. It was reprinted twenty-nine times during the first year of publication. Later he added two more extensive sections hymning two of Nietzsche’s bêtes noires: anti-Semitism and Roman Catholicism. Langbehn also wrote poems; he considered himself a better poet than Goethe. He looked upon himself as a ‘secret Emperor’ whose healing powers would spiritually renew the German empire. Bismarck received him several times.

To ‘cure’ Nietzsche, the self-confessed Anti-Christ, would be a fine feather in Langbehn’s cap. His considered view was that ‘“Atheists” like Shelley and “Anti-Christs” like Nietzsche are simply truant schoolboys who must be brought back into the fold.’9 He prepared a legal document for Franziska to sign: ‘I, the undersigned hereby pledge the legal guardianship of my son Friedrich Nietzsche …’, etc. His plan was to take Nietzsche to Dresden, where the patient’s royal fantasies would be indulged. Surrounded by a court and a retinue, Nietzsche would be treated as a king and as a child. Langbehn believed he could raise sufficient money to pay for the suitably grand mansion, elaborate furnishings, clothes, regalia and costumed courtiers (medical and domestic staff) to sustain the royal charade. Franziska’s attendance as a nurse was grudgingly to be allowed, but only on Langbehn’s strict conditions and permission.

Binswanger seemed to be as dazzled by the celebrity nationalist populist as the rest of the country. He permitted Langbehn to take daily walks with Nietzsche. His endless proselytising and attempts at exorcism eventually so maddened the patient that he upset a table over him and threatened him with his fists. Sinews stiffened by Overbeck, Franziska summoned up her courage and refused to sign the adoption agreement. This was the obvious moment for Langbehn’s discretion to overcome his valour. He retired from the fray, to Dresden, to write pornographic poems, for which he would be prosecuted for obscenity. But the bestselling Rembrandt as Educator lived on as one of the early building blocks for the ideological foundations of the Third Reich. Hitler had a copy in his private library.10

In February 1890, Nietzsche’s lethargy and tractability had improved to the extent that he was allowed to spend some hours with his mother on his good days. She took an apartment in Jena. Every morning, she called for him at the clinic at nine o’clock. Franziska was convinced that if only she might have custody of her dear, good boy, he might be returned to his right mind. The apartment had a second downstairs bedroom where Franz Overbeck and Peter Gast took it in turns to stay and be of assistance to her.

Walking for four or five hours a day had always been an important part of Nietzsche’s routine. Indeed, it accounted for the skeletal and muscular strength remarked upon in both clinics’ reports. Franziska had never been much of a walker but if this was the price, it was not too steep to pay. She would take his arm, or he would walk a little behind her, following her about, sometimes stopping to draw figures on the ground with his stick, or to stuff things into his pockets. While Franziska was delighted by his obedience, his two friends were horrified by his childish docility. There were always one or two oddities on the walks. He would break out into his noises. He tried to hit dogs, or strangers. He tried to shake hands with other people who obviously appealed to him in some unfathomable way. This frightened ladies.

Often they walked to the home of a family named Gelzer-Thurneysen. When they arrived, Franziska would tell Nietzsche to remove his hat and come indoors. He would remain shyly at the door of the drawing room while she went over to the piano and began to play. Slowly, he would approach, drawn by the music. Eventually he would place his fingers on the keys. He would begin to play standing up, then she would push him down onto the piano stool, and he would continue. She would know that she could safely leave him, lost in music. So long as she heard music, there was no need for her to be in the same room to supervise him.

On 24 March 1890, Franziska was granted custody of her son. They remained in the flat in Jena for six weeks but then one day Nietzsche gave her the slip. He undressed in the street, possibly intending to go for a swim, and was discovered by a policeman, who returned him to his mother. This made her terrified that he would be sent back to the asylum. She persuaded one of the young Gelzers to help her ‘smuggle’ him to the railway station, where they caught the train for Naumburg. Alwine, the faithful servant, greeted ‘the professor’ with joy. He was back in Weingarten 18, his childhood home.

The little two-storey house was ideally situated for looking after a disinhibited patient: the garden was small, fenced and gated. The ground-floor windows had stout shutters. One side of the house gave onto a vineyard; the other faced the wall of St Jacob’s Church.

Franziska continued optimistically with the walking cure. Usually he followed her around quietly. If she saw a stranger approaching, she simply turned him round by taking his arm and distracting him, pointing to a view. The threat safely passed, she could turn him around again. If they met an acquaintance and she stopped to talk, she would instruct him to remove his hat. While she exchanged pleasantries, he would stand dully with the hat in his hand. If addressed, he would look uncomprehending. When the encounter was over, she would tell him to put on his hat and they would resume their walk.

As a boy, he had prided himself on swimming in the River Saale ‘like a whale’. It was a recreation that had always brought him great pleasure. Franziska thought that the physical memory might aid recuperation but after a few attempts she had to desist. The excitement was too much; it rendered him uncontrollable.

If the ‘dear child’ was having an unusually noisy or obstructive day, he might easily be contained indoors. There were not many neighbours to be disturbed by shouts and screams. When he became unbearably loud and obstreperous, she simply put something sweet in his mouth, like a little piece of cut-up fruit. By the time he had chewed and swallowed, his attention had been distracted and the violent vocalising had subsided into more acceptable growls. He ate enormously. She said she gave him no chloral or sedatives. If that was so, it was a shutting down, a regression while the mother regained complete control of her beloved, incontinent, obedient boy child.

Notes

1 Schain, The Legend of Nietzsche’s Syphilis, p. 44.

2 Verse 2 of ‘An der Brücke stand’ (‘I Stood on the Bridge’):
       Meine seele, ein Saitenspiel,
       Sang sich unsichtbar berührt,
       Heimlich ein Gondellied dazu,
       Zitternd vor bunter Seligkeit.
       – Hörte jemand ihr zu?

3 ‘Mother’s Statement’, part of health report from the clinic, January 1889.

4 Carl Bernoulli, cited in E. F. Podach, The Madness of Nietzsche, trans. F. A Voight, Putnam, 1931, p. 177.

5 Human, All Too Human, ‘A Miscellany of Opinions and Maxims’, Section 408, ‘Descent into Hades’.

6 Dr Stutz, a director of the Basle clinic in the 1920s, discovered from the records that many cases diagnosed in the clinic as paralytica progressiva were in fact cases of schizophrenia.

7 Recollection of medical student Sascha Simchowitz, quoted in Krell and Bates, The Good European, p. 50.

8 Podach, The Madness of Nietzsche, p. 195.

9 Langbehn to Bishop Keppler, autumn 1900, after Langbehn received the news of Nietzsche’s death. Cited in Podach, The Madness of Nietzsche, pp. 210–11.

10 Timothy W. Ryback, Hitler’s Private Library, The Books that Shaped His Life, Vintage, 2010, p. 134.