When Friedrich Nietzsche was twenty years old and his sister was eighteen, they had the sort of argument over religion that takes place, sooner or later, in almost every family. Elisabeth was devout to the point of sanctimony; Friedrich, though hitherto pious, had begun to have doubts and refused, with maximum bolshiness, to take Communion, Easter 1864.
Elisabeth was scandalised and tearful, enlisting the theological help of her uncles to support her in the bitter row that ensued, which was broken up only when their dogmatic Aunt Rosalie (perhaps remembering the experiences of the founder of Christianity) told Elisabeth ‘in the life of every great theologian there had been moments of doubt’. But the dispute had long-lasting implications: it revealed an ideological chasm between brother and sister that was never bridged. At the time Nietzsche wrote to his sister, ‘Do you desire spiritual peace and happiness? – very well, then, believe! Do you wish to be a disciple of truth? – so be it; investigate!’ Her view was: ‘It is much easier not to believe than the reverse.’ Nietzsche never accepted that argument, and he dedicated his life to exposing faith as fraud. He never found another credo, after that first crisis of conscience, unless it was faithlessness itself. He rejected Christian morality and all other ideologies with moral imperatives, and for most of his life he wandered Europe searching for something to put in place of a morality he thought was moribund, for a truth, as he defined it. He was seldom happy, and never enjoyed spiritual peace of mind. He had no permanent home, few friends and even fewer satisfying emotional relationships. He never married. From the age of thirty-five he was usually ill and depressed, and shortly after his forty-fourth birthday he went permanently insane.
His sister’s life was a perfect contrast. Elisabeth was healthy and happy for every one of her eighty-nine years. Her peace of mind was based on a clutch of rigid religious, political and racial beliefs and an unswerving faith in her own moral rectitude. Those beliefs led her to Paraguay, where they were tempered into an ideology; later she would impose them on her brother, the disciple of truth.
And, as for truth itself, Elisabeth used it when convenient.
Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, the pastor of Röcken, a tiny Saxon village south-west of Leipzig, was overjoyed when his young wife gave birth to a boy on 15 October 1844. The child shared a birthday with the reigning King of Prussia, and Pastor Nietzsche, a dedicated monarchist, named the boy Friedrich Wilhelm after the King. Less than two years later, on 10 July 1846, the Nietzsches had a girl, and christened her Therese Elisabeth Alexandra after the Princesses of Alte-Saxenburg whom Pastor Nietzsche had tutored as a young man. And two years after that a second son, named Joseph, after the Duke of Alte-Saxenburg. Carl Ludwig was a consistent sort.
The parsonage was surrounded by flat green fields and orchards. The children played around the fish ponds and in the woods, and in the bell tower of the twelfth-century village church. Röcken was a sleepy place – idyllic and rather dull. In 1848, cartloads of rebels waving revolutionary banners passed the parsonage on the road to Leipzig. Carl Ludwig was livid at the ingratitude of a rebellion against his beloved monarch and patron, and when he heard that the King had appeased the rebels he burst into tears and locked himself in his study. Otherwise, the revolutions of 1848 and 1849 had no effect whatever on the lives of the Nietzsche family.
Friedrich was four, Elisabeth two when Pastor Nietzsche died of ‘softening of the brain’. He was followed to the grave within six months by the child Joseph. It was a devastating blow, particularly when the family had to move to Naumburg on the Saale to make way for the new pastor. Henceforth Elisabeth and Friedrich Nietzsche were brought up in a house containing several very old, pious women and one very young one, their mother: there was Aunt Rosalie, devout, dotty and opposed to Shakespeare; Aunt Augusta, who insisted on doing the housekeeping in spite of her digestive problems; Grandmother Erdmuthe, who couldn’t stand noise and habitually wore a frilly lace bonnet; and an ancient maid called Mina.
Franziska Nietzsche was widowed at twenty-three: she was a kind, nervous, unsophisticated woman, and she never came close to understanding her children, though she played a pivotal role in their lives. Perhaps because she was so close to them in age, her relationships with her children tended to be stormy. Later, Elisabeth had few words of praise for her more generous than ‘the wonderful way she used to toboggan’. The house in Naumburg was a stifling and precious place. The continual presence of so many old and rather peculiar females throughout their childhood affected both children: they both grew up with a firm dislike of women. In Nietzsche’s case this sometimes expressed itself in blistering misogyny, but in Elisabeth the effect was more complex. Friedrich was the undisputed centre of the family’s attention, and Elisabeth seems to have accepted the notion that men, like her brother, were superior beings, the makers of history. Throughout her life she attacked the idea of women’s suffrage (‘Feminism is a movement of spinsters’, she wrote, ‘and its adherents are generally childless women’) and she habitually valued the attention and opinions of men above those of her own sex, partly perhaps because she found them easier to manipulate. Much later she would ascribe to Nietzsche an ideal of womanhood which was actually her own: ‘My brother’s ideal of women was in fact the ideal cherished by every man of high character: the brave woman, who by her cheerful, loving personality tries to lighten her husband’s burdens, to refresh him after his dreary hours of work and of wrestling with difficult problems, who relieves him of the petty worries of daily life, and shows some understanding for his higher aspirations …’ That was how she believed women ought to behave; it was not how she behaved. Elisabeth lived a life that was, in the context of the times, thoroughly emancipated. She might defer to men in theory, but in practice she was adept at getting them to do exactly what she wanted, alternately beguiling and bludgeoning them into co-operation. Elisabeth achieved her ends through and in spite of the men she claimed to defer to. She was at least partially ignored as a child. In later life, people reacted to her in a variety of ways: some admired her, others despised her and almost everyone feared her. But she made quite sure that no one ignored her.
The two fatherless children grew extremely close. Elisabeth idolised her Fritz, and, in loco parentis beyond his years, he seems to have returned her affection with a distinct edge of superiority. The children had found a picture of a llama in a story book, detailing its stubborn as well as its lovable qualities; Fritz nicknamed his sister after the animal and called her Llama (with different degrees of affection) all his life.
Friedrich was a nervous child, shy, introverted and precocious. He wrote his first autobiography at the age of fourteen, disguised as a memoir to his father. It is painful to read, the expressions of romantic piety jarring with genuine anguish. They both learned to play the piano; she competently, he with real virtuosity, developing a love of music that is reflected in his more melodious writing. By the age of eight he was writing poems and plays and his devoted sister was collecting them, stashing them in her ‘treasure drawer’ for posterity. With good reason, he sometimes wanted to destroy his efforts, but she would, where possible, prevent him. It was a dangerous precedent. His passionate reading and writing damaged his already poor eyesight. Both children had inherited myopia, and Elisabeth had a pronounced squint. But she was a pretty child, with long, curly fair hair.
There were Lutheran pastors on both sides of the families, going back several generations, and it was assumed by all that Friedrich would go into the Church. To this end Aunt Rosalie gave him extra religious tuition. He showed religious zeal extraordinary even for a child. At fourteen he wrote: ‘In everything God has led me safely as a father leads his weak little child … I have firmly resolved to dedicate myself for ever to his service.’ The earliest photographs show a serious little boy, with long hair and mournful eyes, his face set in a dour line. In fact there is only one photograph of Friedrich Nietzsche with anything other than an expression of deep seriousness. Elisabeth, by contrast, either grins at the camera, full of merriment and devilry, or pouts. Friedrich won a place at Schulpforta, the famous Protestant boarding school where the Schlegel brothers, Fichte, and Ranke had all been educated. The school combined academic excellence with strict Prussian discipline, and he thrived in the pressurised atmosphere; he set up his own literary society, Germania, with two friends and became obsessed with Nordic saga; he read Byron, Shakespeare, Goethe and Hölderlin, composed poetry and music. He also began to doubt the Christian mores he had been infused with throughout his upbringing.
Elisabeth lacked her brother’s early intellectual promise, but she was no dunce. Her records from the private Naumburg school for young ladies show that she was an excellent pupil in all subjects except English. Her academic determination partly reflected a sibling rivalry; later she recalled an occasion when a school inspector had visited both the girls’ and boys’ schools in Naumburg, before Nietzsche left for Schulpforta. The man had been struck by Friedrich’s precocity, but she added, fifty years after the event, that ‘the inspector of the girls’ school took a great interest in me and also inquired my name’. Both children were somewhat arrogant in manner, and outside her brother’s company Elisabeth was distinctly bossy. Friedrich wrote: ‘I have a pleasant and varied circle of friends, but there can be no question of influence. First I would have to meet someone I considered to be my superior.’
Once a week, Friedrich would meet his mother and sister at an inn between Naumburg and Schulpforta, and between times the children wrote to each other constantly. Both were avid letter-writers all their lives. In Elisabeth’s case it was pure habit; she would often write whether or not she had anything to say. Nietzsche himself was disparaging about receiving letters: ‘A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath.’ But he relied utterly on sending and receiving letters, which too often took the place of real human contact. He needed to write as others needed air; often he would write letters but never post them.
When it was decided that Elisabeth should finish her education in Dresden, Nietzsche wrote to their mother: ‘Dresden will be quite adequate for E’s spiritual education and in some ways I envy her … I have plenty of confidence in Elisabeth – if only she would learn to write better. And when she tells a story, you cannot believe how splendid, wonderful and enchanting it would be if she could manage not to keep exclaiming “Oh” and “Ach”.’ This from a brother less than two years her senior. He instructed Elisabeth to visit art galleries and to send him written descriptions of one or two paintings every week; he told her what to read and, often, what to think about what she read. The fact that Elisabeth, who was more than capable of thinking for herself, did not tell him what he could do with his advice was a sign of the unhealthy reverence she already seems to have felt for her brother. Her jealousy of him grew stronger as she grew older, and Nietzsche seems to have exploited it. When he developed a crush on the sister of a school friend, he asked Elisabeth to send some Schumann scores to the object of his new infatuation, and she refused huffily. So he sent some poems. He seems to have enjoyed comparing his sister to other girls he met; of the sister of a friend he wrote to her, ‘Marie Deussen is, despite her youth, a quite splendid, spiritual girl, who really, dear Lisbeth, occasionally reminds me of you.’ The gently taunting tone is unmistakable.
Was there something incestuous in their relationship? Something, perhaps, certainly nothing provable, but enough for at least some people to go to remarkable lengths to establish this as fact. In 1951, a book was published in New York under the title My Sister and I, which purported to be the last book written by Friedrich Nietzsche, containing the ‘confessions’ of ‘the boy who grew up in a house full of manless women’. A 1953 advertisement called it ‘the story of a Famous Brother and a terrifyingly ambitious younger Sister, who grew to love each other physically as children and continued to do so into maturity … the 19th century’s greatest philosopher tells how he was gradually led into this extraordinarily dangerous love-trap …’ It is steamy in the extreme:
It first happened between Elisabeth and me the night our young brother Joseph died, though we had no idea that he was dying when she crept into my bed … suddenly I felt Elisabeth’s warm little hands in mine, her hissing little voice in my ear, and I began feeling warm all over … I was usually in the midst of a sound sleep when she got into my bed, and thrilling as I found the ministrations of her fat little fingers, it also meant my being kept awake for hours and hours.
My Sister and I is full of such soft-core pornography and would radically affect any consideration of Nietzsche’s relationship with his sister if there was any reason to believe that Nietzsche wrote a single word of it.
The book was said to have come to light through a young American journalist who had been given it in exchange for a favour done for an English ex-clergyman on a transatlantic crossing in 1920. It then passed, supposedly, into the hands of Oscar Levy, an English Nietzsche scholar who allegedly translated it and wrote the introduction. His family vehemently deny that he did either. Then, the story goes, it ended up in the hands of Samuel Roth, a New York publisher of a reputation so dubious that in 1927 a protest was mounted against him signed by 176 literary figures, including Einstein, Hemingway, Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Thomas Mann and Yeats. Roth later claimed that although he had planned to publish the book in the 1920s, his offices were raided by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, looking for an edition of Ulysses, and they carried off everything – including the original German manuscript of My Sister and I. It was not until 1951, he claimed, that a motheaten copy of Levy’s translation miraculously reappeared in the bottom of a trunk. He promptly published it as Nietzsche’s lost manuscript. Levy, by this time, was conveniently dead. Years later, a man called George Plotkin, a professional forger, admitted to Walter Kaufmann, one of the greatest Nietzsche scholars, that he had written the book ‘for a flat fee’.
My Sister and I is almost certainly a rather poor hoax: it is full of anachronisms, Anglicisms and references to events that Nietzsche could not have known about. Its language, though it copies Nietzsche’s aphoristic style, is a pale pastiche, and it is philosophically void. The book proves nothing – except, perhaps, that Nietzsche is still prey to people who would change him posthumously, even if they must stoop to forgery. There is no evidence to suggest that links between Elisabeth and Friedrich Nietzsche were sexual; but there is copious proof that their relationship was as emotionally charged, as possessive and as destructive as any sexual relationship.
At university in Bonn, away from home at Christmas for the first time in his life, Friedrich composed eight songs as a present for his sister and sent them to her, bound in lilac-coloured morocco leather and bearing a silhouette of himself. He also sent precise instructions on how they were to be played.
The young Nietzsche attempted, somewhat half-heartedly, to join in the bibulous buffoonery of his university contemporaries. He got drunk and joined the Burschenschaft Frankonia, a student union dedicated to duelling and hard drinking. He even contrived to get the requisite duelling scar, which he carried on his nose for the rest of his life. But his mind was some way away from the childish, beery superficiality of university life. Despite periods of self-doubt, he was already convinced of his own potential. This was more than youthful ambition; he felt destiny pressing hard on him, reinforced by the effects of a spoiled childhood, but there was something else too. He had written about it when a child, a vague, shapeless dread looming outside his conscious mind: ‘What I fear is not the terrifying shape behind my chair, but its voice; not the words so much as the horrifying, inarticulate and inhuman tone of that shape. If it only spoke as humans speak.’ This may be no more than a childish nightmare, but it is horribly prescient. Increasing doubts caused him to abandon theology and Bonn. He moved to Leipzig (along with his philology professor, F. W. Ritschel) after deciding to devote himself to classical scholarship. There he studied the great pessimist Schopenhauer and found in him an echo of his own coalescing philosophy. Pessimist though he might be, Nietzsche needed something to believe in, to replace his decaying Christianity, and on the evening of 28 October 1868 he found it.
He had heard Wagner’s music before but had been unimpressed; yet when he heard extracts from Tristan and Die Meistersinger that evening he was enraptured: ‘I am quivering in every fibre with excitement and ecstasy.’ Less than two weeks later, he met the Meister himself. Wagner was staying incognito in Leipzig, but, having heard of a young student who raved about his music and never being one to shy away from a possible plaudit, he asked his hostess to arrange a meeting. Wagner held court that night, playing parts of the Meistersinger and reading aloud, as only one so self-obsessed as he could, parts of his own unfinished autobiography. Nietzsche was enchanted with this ‘wonderfully lively and animated man who speaks very fast, is very witty and makes a private gathering of this private sort very cheerful’. Wagner and Nietzsche discussed their shared passion for Schopenhauer, and at the end of the evening Wagner invited Nietzsche to visit him.
Nietzsche later described their encounter as a ‘fairy tale’, and it initiated a relationship that was to have dramatic and far-reaching consequences for both Friedrich and Elisabeth Nietzsche. Wagner was thirty-one years older than Nietzsche, the same age as Pastor Carl Ludwig would have been, whom he oddly resembled. Through their mothers, Wagner and Nietzsche were, in fact, distantly related. Whether or not Nietzsche found in Wagner a father figure, his obsession with the older man and his works was as passionate as his later rejection of him. ‘Together we could march to the bold, indeed giddying rhythm of his revolutionary and constructive aesthetic’, he wrote to his friend and fellow student Erwin Rohde.
But while at Leipzig Nietzsche made another, far more awful discovery: he had contracted syphilis. Two Leipzig doctors treated him for the infection in 1867; much later he himself stated he had caught the disease in 1866. He had certainly visited a brothel in Cologne in 1865, but had been embarrassed and played the piano to cover his shame before fleeing into the night. Thomas Mann believed he later went back to the brothel; Freud and Jung helped to spread a rumour that he had caught the disease in a Genoese male brothel, for which there is no evidence. Elisabeth claimed he had never had syphilis, and another friend that he had never had sex. The progressive paralysis which killed him and drove him mad may, conceivably, have been contracted some other way, but the point is that he thought he had syphilis, which is not something you tend to think without good reason, still less if you are a virgin.
In 1869, at the age of twenty-four, through an astonishing stroke of good fortune and the good offices of his Professor Ritschel, Nietzsche took up the chair of philosophy at Basle University. Elisabeth, still in Naumburg, was delighted by her brother’s rapid rise to fame. ‘I know that they are all talking about it in the Ratskeller’, she said. ‘They will say “How happy his mother must be, and his sister,” and they are right, they are right, says your tenderly, ardently, eternally loving sister.’ Basle had the added attraction of being close to Tribschen, Wagner’s house on Lake Lucerne. When Nietzsche left to take up his new post, Elisabeth, twenty-three years old and, thanks to the timely demise of Grandmother Nietzsche, financially independent, decided to study in Leipzig as her brother had done. (Her private income was regularly topped up as, one by one, her many aunts and uncles passed away.) She attended a number of lectures and concerts, took lessons to improve her English and immersed herself in the town’s social life. When the Franco-Prussian war broke out Nietzsche volunteered as a nursing orderly. He served for a month, but collapsed at Erlangen in September 1870 having contracted dysentery and diphtheria from some of the soldiers he was looking after. Elisabeth helped to nurse him back to fitness, but his health was seriously impaired. Safely in Basle he sent his sister a bound copy of his inaugural address, ‘The Personality of Homer’, with a dedication to ‘my dear and only sister Elisabeth’. Nietzsche cut a dandyish figure around the town, with his grey top hat and erect bearing. The characteristic moustache had yet to reach the remarkable proportions of later life, but it was well on the way, already blossoming on his upper lip, six inches long and gently curved.
Within a month of arriving at his new university and in spite of bouts of ill-health which could leave him prostrate for days, Nietzsche went to visit the Wagners. So far from forgetting the Leipzig student, as Nietzsche feared, Wagner had formed a good impression of the intense young man who had talked so earnestly of Schopenhauer; he perhaps sensed, too, a man who craved a mentor, a father figure, as much as Wagner himself needed disciples. Almost overnight Nietzsche was adopted into the intoxicating atmosphere of Wagner’s home.
With Wagner, Nietzsche formed, next to Elisabeth, the most intense relationship of his life. The composer was already the preeminent artistic personality of his age, a figure whose musical genius was matched only by his consuming egotism; from the distance of a century, his cultural and in particular his racial ideas, his crude Teutonic nationalism and verbose theorising seem dubious in the extreme, but his capacity to inspire was astonishing. Nietzsche considered him ‘divine’, and in return Wagner put him in the centre of the dazzling spotlight that was his personality. The fact that Wagner considered most of his relationships, that with Nietzsche included, in terms of his own needs cannot detract from the many kindnesses he showed Nietzsche in these early years. Nietzsche was entranced by Tribschen and the Wagner family circle, which combined, he thought, artistic brilliance with an intellectual freedom that could not have been further removed from the bourgeois banalities of Naumburg. Later, in Ecce Homo, he would write: ‘I offer all my other personal relationships cheap, but at no price would I relinquish from my life the Tribschen days, those days of mutual confidences, of cheerfulness, of sublime incidents – of profound moments … I do not know what others may have experienced with Wagner: over our sky no cloud ever passed.’ It wasn’t true, of course, and eventually a cloud so large and black passed over the relationship that the light went out of it.
The house at Tribschen, a pretty four-square building on the lakeside, was an elaborate testament to the composer’s vanity. Its plush interior reflected Wagner’s taste for the grandiose, complete with busts of himself. Nietzsche came to know Wagner when the composer was at the height of his creative powers: Die Meistersinger, Siegfried, Götterdämmerung were all products of the Tribschen years. He visited the Wagners, in total, twenty-three times before they left Switzerland; a room was set aside for the young professor, who repaid the honour by bringing toys for the Wagner children and carrying out small commissions for the family – buying Christmas presents, procuring a painting of Wagner’s uncle and helping him proofread his memoirs. At the second Christmas spent with the family, he presented Wagner with a gift of Dürer’s engraving Knight, Death and the Devil, which shows a gallant knight overcoming all obstacles – Wagner in armour.
His gift, however, was overshadowed by Wagner’s gift to his wife. As she woke on Christmas Day, which was also her birthday, she heard music playing: ‘Richard came in with the five children to put the score of his symphonic birthday greeting into my hands. I was in tears, but so was the whole household. Richard had put his whole orchestra on the stairs, and thus consecrated our Tribschen for ever.’ That description, with its lush sentimentality and exhibitionism, might make one’s flesh crawl; but the episode produced the lovely ‘Siegfried Idyll’. Wagner’s bold talk of cultural renewal, indeed of artistic revolution, drew Nietzsche to him. But there was another reason why Nietzsche found Tribschen so alluring: he seems to have been in love, although perhaps subconsciously, with Wagner’s wife.
Cosima Wagner played an extraordinary role in the composer’s life: she was lover, companion, mother, diarist, administrator and co-creator of the Wagner myth. Franz Liszt’s daughter, she had left her husband, Wagner’s friend the composer Hans von Bülow, to live daringly ‘in sin’ with Wagner, bearing him three children and finally marrying him. She was haughty, prejudiced and, particularly when seen side by side with the diminutive composer, exceptionally tall. In the depths of his later madness Nietzsche was to write to her, ‘Ariadne, I love you’, and sign himself ‘Dionysus’. When he was finally taken to the lunatic asylum at Jena, years after his rift with the Wagners, he informed the warders that ‘My wife, Cosima Wagner, brought me here.’ He almost certainly never declared his love to Cosima when sane. Her own attitude to the young man was relentlessly platonic and often rather patronising.
So far from objecting to Nietzsche’s new attachment, Elisabeth luxuriated in it. Nietzsche introduced her into the charmed circle of Tribschen at the end of July 1870. Soon she was acting as babysitter to the Wagner brood, who called her ‘Aunt Elisabeth’. If she resented being treated as a childminder while her brother played official philosopher at Wagner’s court, she didn’t show it; she was too busy absorbing the example Cosima set as the doyenne of a cultural Utopia. Later she described her impressions: ‘The whole of Tribschen, together with its inmates, was a charming idyll; at the head, the ideal couple, then the beautiful children with all their wealth of imagination and resource … and the old angular house which, with its simple garden and grounds, took its place so unpretentiously and naturally in the glorious landscape.’ Her only objection was to the lavish Parisian interior of the house; otherwise, she was hooked. More than thirty years later she wrote:
I can still remember the last evening I spent there; the sun was just setting, but the moon already stood full and bright over the luminous snowfields of Mount Titlis … in front walked Frau Cosima Wagner and my brother – the former dressed in a pink cashmere gown with broad revers of red lace which reached down to the hem of the garment; on her arm there hung a large Tuscan hat trimmed with a crown of pink roses … then followed Wagner and myself – Wagner being attired in a Flemish painter’s costume, consisting of a black velvet coat, black satin knickers, black silk stockings, a light-blue satin cravat tied in a rich bow, with a piece of his fine linen and lace shirt showing below, and a painter’s tam-o’-shanter on his head, which at that time was covered in luxuriant brown hair … Yes, Tribschen was a blessed isle, and whoever has known it, thinks of it with a profound regret.
Nietzsche was overwhelmed by Wagner’s ideas and his music, Elisabeth was as yet more concerned with the colour of his knickers and the shape of his wife’s hat, but for both of them knowing Wagner was the most exhilarating experience of their lives so far.
Nietzsche’s first major work, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), was partly an academic study of Greek drama; but it was also an undisguised paean of praise to Wagner. It was roundly, perhaps rightly, denounced by many scholars; newspapers began to label Nietzsche, Wagner’s ‘literary lackey’. But Wagner, naturally enough, was delighted with the book and claimed to have read ‘nothing more beautiful’. He would read it after breakfast to put him in the right mood. Wagner’s was the sort of constitution that cannot digest without a dose of flattery.
At the beginning of 1871, Nietzsche’s health had hit a new low, with painful haemorrhoids, insomnia, headaches and vomiting. He sent a telegram to his sister, asking her to come to Basle urgently to tend to him. When Franziska said she was unwilling to see her daughter set off in bad weather, Nietzsche was so enraged he vomited with anger and blazed back: ‘I am in no mood for such jokes.’ Elisabeth arrived shortly afterwards; gradually they fell into a pattern: for about half the year Elisabeth would tend her brother and keep house for him (and visit Tribschen), spending the rest of her time in Naumburg, where she helped to found the Naumburg Wagner Society. Nietzsche was content with the new arrangement ‘because of my sister’s cheerful manner, which fits my temperament excellently’. Neither brother nor sister showed any inclination to marry, to Franziska’s consternation: at twenty-five Elisabeth, after all, was nearing the age when women in Naumburg became spinsters for life. Her daughter seems to have worried about it from time to time, but more because of what her brother might think than on her own account: at one point, after she claimed to have rejected three suitors, she wrote to her brother that if she should end up ‘as an old maid … then, my dear Fritz, do not think badly of me and love me also in my old age’.
On Wagner’s behalf Nietzsche wrote an Exhortation to the German People in an (unsuccessful) effort to raise new funds for Wagner’s Festival Hall project at Bayreuth; perhaps it was just as well that it was never published, since it plumbed new depths of sycophantic Wagnerian rhetoric, calling on German citizens to dig deep for the ‘great, brave and indomitable champion of German culture: Richard Wagner’. Long before he finished the great four-opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung, Wagner had conceived of building a grand opera house, on a scale way beyond anything currently on offer, in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth, a place uncontaminated by Jews where pure German culture could flourish unimpeded. There would assemble Germany’s musical elite, and only there could Wagner be properly appreciated. Nietzsche rode in Wagner’s carriage when he laid the foundation stone in 1872.
By now Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for the ‘mole-like’ activity of philology, never very strong, was waning. In 1871 he had applied for the chair of philosophy, where his thoughts increasingly strayed, but was turned down. He needed a claim to fame of his own, and he settled on the idea of a school for scholars, an ideal colony or, as he called it, a ‘cultural sect’ or community where like-minded men could converse on elevated intellectual matters, where ‘we shall love, work and enjoy for each other’. It was Tribschen on a grander, more academic scale. He asked Elisabeth to act as administrator of this fantasy and, flattered, she accepted. The plan was shelved shortly afterwards, on account of Nietzsche’s poor health, but it remained lodged in Elisabeth’s memory.
The first Bayreuth festival was planned for 13 August 1876. Both brother and sister decided to attend the grand opening of Wagner’s crowning achievement. Elisabeth’s enthusiasm for all things Wagnerian had swelled, but Nietzsche’s had begun to wane. In April he had published his fourth Untimely Meditation: Richard Wagner in Bayreuth. It contained much of the old devotion, but by now it was, it seems, beginning to jar with Nietzsche’s true feelings. It is almost impossible to date the moment at which love of Wagner ceased to be the ruling element of his life. In June 1874, he had (perhaps deliberately) left a Brahms score on the piano at Bayreuth, to Wagner’s fury, who found it insulting that anyone should play music other than his own, particularly in Bayreuth. There had been an ugly scene between the two friends. What seems certain is that by the time the festival began Nietzsche had become frustrated with playing second fiddle to Wagner’s entire orchestra. He was also extremely ill. Naturally, with such a grandiose operation, technical hitches marred the first performance. The dragon for Siegfried, constructed in London at fantastic expense, appeared without the neck, which had accidentally been shipped to Beirut. The curtain rose at the wrong moment, and there were so many people packed into the small Bavarian town that the food ran out.
Nietzsche loathed the whole occasion, partly because he was again struck down with shattering headaches, but also, perhaps, because he saw the Wagner dream suddenly thrown into tawdry relief. Wagner strutted about, happily absorbing the flattery that lapped about him. Later Nietzsche wrote: ‘Truly a hair-raising crowd! … Not a single abortion was missing, not even the anti-Semite. – Poor Wagner! To what a pass he had come! – Better for him to have gone among swine! But among Germans!’ Bayreuth showed what Nietzsche would later call Wagner’s ‘histrionic self-deception’; now, his eyes cleared by pain, he saw him clearly. At least, that is what he saw in retrospect. He fled to the Bohemian forest to recuperate in the company of Paul Rée, a talented and cynical psychologist who had attended some of Nietzsche’s lectures in Basle. It did not go unnoticed in Bayreuth that Nietzsche’s new friend was also Jewish.
Where Nietzsche saw Bayreuth as awash with ‘the whole idle riff-raff’ of Europe, Elisabeth saw only vast expanses of social advancement. Later she would claim that, like her brother, she had been disappointed with the festival, attended by ‘philistines and housewives’; in fact she adored it. As the sister of Wagner’s greatest friend, she was allowed to visit Wahnfried, Wagner’s home, where she ‘peeped into the room and saw that at least forty orchestra conductors, young artists and authors, were waiting for an audience with Wagner … in that rapid glance I saw only interesting, artistic heads and fine intellectual faces; the more elderly men in the crowd spoke in gentle undertones, and the younger men listened with becoming reverence. Indeed, a serious, reverent and devout spirit seemed to prevail among the small throng of men waiting to see the Master.’ She was privileged to attend the royal performance of Rheingold; she paid court to the Wagners, and the Wagnerites, including a number of highly presentable young men, paid court to her. One of these was a handsome racist fanatic of thirty-two called Bernhard Förster.
The anti-Semitism and crude nationalism that had helped to drive Nietzsche away from Bayreuth were exactly what had attracted Förster. A Berlin schoolmaster and natural pedagogue, Förster stood on the fringes of Wagner’s circle but over the years he made repeated attempts to gain the Meister’s support for a variety of anti-Semitic ventures. Wagner, to his credit, did his best to ignore him – which may explain Förster’s eagerness to cultivate Elisabeth, as a possible passport to Bayreuth acceptance. He was certainly in no hurry to marry her, but he told her that he had read her brother’s book, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, and had found it enthralling.
Wagner apart, the two had much in common. Förster was also the child of a Protestant pastor; his widowed mother lived in Naumburg and moved in the same circles as Frau Nietzsche. In January, following the Bayreuth festival, the Försters, mother and son, paid a visit to Elisabeth and her mother at home in Naumburg. Again Förster enthused about Nietzsche’s work, and the two talked avidly together about the rebirth of the German spirit and the Jews, whom Förster said were destroying Germany. ‘It was really a feast for me to listen to someone who talks our language’, Elisabeth wrote to her brother. Förster’s language, laced as it was with anti-Semitic bile and Wagnerian pretension, could not have been further removed from Nietzsche’s. Though they both dreamed of the regeneration of German culture, Förster’s approach was racial, while Nietzsche’s was cultural. Nietzsche had already met Förster’s brother Paul, another well-known anti-Semite, and had disliked him thoroughly; he had no wish to make the acquaintance of another Förster, and, indeed, it was almost a decade before the two would meet for the first and only time. In the interim, Förster introduced Elisabeth to a new and exciting set of moral certainties – to an ideology she never lost.
Förster had fought in the Franco-Prussian war in which he had won the Iron Cross, and on his return to Berlin had taken up schoolteaching. But he believed he was destined for better things and thought he had found in Wagner a kindred spirit in the personal war he waged against Jews.
In 1878 Nietzsche wrote the first part of Human, All Too Human. It marked the definitive break with Wagner; indeed it was overtly anti-Wagnerian in tone. The letter which accompanied the copy he sent to Richard Wagner was the last he ever wrote to the man who had once been his inspiration. Why did Nietzsche turn against Wagner? The answer to that question depends at least partly on who is asking it. For some Wagnerians, Nietzsche’s attitude was that of a ‘pint-pot capacity railing peevishly at the impermissible magnitude of quarts’; for the Nietzscheans, the break was evidence of Nietzsche’s disillusionment with Wagner’s pomposity, and proof of the independence of his own ideas. That, certainly, was the impression Nietzsche himself sought to give, and which Elisabeth, while stressing the genius of Wagner, faithfully reproduced in her biographies. Partly it was a growing disillusionment on Nietzsche’s part with what Bayreuth had come to represent: the Reichsdeutsch element in Wagner, his theatrical vanity, his nationalism and crude racial theorising. More specifically, Nietzsche objected to what he saw as the hypocritically Christian tone of Parsifal. But it was an emotional as well as an intellectual parting of the ways; perhaps it was simply that two such tremendous egos could never have survived together in such a restricted cultural space. Neither forgave the other for his deficiencies, real or imagined; but Nietzsche never stopped loving Wagner’s music, while Wagner, until he died, spoke of his former disciple with the peevish tones of an abused parent.
Cosima Wagner did not look far to find an explanation for Nietzsche’s new hostility; she blamed Paul Rée, the Jew, for the insulting tenor of Human, All Too Human: ‘Finally Israel intervened in the form of Dr Rée, very sleek, very cool, at the same time as being wrapped up in Nietzsche and dominated by him, though actually outwitting him – the relationship between Judea and Germany in miniature.’ Elisabeth concurred in Cosima’s assessment, particularly since she was now a thoroughgoing convert to Försterian anti-Semitism: the atheist Rée was responsible for the sickeningly cynical tone of the book. But it was the book’s openly anti-Christian polemic that upset her most, and the fact that its publication might affect her popularity at Bayreuth. She was right: the name Nietzsche was no longer mentioned in Wagnerian circles, and Human, All Too Human was effectively banned. Wagner wrote a damning article in the Bayreuther Blätter, the official organ of the Wagner movement, in which he poured scorn on professors who ‘criticise everything, human and inhuman’. With overarching arrogance he later concluded that the only explanation for Nietzsche’s hostility was that he was mad – a view that is still held among some Wagnerians today. He even took it upon himself to write to Nietzsche’s own doctor, telling him he believed the cause of his erstwhile friend’s illness was excessive masturbation.
The strain of the controversy was certainly telling on Nietzsche’s health, which deteriorated progressively until, in May 1879, he resigned from Basle. Henceforth he lived the life of an intellectual gypsy, wandering through Europe, alternating between moods of blissful ecstasy and deep depression; when in the grip of the former, he was a new Columbus, discovering new worlds of thought; as he slid into the latter, he longed for his own death. Much as she might resent this new opposition to Wagner, Elisabeth did not abandon her brother. She came to Switzerland to collect him and was appalled by his appearance, now so ravaged by pain that she hardly recognised him. That Christmas he nearly died.
While Nietzsche distanced himself from the Wagnerites, Elisabeth’s new friend Bernhard Förster was strenuously attempting to do the opposite. On 8 November 1880, after a prolonged session in a Berlin wine tavern with some like-minded colleagues, Förster had caused a public disturbance by throwing what amounted to an anti-Semitic fit on a horse-drawn tram in Charlotten Strasse at half-past four in the afternoon. Picking out the passengers he thought were Jews, Förster had railed about Jewish impudence in mock Yiddish, cursed the Jewish press and praised his friend, the ex-preacher and well known Jew-baiter Adolph Stöcker. The passengers did not react well; although Förster noticed this, he thought that changing the subject (or just shutting up) might be seen as cowardice. Finally a group of passengers, led by a Jewish businessman, forced him and his friend off the tram and a heated dispute took place on the pavement. The businessman started to take down names with a view to reporting the pair for agitation. ‘But you’re only a Jew’, said Förster’s friend. At which point the businessman punched him in the face, knocking his hat off. A brawl ensued, which ended only with the arrival of a passing policeman. A rather battered Förster was hauled off to the police station. When he gave his particulars, Förster stated that his father was an Aryan, implying that this was more than could be said for his accusers. As far as he was concerned, that was excuse enough for his actions.
News of the incident reached Bayreuth, where Cosima noted in her diary: ‘When we hear that Herr Förster has been maltreated by some Israelites, R. says, “The Germans have never thrashed reviewers, but the Jews thrash Germans.”’ Berlin buzzed with ‘the latest Jewish scandal’. Förster was reprimanded for ‘unfitting and undignified behaviour’, and fined ninety marks. If anything, it intensified his hatred of Jews, and in racist circles his stock rose dramatically. He followed up his notoriety by launching, with some Berlin colleagues who shared his bigotry, an anti-Semitic petition which they planned to present to Bismarck. This demanded that Jewish immigration be suspended, that Jews be barred from the Stock Exchange, that their activities in the press and financial world be restricted and that a census be taken of their numbers.
Germany of the late 1870s and 1880s was fertile ground for the spread of anti-Semitism, and an economic crisis combined with anti-clericalism to provide Förster with a growing audience. While he considered himself an intellectual, Förster was always a lightweight, adhering to each of the fashionable causes that Wagner espoused at one time or another: he opposed inoculation and vivisection, and supported homeopathy, vegetarianism and the sanctity of the soil; many of these ideas would later reappear among the more peculiar tenets of Nazism. He wrote long, rambling discourses on art theory, national education and opera, many of which found their way into the Bayreuther Blätter. But his verbose pronouncements boiled down to one central belief: that the Jews were engaged in a single-minded attempt to destroy German culture through their corrupt capitalist business practices. Echoing Wagner’s anti-Semitic ‘Jews in Music’, he wrote a long and repetitive discourse on ‘Modern Jewry and German Art’, using the engraving by Dürer of Knight, Death and the Devil as a symbol of German art under threat – the picture that Nietzsche had given Wagner. It ended with a call to arms, and a sinister threat to those who refused to co-operate: ‘Either we rid ourselves of these Jews and the honouring of the Golden Calf, or we are lost and deserve to be lost. Anyone who permits the smearing of German culture with vile gold, betrays his Fatherland and becomes a traitor to the most holy German people … as we read in the old law books of the Ostrogoths, whoever betrays the Fatherland was hanged on a bare tree.’ By contrast ‘the true German is a fighter, a brooder and a poet’, who would rather ‘let that most lamentable of all nature’s products, Homo sapiens judeo progrediens communis, die in its own void.’
He made every effort to enlist Wagner’s support for the petition, but the composer was adamant: he wouldn’t sign any petitions, particularly ones containing such ‘ridiculously servile phrases and anxiously expressed concern’. He told Cosima ‘how embarrassing he finds such relationships, when he is obliged to write to untruthful, narrow-minded, phrase-making people who are none the less devotees’. But in Elisabeth Nietzsche, Förster found a partner only too willing to support him. Elisabeth canvassed Naumburg, enthusiastically collecting signatures for the anti-Semitic cause. The petition was finally signed by 267,000 people and ceremoniously carried to the Chancellor’s palace by horse and cart on 13 April 1881. Bismarck studiously ignored it, but Förster was undeterred. He had preceded the presentation of the petition with the foundation of the Deutscher Volksverein, the German People’s Party, in March 1881, a specifically anti-Semitic group which attracted 6,000 people to its first meeting.
And, while Förster’s fame was growing, Nietzsche, the prematurely pensioned philology professor from Basle, sank into peripatetic obscurity. He wandered from spa to mountaintop, from Sorrento to Stresa, Venice, Marienbad, Messina and Genoa, searching for his lost health, burdened and elated by the growing conviction that he carried in his mind the seeds of a revolutionary philosophy. Usually he was alone; sometimes Paul Rée would accompany him, sometimes Peter Gast, a bad composer but a loyal friend from the Basle days. He found some peace in Sils Maria, a tiny town high in the Engadine mountains, where long walks in the clear air invigorated him; the solitude alternately inspired him and drove him to fits of loneliness. Sometimes he would live for days off nothing but dried fruit in his usually unheated room.
He found some solace in Bizet’s opera Carmen, which he heard for the first time in November 1881; it was a good antidote to what he now saw as the grand pomposity of Wagner’s music: ‘I almost think Carmen is the best opera there is.’ The next year in Genoa with Rée, he saw Sarah Bernhardt in La Dame aux Camélias, but the performance ended when she burst a blood vessel on stage: she reminded him of Cosima Wagner. Nietzsche was now thirty-seven and had never experienced a woman’s love.
From time to time he had expressed a wish to marry, using the same tone that one might employ to suggest a change of wallpaper. But the insulting insouciance of his writings surely belied a real need for affection and a fear of women: ‘The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.’ His own emotional immaturity was remarkable. In 1876 he had met Mathilde Trampedach in Geneva, a twenty-three-year-old Dutch beauty of refined tastes. They discussed poetry. Five days after being introduced he proposed, by letter, and was politely but firmly rejected. Perhaps reacting to the overattentive women of his childhood, he saw women as accoutrements, and intelligent women as threatening. He later wrote that ‘man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior’. Women should provide love and housekeeping; and Elisabeth had hitherto been prepared to do both. It was through Paul Rée that he met a woman, intelligent, beautiful, calculating and in absolutely no danger of agreeing to do his housework; and he immediately fell in love with her.
Lou Salomé was the daughter of a Russian general of Huguenot and Baltic German origin. She had left St Petersburg at the age of nineteen with her mother to study in Zurich. When Nietzsche met her in 1882 she was twenty-one, sixteen years his junior, but already far older than her years. Lou was to become one of the most brilliant and stylish women of the nineteenth century. Intellectual and artistic men tended to ask her to marry them within hours of meeting her, and she became adept at turning them down. Finally, many years later, she consented to marry one, Frederick Carl Andreas, a rather peculiar professor of oriental literature, and eventually became Rilke’s mistress. Rée had met her in Rome at the home of Malwida von Meysenbug, a middle-aged woman of emancipated views and large fortune who made it her mission to cultivate artists and writers, in particular independent young women. Rée proposed to her almost immediately, but she declined and suggested instead that they should live together as ‘brother and sister’, with an older man for company; it was a revolutionary idea and, by the morality of the time, totally unacceptable. Rée agreed at once, and suggested that Nietzsche join them. Nietzsche and Lou met in St Peter’s. She recalled that his first words were ‘What stars have sent us orbiting towards each other?’ A few days later, in spite of the obvious deficiencies of this chat-up line, Rée made a marriage proposal to Lou on Nietzsche’s behalf, which was turned down. A little later Nietzsche tried again, this time in person, and got the same response.
The three continued to discuss the idea of a sexless ménage à trois, in which they would live and study together, although neither man had given up hope of winning her over. Lou was later to become a close friend of Sigmund Freud and an important psychologist in her own right; you didn’t need to be Freud to realise that this particular plan, which they called the ‘Holy Trinity’, was likely to end in the devil’s own fracas. The threesome arranged to meet up again later in the year, but before parting they agreed to commission a photograph to commemorate their triple alliance. A Swiss photographer, Jules Bonnet, was chosen for the job and Nietzsche arranged the pose. The resulting picture is hilarious, and a sexual minefield.
Nietzsche and Rée are harnessed to a small cart by lengths of rope. In the cart, kneeling down and brandishing a small whip, is Lou Salomé. Nietzsche appears serene, Rée embarrassed and Lou, well, demonic. On his return to Naumburg, Nietzsche told his family about Lou, whom he described merely as a potential disciple. He was careful not to tell his mother or sister the full extent of his feelings for her, or the details of their plan. Had he done so, Elisabeth would certainly not have agreed to accompany Lou to Bayreuth that summer, where Parsifal was to be performed for the first time. It was planned that the Nietzsche siblings and Lou would all meet in Tautenburg in the Thuringian forests, after the festival. Nietzsche, his hostility now public, was persona non grata at Bayreuth; indeed, when Wagner heard his name mentioned, he stormed out of the room. But Elisabeth was still determined to go, and agreed to accompany the young Russian woman. Although their characters differed in almost every respect, the first encounter between Lou and Elisabeth was friendly enough. By the end of the journey from Leipzig to Bayreuth they were calling each other Du.
Lou was fêted at Bayreuth, much as Elisabeth had been six years earlier. She was introduced to Wagner and Cosima, and the men, young and old, flocked around her. In particular she formed an alliance with Count Paul von Joukowsky, a rich young Russian designer and Wagner’s new favourite; they were seen together constantly and it was even rumoured that the young Count had persuaded Lou to take off her dress so that he could design another around her. It probably wasn’t true, but Lou wouldn’t have cared one way or the other. There was added irony in the flirtatious friendship between the young Count and Lou; Joukowsky had become the disciple that Nietzsche had not, faithful to Wagner until death. Elisabeth was scandalised, and almost certainly extremely jealous of all the attention being lavished on a mere girl. Her anger redoubled when she found that Lou was showing off a grotesque picture of her brother and his Jewish friend tethered to a cart. But she finally exploded when she discovered the immoral plan, confirmed by Malwida von Meysenbug, that Nietzsche planned to live with Lou and Rée in Paris.
When Elisabeth returned to Naumburg and told him what she thought of Lou, Nietzsche was initially angry and embarrassed. He wrote to Lou calling off the Tautenburg rendezvous, and then relented and asked her to come anyway. When Lou and Elisabeth met again in Jena, prior to departing for Tautenburg, a slanging match ensued. Lou responded to Elisabeth’s haughty moralising with ballistic self-defence: ‘Don’t get the idea that I am interested in your brother or in love with him’, she shouted. ‘I could spend a whole night with him in one room without getting excited. It was your brother who first soiled our study plan with the lowest intentions.’
Elisabeth was not used to that sort of talk and seems to have decided, if she had not decided already, that Nietzsche would be better off without this Russian hussy. Nobody contradicted her, and nobody talked about her brother like that. She had not liked the blasphemous tone of her brother’s latest philosophy as it was, and Lou personified it, ‘that rabid egotism which tramples on everything in its way, and that complete indifference to morality’. The month in Tautenburg, intended as relaxation for Nietzsche’s ailing body and mind, was tense in the extreme. Elisabeth was tearful, Lou was strained and distant (taking to her bed at one point) and Nietzsche alternated between asking Lou to leave (which she wouldn’t) and trying to declare his love for her. When the time came to go home Elisabeth stayed behind, molten and unwilling to let their mother see her fury. When Nietzsche explained the situation to Franziska, she took Elisabeth’s side and called her son ‘a disgrace to his father’s grave’. Nietzsche, furious himself, left in high dudgeon.
‘I have the Naumburg virtue against me’, he wrote. That was an understatement. Elisabeth now launched herself into a one-woman campaign of character assassination against Lou Salomé, who she was convinced was trying to ensnare her brother, although exactly the reverse was true. She bombarded Nietzsche’s friends and acquaintances with letters detailing Lou’s crimes. ‘I warn Miss Salomé to watch out’, she screeched. ‘If she should ever dare again to come near Fritz alone with Rée or quite alone without her mother or some other worthy chaperone and ruin poor Fritz’s reputation by her compromising presence – but I will say nothing more …’
She did say more, a lot more, about the ‘low, sensuous, cruel and dirty creature’ that was Lou; she even attempted to have her sent back to Russia as an immoral woman. But by now the trinity was already breaking up under the weight of its own triangular jealousies. The three met again in Leipzig in October; it gradually seems to have dawned on Nietzsche that he was being squeezed out of the arrangement and that Lou was beyond his reach.
Deserted by his best friend and the woman he wanted, and now the object of his sister’s caustic moral hectoring, he fled to Italy. He wrote to Rée and Lou, long reproachful testaments of pain, wounded pride and loneliness: ‘I am a headache-plagued half-lunatic, crazed by too much solitude.’ He even threatened suicide: ‘I have suffered from the disgraceful and anguishing recollections of this past summer as from a kind of madness … Sometimes I think … of driving my solitude and resignation to the ultimate limit and—’ Soon his reproaches turned to anger; he called Lou a ‘dried-up, dirty, evil-smelling monkey with false breasts’. In his philosophical writing too, his misogynistic imagery took on new vehemence: ‘How rudely the bitch sensuality knows how to beg for a piece of spirit, when a piece of flesh is denied her.’ Perhaps remembering the grotesque photograph, he would later write, ‘Are you visiting women? Do not forget your whip!’ Paul Rée, once his closest friend, was now ‘a sneaking, slanderous, mendacious rogue … who dares to speak contemptuously of my intellect, as if I were a lunatic who doesn’t know what he is doing’. He began to take doses of sleeping pills, chloral hydrate, in large quantities: ‘I am being broken as no one else could be on the wheel of my own passions.’
His relationship with a sister he now called ‘morally bloated’ was also in tatters. ‘It is painful’, he said, ‘for me to hear my sister’s voice.’ Although they were eventually reconciled, Nietzsche never forgave Elisabeth for her unwarranted intrusion into his affairs; perhaps rightly, he thought she had, by her interference, destroyed his one opportunity to be loved; that was certainly her intention. ‘For a year now she has cheated me out of my greatest self-conquest’, he wrote, ‘by talking at the wrong time and being silent at the wrong time, so that in the end I am the victim of her merciless desire for vengeance.’ ‘There can be no question of reconciliation with a vengeful anti-Semitic goose’, he wrote in May 1884. It is doubtful whether Elisabeth felt the slightest remorse for her actions; she had, after all, taken what she saw as an irreproachable moral line. Elisabeth thought all moral lines were irreproachable, so long as they were hers. Although she regretted her brother’s animosity, she was increasingly preoccupied with the other man in her life.
Bernhard Förster’s career as an anti-Semitic Siegfried had reached something of an impasse. His new party and ‘The German Seven’, an anti-Semitic group of which he was a member, were attacked in liberal newspapers for what they were: a bunch of rabble-rousing opportunists fuelled by race hatred. Förster had called his anti-Semitic petition ‘A cry for help from the conscience of the German peoples, and later generations will not understand how it could remain unnoticed by the leaders of the state’. But ignored it was, if not unnoticed. Förster’s racist activities, and in particular his active agitation among his own pupils, had led to another series of inquiries, forcing Förster to resign his teaching post at the end of 1882. One paper put it pithily: ‘The ferocity with which he waged war with one portion of society rendered it impossible for him to be any longer entrusted with the education of another.’
Elisabeth had grown closer to Förster, whom she had seen again at the Bayreuth festival; unlike her irascible brother, here was a man of action and one whose views coincided with her own. She wrote: ‘He is filled with magnificent enthusiasm for Wagner’s efforts to regenerate our country. We feast on compassion, heroic self-denial, Christianity, vegetarianism, Aryanism, southern colonies …’ The latter craze, Förster’s latest, came directly, as usual, from Wagner’s most unedifying writing. In Religion and Art, published in 1880, Wagner railed against the emancipation of the Jews in 1871, and repeated his belief that the miscegenation of noble and ignoble races was destroying the best human traits. Only by retaining the purity of the Teutonic race could one bring about ‘a real rebirth of racial feeling’. Moreover, ‘the degeneration of the human race has come about through its departure from its natural [that is, vegetarian] food’ – this from the man who had once excoriated Nietzsche for a brief dalliance with vegetarianism. His solution was a simple one: ‘What is to prevent our carrying out a rationally conducted migration of these peoples to those quarters of the globe whose enormous fertility is sufficient to maintain the entire present population of the earth, as is claimed for the South American peninsula itself?’ Colonising South America would have the added advantage of preventing ‘the English traders’ from getting their hands on any new colonies. Förster leaped at the idea; here was an opportunity both to prove his Wagnerian mettle and to escape the pernicious influence of the Jews. He was also unemployed. ‘The national anti-Semitic movement began with the petition’, he wrote, ‘and it moves ever onwards.’ This wasn’t quite true; although Förster and his like represented the first bloom of an anti-Semitic plague, the day when racial hatred could galvanise a nation was still some way off; Förster enjoyed some table-thumping support among beery and disgruntled racists in the countryside, but in metropolitan political circles he was not taken very seriously.
Colonisation fever had gripped Germany, itself caught in the depths of economic depression; colonial societies mushroomed, catering to thousands of disillusioned and often poverty-stricken would-be emigrants. By the early 1880s several hundred thousand Germans had taken ship for South America, usually destined for Brazil and Argentina. Förster adopted Wagner’s ill-considered notion and elaborated on it. Not only would he found a colony in South America, but he would create a new Fatherland, the mirror image of the old Germany which had become a ‘stepfatherland’ through the evil effects of Jewry. The colony would be the nucleus of an entire empire in South America. He found enthusiastic supporters in E. Kürbitz, a banker in Naumburg, and Max Schubert, a factory owner from Chemnitz, both of whom shared his opinions. While Wagner may have thought of the idea, he clearly had not envisaged Förster as the man to carry it out, but the Bayreuther Blätter and its editor Freiherr Hans Paul von Wolzogen espoused Förster’s judenreine cause with a will. Förster chose Paraguay for a number of reasons: a spectacularly bloody war had left the country depopulated, and the immigration office of the Paraguayan government under Colonel Morgenstern de Wisner seemed ready to grant land on highly advantageous terms; several Germans had travelled to the country already and written enthusiastically about its merits, and a successful German colony had been established at San Bernadino, just outside Asunción. Moreover, just as Germany was waking up to the possibility of overseas empire, the areas of possible colonisation were drying up, particularly for what Förster had in mind. North America, he felt, was inimical to propagating true Germanness, and Russia was ‘already being systematically destroyed by Jews and nihilists’. Paraguay was just about the only place left.
Förster left Germany in January 1883 to find a suitable site, but before embarking he made sure his plans were well publicised. News of the project even reached England, where The Times called Förster ‘the most representative Jew-baiter in all Germany’ and described his departure as ‘the comedy of the modern Pilgrim Fathers’:
Herr Doctor Förster, one of the ring-leaders of the anti-Semitic agitation in Germany, shook the dust of an unappreciative country off his feet and, with a small but devoted band of adherents, left Berlin … to embark for Paraguay, where they will found a new Germany unpolluted by any of the descendants of Abraham … He is a man, like too many of his countrymen, of one idea, and that idea is Germany for the Germans, and not for the Jews. Finding that idea unrealistic in his native country, he, with a few devoted men like himself [in fact Förster travelled alone], has sailed to a far country, there to found a new Deutschland, where synagogues shall be forbidden, and Bourses unknown.
Förster read the article and wrote to a friend: ‘let them make fun of me, I know what I want’.
For all his bravado Förster, like most racists, was an insecure man. Where Nietzsche had, however briefly, embraced Wagner for the grandeur of his vision and the power of his music, Förster seems to have cottoned on to Bayreuth as a salve for his own inadequacies; there was a place for everyone in Bayreuth, thugs and bullies as well as philosophers and aesthetes. His writings had not sold well and Förster blamed the Jews; not only were they corrupting German art and morals, they were dominating the publishing, journalistic and educational professions as part of their malign conspiracy. They were out to get him. On little pieces of paper, in his elaborate curled handwriting, he would jot down the percentages of Jews at Berlin University: ‘Law 60%, Medicine 100%, [etc.].’ With Elisabeth he shared a profound Lutheran faith. Förster had found his life’s work where Martin Luther had written ‘Know, Christian, that next to the devil thou hast no enemy more cruel, more venomous and violent than a true Jew’; but Förster went further, reaching the original conclusion that Christ could not be a Jew because he was the son of God. Ipso facto, God was a gentile.
Förster seems to have been as emotionally immature as he was politically unsophisticated; he had confided to Elisabeth that he did not think he would be able to love again because his heart had been broken by a seven-year affair with a woman who had deceived him. But Elisabeth was not the sort of woman to allow a mere technicality to stand in her way, and anyway it was probably just an excuse. In Förster, Elisabeth thought she had found her White Knight. His ideas were fashionable and daringly simple, and she understood them in a way she never understood her brother’s philosophy, now or later. ‘I find Fritz’s views more and more unsympathetic’, she wrote to her mother. ‘Do you understand now why I wish Fritz shared Förster’s views? Förster has ideals that will make men better and happier if they are promoted and carried out. I laugh at the uproar he causes among stupid people.’ But Elisabeth equated love with control, and to an extent her emotions were at the mercy of her vaulting ambition. Cosima Wagner was more than a role model for Elisabeth, she was a symbol of what German womanhood could achieve, since she had found her man of genius and helped him to his destiny. Elisabeth believed she too had found such a man – ‘some day Förster will be praised as one of the best Germans and a benefactor of his people’, she said, rightly as it turned out. She genuinely admired Förster’s ideas, but perhaps she sensed his weakness as well; Elisabeth could dominate Förster as she had never dominated her brother.
Just before he left Hamburg at the beginning of 1883, Förster received a telegram which read: ‘Greetings from Wagner. Congratulations on your “Dreams”. Have a good trip.’ Wagner was referring to Förster’s latest turgid emission, a pamphlet called Dreams of Parsifal. It was the first and only time that the Meister had positively acknowledged his most ardent disciple. Förster was delighted, but he would have been considerably less pleased if he had heard the Wagners discussing his emigration project over breakfast a few days later: ‘We hear’, reported Cosima, wrongly, ‘that numerous people are going, that parents are entrusting their sons to him. This alarms R. greatly since he has no great confidence in it.’ Richard Wagner was probably the only person alive who could have dissuaded Förster from his Paraguayan plan, but four days later he was dead.
Förster got the news when he arrived in Asunción for the first time, and wrote to a fellow devotee: ‘What a thunderbolt it is to hear that Wagner has gone to Nirvana … but it is a consolation that we lived through the greatest and most productive part of his sumptuous career … much as I search, I can find no greater man and none to whom I owe more; my hard work here is dedicated to the service of his ideas.’ Five thousand miles away Nietzsche was both moved and relieved by the news that the man he had once loved and later so bitterly opposed was dead. It had been hard, he said, for six years to be the enemy of ‘the man one most reveres’.
He took to his bed for several days and then wrote to Cosima: ‘I regard you today, even from far away, as I have always regarded you – as the woman my heart most honours.’
That year Nietzsche wrote the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the bleakly brilliant summation of his apocalyptic philosophy. For the first time Nietzsche introduced the Superman, a figure of the future who could survive the end of morality and recreate himself by overcoming Ressentiment, a concept intended to inspire but one which would develop sinister overtones in the wrong hands. With the completion of Zarathustra, Nietzsche believed he had brought the German languge to perfection and created at the same time a philosophy that could alter the world: ‘My son Zarathustra may have betrayed to you what is going on within me; and if I achieve all I desire to achieve I shall die in the knowledge that future millennia will take their highest vows in my name.’ But the world wasn’t listening. More than that, it seemed to be studiously ignoring him.
Elisabeth, temporarily reconciled with her brother, was initially enthusiastic about the book – she may even have the dubious honour of being the first person thoroughly to misconstrue the notion of the Superman. She promised to send a copy to Förster, whom she thought had taken the first step towards Superman status. But the conciliatory tone was short-lived. Nietzsche was still upset by Elisabeth’s part in the Lou affair, and a week spent with his mother and sister in September led to bitter arguments. Elisabeth wrote to Förster, ‘My brother’s goal is not my goal, his entire philosophy goes against my grain …’ In that she was entirely accurate, for the source of their disagreements was now less her disapproval of his philosophy than his contempt for hers, as evidenced by her new alliance with Förster. Nietzsche never sought to disguise the fact that he considered Förster intellectually and politically reprehensible. His feelings were partly emotional, since he would have made life difficult for any prospective suitor for his sister, but his objections were primarily ideological.
In the 1887 edition of The Gay Science, Nietzsche wrote a description of the type of man he most despised. It was, and perhaps was even intended to be, an accurate character portrait of Bernhard Förster:
Here is a man who has turned out a failure, a man who possesses too little spirit to be able to enjoy it and just enough culture to realise that fact; bored, weary, a self-despiser … such a one as is fundamentally ashamed of his existence – perhaps he harbours a couple of little vices as well – and on the other hand cannot help over-indulging himself and exacerbating his vanity worse and worse with books to which he has no right or more intelligent company than he can digest: such a man poisoned through and through … falls finally into an habitual condition of revengefulness, of the will to revenge.
Specifically it was Förster’s nationalist trumpeting and crude anti-Semitism that appalled Nietzsche and, by association, threatened his own reputation. ‘This accursed anti-Semitism’, he wrote, ‘is the cause of a radical breach between me and my sister.’ He believed Förster’s vegetarianism would make him gloomy and depressed, in contrast to the British taste for roast beef which had made them such effective colonists, and as for Förster’s notions of Aryan purity, they were nonsense. ‘To enthusiasm for the “German national character” I have indeed attained very little’, he declared, ‘but even less to the wish to keep this “glorious” race pure. On the contrary, on the contrary…’; and finally snobbery made the idea of living on the same level as twenty peasant families distinctly unappealing. Even Franziska Nietzsche, desperate as she was to see her daughter married off, had serious reservations about this bearded agitator and his wild schemes.
Elisabeth, however, was determined. She wrote regularly to Förster as he wandered Paraguay (usually alone) in the two years he took to find a site for his colony. She told him that pioneers would flock to his standard, that he should build himself a large house and that the project was a certain success. She even sent him money to engage a servant, since she worried that he should have to look after himself. Under that kind of pressure a man as weak as Förster was putty. He decided he was in love with Elisabeth and told her he would return to Germany and marry her. Then they would voyage to Paraguay together, the joint leaders of a glorious colonial mission. Elisabeth was delighted, although she worried about her brother and his failing health: ‘Is it right to leave my brother? Is it not my duty to remain here and take care of him?’
Förster returned to Germany in March 1885 and married Elisabeth in Naumburg on 22 May, Wagner’s birthday, a date which might have been calculated to annoy Nietzsche. The day, wrote Förster, ‘shall bind the hearts of two people who are inextricably entwined not only by nature but also by the shared spirit of Richard Wagner’. Nietzsche refused to give her away or even to attend the ceremony, and went for a picnic on the Lido instead. But he did send a gift, one which Elisabeth had specifically requested; it was, of course, the engraving of Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil. Of all Dürer’s great works, it is perhaps the most powerful, yet in the circumstances it seems grotesque; no doubt the couple saw themselves as the brave Aryan and Christian knight, death and the devil as Jewish intrigue. Nietzsche said gloomily, and probably untruthfully, that he hoped their marriage would be happier than the picture. Later that month he wrote to his mother: ‘From my own point of view it is impossible to have closer contact with such an agitator. He seems to have the same feeling.’
Elisabeth and Förster toured the country, lecturing about Paraguay to Wagnerian societies, in beer halls and colonial clubs, recruiting Aryan disciples for their colony and riding what Nietzsche called ‘two horses, anti-Semitism and Paraguay.’ The response was less ecstatic than they had hoped, but gradually they assembled a corps of pioneers: the poverty-stricken, the racist and the merely gullible. Together the couple produced Förster’s book, German Colonisation in the Upper La Plata. Nietzsche was almost certainly galled that a mere travel book should attract more attention than his own works; he thought that putting Förster’s picture in the front was an act of supreme vanity and told Elisabeth so. The philosopher steadfastly refused to join in his sister’s project, despite her entreaties, and he provided numerous reasons: the climate was alien, he said, and there were no large libraries, he might be seasick, and he was anyway unwell. In fact the climate was murderous, there were no libraries and he was more ill than he knew, but Nietzsche seems to have been trying to tone down his objections to a project he now couldn’t prevent. He even agreed to a meeting with his new brother-in-law. They met for the first and last time in Naumburg on Nietzsche’s forty-first birthday. Elisabeth later recalled that they talked about sex, and how great men have no need of physical solace. ‘My husband’, recalled Elisabeth, ‘told how [Heinrich Freiherr von] Stein had complained to him of feeling so lonely among the young men of the great city, who really knew no other problem but the sexual problem, and paraded their disgusting, overheated sensuality as a state of healthy. My brother spoke of similar complaints he had heard from Stein … “Perhaps we are alike,” said my brother, “at any rate we are masters of our senses, and know more important problems than that of sex.’” This was male bonding of a sort, I suppose, although rather tactless given Förster’s newly married status. After the meeting Nietzsche was moderately forgiving about his new relative. There was something noble in his character, he said, he was a man of action if impetuous, sincere if misguided. Privately he wondered whether his sister and brother-in-law were the stuff colonists are made of.
Elisabeth and Förster and their band of Aryan pioneers boarded the steamer Uruguay at Hamburg on 15 February 1886. Förster made a short speech: ‘I am in the company of a small number of friends and companions whom others will shortly follow’, then the steamer pulled out of the harbour. The couple had sent Nietzsche a ring as a parting gift, inscribed with the injunction ‘Think lovingly of B and E’. His attitude to Elisabeth was still ambivalent, and about Förster he thought anything but lovingly. He was glad Förster had gone, he said, and hoped every other anti-Semitic agitator in the country would do likewise. But the departure of his sister affected him deeply for, though she irritated him beyond words, she had always loved him, as no other woman had. ‘How lonely your Fritz now feels’, he wrote to her, ‘for I have lost all my friends in the last few years without exception … he is living in a remoter, stranger, more unapproachable land than all the Paraguays could be.’ And in another letter he told a friend: ‘I have lost my sister … not through real death but by an irreversible separation. She has gone to South America with her husband to found a colony. There is every prospect that it will succeed, but the more it prospers, the less chance there is that she will return. But then, the opinions of my brother-in-law, by which he is prepared to live and die, are far more alien to me than Paraguay.’ In a last letter before her departure he pleaded with Elisabeth not to desert him: ‘I would give everything I possess if it would help to bring you back.’
See notes on Chapter V: Knights And Devils