Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in Röcken, a small village in the Prussian province of Saxony. His father, a Lutheran pastor, died in 1849, and Nietzsche was raised in Naumburg by his mother and female relatives. He showed early aptitude in philology and music, and at the age of twenty-four was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, an unusually young appointment for the position.

His first major publication, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), examined ancient Greek culture and drew on his friendship with the composer Richard Wagner, from whom he later distanced himself. During the 1870s he produced a series of essays collected as Untimely Meditations. In 1879, persistent health problems, including severe headaches and vision difficulties, forced him to resign his professorship. He spent the following decade living modestly in Switzerland, Italy, and France, writing without an academic post.

His subsequent books, written between 1878 and 1888, include Human, All Too Human (1878), The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (published in parts between 1883 and 1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), On the Genealogy of Morality (1887), Twilight of the Idols, The Case of Wagner, and The Antichrist (all 1888). These works examined topics including the foundations of moral values, the nature of power, the problem of nihilism, and the history of Western philosophy and religion.

In January 1889, Nietzsche suffered a mental collapse in Turin. He was hospitalized in Basel and later in Jena, and spent the remaining eleven years of his life in a state of mental incapacity, cared for first by his mother and then by his sister Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche. He died on 25 August 1900 in Weimar.

After his death, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche controlled and edited his unpublished notes and correspondence, a circumstance that later scholars identified as distorting the reception of his work. His writings became widely read in the twentieth century across philosophy, literature, and the social sciences.