Friedrich Nietzsche

Born Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche on October 15, 1844, in Röcken, a small village in the Prussian province of Saxony, he was the son of Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, a Lutheran pastor who had received his appointment through the personal patronage of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. His father died in 1849, Nietzsche was not yet five, likely of a brain ailment, and the boy grew up in a household of five women: his mother Franziska, his younger sister Elisabeth, his maternal grandmother, and two aunts. In 1858 he entered Schulpforta, Germany's most prestigious Protestant boarding school, where he received a rigorous classical education. His brilliance was such that in 1869, at just twenty-four, the University of Basel appointed him professor of classical philology, the youngest ever to hold such a chair, and Leipzig awarded him a doctorate without examination or dissertation. Plagued by debilitating migraines, near-blindness, and stomach ailments, he resigned from Basel in 1879 and spent the next decade as a stateless wanderer, drifting between cheap boarding houses in Switzerland, Italy, and the French Riviera, producing in feverish isolation the works that would reshape Western thought: The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). On January 3, 1889, in Turin, he collapsed in a piazza after reportedly embracing a horse being flogged by its driver. He never recovered his sanity, spending his final eleven years in the care of his mother and then his sister Elisabeth, who edited and distorted his unpublished writings to serve her own nationalist and antisemitic ideology, views Nietzsche had explicitly despised. He died on August 25, 1900, in Weimar.