ze ubermustache
Or, a brief portrait of Friedrich Nietzsche and my personal grudge against him.
Hello, friends!
First, apologies for the late newsletter. I just turned in copy edits for Our Rotten Hearts yesterday evening, and for the past three weeks I have used every moment of my free time fixing improperly hyphenated compound nouns and researching professional historian questions like “how much did a copy of the London Times cost on November 8, 1834?” or “invention of the starter pistol?” or “when was corn?”
All this to say, the book has been copy edited and is now in the hands of my talented production team, and I get to take a wee rest before I have to think about it again. Which means we’re back on the dirtbag circuit, baby!
This week, it’s time for a quick sketch of a dirtbag I’ve known for a while, because my brain is exhausted and I wanted a real gimme to get back on schedule:
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Weirdo Philosopher Whose Unhinged Edgelord Nonsense Was Rivaled Only By The Wingspan Of His Tremendous Mustache
Brief note for context: my first exposure to this whackadoo was my freshman writing seminar as an undergrad, which included on the syllabus Orwell’s 1984, the complete works of Nietzsche, and nothing else. We would all gather as a class in the dorm lounge the day before papers were due and ask each other questions like “do you understand a single goddamn word of this” and “what the actual fuck.” It was a much more difficult and expensive alternative to psychedelic drugs, but I think the ultimate effect was the same.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in 1844 near Leipzig in—wait for it—Prussia. Yes, the country I have heretofore refused to learn about because it functions like an automatic hard-reset button for my brain. If all Prussians were like Nietzsche, I was clearly right to keep my distance.
Nietzsche’s childhood was unequivocally a shit time for all involved. His father died in agony of a brain disease when Nietzsche was two, and his younger brother died not long after that. Nietzsche moved with his mother and sister to live with his grandmother, who—surprise, surprise—died a few years later.
He got accepted into a fancy-pants private school when he was about 10, apparently by virtue of a “gee, we’re sorry everyone you love has dropped dead” scholarship. He got passionately interested in poetry and music, though he was profoundly bad at both. A contemporary composer described one of the pieces Nietzsche wrote as “the most undelightful and the most anti-musical draft on musical paper that I have faced in a long time,” which, ouch.
He also got very into Wagner at this point, which is never a good sign. Do not get very into Wagner. No one who got very into Wagner ever ended up having a nice life.
Schopenhauer? I Hardly Know ‘Er!
After private school, Nietzsche went to college at the University of Bonn, where he thought about studying to be a priest. This is yet another example of the dirtbaggiest person you’ve ever heard of narrowly escaping the priesthood. It didn’t stick, though, probably because it’s tough to believe in a benevolent god when every person you look at drops dead. Instead of religion, he got very into the edgiest philosophers he could find, which at the time was a man with absolutely insane hair named Arthur Schopenhauer.
The modern equivalent of “getting into Schopenhauer” is, I think, forcing everyone in your college dorm to listen to your impromptu lecture on NFTs. Nothing means anything, God is a lie, invest in non-fungible tokens and pay with Bitcoin because the whole world is going to collapse, oooooh, so edgy.
Nietzsche tried to make friends and enjoy himself at Bonn, but it doesn’t seem that he was very good at it. The famous anecdote from this period is that his friends took him to a brothel one night, where he had a panic attack and played the brothel’s piano all night while his friends had sex. It’s also rumored he contracted syphilis during this excursion, about which more later.
In 1869, when Nietzsche was 24, he was named a professor at the University of Basel in Switzerland, even though he didn’t have his PhD or even a teaching certificate. One assumes the reasoning was, where else are you going to put this weirdo but the philosophy department. In between classes, he fought briefly in the Franco-Prussian War, which again I don’t know anything about and will not learn. Apparently he injured himself getting on a horse incorrectly. This is the one instance where I find Nietzsche relatable.
He returned from war to write his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, in 1872. This book ruined my life as an 18-year-old. It is the most infuriatingly obtuse thing I’ve ever read. It’s been 14 years and to this day if I see the word “Dionysian” I’m liable to start punching people. Fuck all the way off, Nietzsche. You could have summed up that book in one sentence and it’s “people should follow rules sometimes but like don’t be crazy about it, and also I have a crush on Wagner.”
Fortunately, literally nobody gave a fuck about this book when it was first released. It was panned by the critics, and the only person who spoke up in favor of it was Wagner, who by this point was a close personal friend of Nietzsche. When the only person who doesn’t hate you is Richard Wagner, you done fucked up.
Do You Want To Form An Alliance With Me?
Nietzsche published a few more essays that nobody read, including a book of aphorisms that was apparently so annoying that Wagner broke off their friendship after reading it. By 1879, Nietzsche’s health had declined to the point that he could no longer teach at Basel. So he retired at the ripe old age of 34 to wander around Europe looking for nice weather and think philosophical thoughts about good and evil. I wish this was still a career option. I’m 32 and just about ready to enter my Philosopher Era, if anyone has a European chalet I can move into for the purpose.
So far, this is all standard edgy philosopher nonsense. But then we reach the year 1882, and things go batshit as fuck.
It all started going downhill when Nietzsche met a woman named Lou Andreas-Salomé. She was 21 years old and honestly a queen of making Big Choices. Lou arrived in Rome and met up with a guy named Paul Rée, one of Nietzsche’s friends, who fell in love with her immediately. What happened next? Well, I’ll tell you, using the magic of imagined dialogue:
Paul Rée: Lou, I am passionately in love with you.
Lou Andreas-Salomé: that’s very nice.
Paul: so… you wanna fuck?
Lou: counter-proposal… do you want to form a platonic academic throuple with one of your friends and live in a run-down monastery that’s for sure haunted?
Paul: what
Lou: I just think it would be fun platonically traveling Europe with two horny male companions whose job is professionally overthinking things. we can talk about philosophy with the ghost priests.
Paul: like… philosophy as an innuendo for…?
Lou: no. like literally philosophy. I will never fuck you. is it spooky commune time or what?
Paul: so what I’m hearing is, I have a chance. let me call my friend Nietzsche.
Nietzsche, leaping out of the bushes where he has been eavesdropping all this time: say less bro I’m in
Sure enough, Nietzsche, Rée, and Salomé formed a sexually frustrated throuple, and it went exactly as well as you’d think. Both Nietzsche and Rée were stupid in love with Salomé, who didn’t love either of them but sort of strung them both along for…polyamorous academic reasons?
They traveled around Italy and Switzerland looking for an abandoned monastery they could use to set up their academic sex-cult-not-a-sex-cult. During this period, Nietzsche proposed marriage to Salomé I think like three or four times. She said no. He didn’t take the hint.
I don’t know. None of this adds up to me either.
Saloméybe Not So Much
This went on for several months, until Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth found out that her older brother had swan-dived off the deep end. She—reasonably—asked him to knock it off, and may have written to Salomé’s parents to let them know that strange things were afoot at the Circle K incel academic cult. At that point, even Salomé herself started getting weirded out and politely removed herself from the narrative, retreating to Poland with Rée.
How did Nietzsche respond, you ask? He declared his sister his mortal enemy, ran away to the Italian Riviera, and started doing catastrophic amounts of opium while writing increasingly horny letters to Salomé, to no avail.
His philosophy got angrier and angrier, with lots of fist-shaking at the very concept of God, morality, and society. The famous thesis of his books at this time was “God is dead,” to which I simply say:
Europe was not a fan, and his books were received begrudgingly, like “I don’t want to read his philosophy either but are you going to tell him to stop?” At this point, Nietzsche was cranking out a book a year, retreating from all his friends, writing himself prescriptions for opium and signing them “Dr. Nietzsche,” even though he never did get his doctorate and certainly not in medicine.
The books published during this period have…let’s say a trajectory. If you believe the theory that Nietzsche was gradually succumbing to syphilis, you can really see the tipping point, and it’s exactly halfway through the book Beyond Good and Evil. It starts out “hmm this is weird” and then ends up “what on EARTH is going on in the House of Commons.”
Interestingly, while Nietzsche was getting more “old man yells at cloud” by the day, it did not go the way I usually expect it to go with old German men! In fact, Nietzsche broke with his publisher because he thought the press was too willing to publish antisemitic books. Just a fun lil fact for you.
Get In, Losers, We’re Assassinating the Pope
Things were devolving more and more by the year until 1888, when Nietzsche had a full-fledged mental breakdown. As I mentioned, the general consensus is that his deteriorating mental state was due to tertiary syphilis, though some question this because of his overall aversion to sex throughout his adulthood. Whatever the cause, Nietzsche was walking through Turin one day when he saw a cart driver whipping a horse. Something in this broke Nietzsche, and he fainted. When he awoke, he started writing letters describing how he was going to shoot the German Kaiser and storm the Vatican to arrest the Pope.
One of these letters made its way to Nietzsche’s friends, who presumably read it, made significant eye contact, and said “ooooh not great.” They went and collected him in Italy and brought him to a sanatorium in Basel, where he escalated his threats to “having all antisemites shot dead.” (Not that I condone this, but suck it, Hitler. The inventor of the übermensch would have shot you on sight.)
Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth returned to take care of him for the last few years of his life, until he suffered a series of strokes and passed away in 1900. Elizabeth took charge of his literary estate and published his final few works posthumously, although she added a little antisemitic spice of her own to those manuscripts because she was—sidebar—a shitheel who had spent a decade in Paraguay trying to establish an Aryan colony with her garbage racist husband.
This is probably why the Nazis liked him so much. It certainly wasn’t because of The Birth of Tragedy, which literally no one should read.
Anyway, that’s all for this week, friends! Thanks for indulging me in this trip down memory lane to my freshman year of college. Next time I’ll have fully recovered from copy edits and will be prepared to learn something new for the good of Dirtbag Nation.
Until then, be well, and do not befriend Richard Wagner, I don’t know how many times I have to say this,
-Allison
He is the only author I have read whose prose sounds as if he is shouting in your face the whole time you read him.
I would like to fight your freshman writing seminar professor in hand-to-hand combat. Also what I wouldn't GIVE for a "Salome's incel cult at the monastery" BBC miniseries from the early 00's with dubious anachronisms!!