Friedrich Nietzsche

Nietzsche was the son of a Lutheran pastor in Saxony, lost his father at five and grew up in a household of women: grandmother, mother, sister and aunts. Rigorously trained in classics at Schulpforta, he studied philology at Bonn and Leipzig and at twenty-four, without a doctorate, was appointed professor at Basel; philologists thought him a genius. In Leipzig he read Schopenhauer and met Wagner, becoming a regular at the Wagner household. The Birth of Tragedy in 1872 explained Greek tragedy through the opposition of Apollo and Dionysus and hailed Wagner's opera as its rebirth; the philologists broke with him for it.

His health, damaged during service in the Franco-Prussian War, kept deteriorating: violent headaches, vomiting, failing eyesight. In 1879 he had to resign his chair and on a small pension moved between cheap lodgings in Switzerland, Italy and southern France, summers at Sils-Maria, winters at Nice or Genoa. He broke with Wagner in 1876; Human, All Too Human in 1878 turned to cool psychological analysis; The Gay Science in 1882 announced that God is dead. That same year Lou Salomé refused his proposal, his sister intrigued against them, and he sank into his deepest isolation.

Between 1883 and 1885 he wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a philosophical poem in the voice of a prophet, preaching the Übermensch, the will to power and eternal recurrence; only forty copies of the fourth part were printed. Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality then dismantled morality by genealogy: 'good and evil' is a slave morality invented by the resentment of the weak against the strong to overturn the noble values of 'good and bad'. In Turin in 1888 he wrote The Case of Wagner, Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist and Ecce Homo at astonishing speed, in a tone growing ever more manic.

On 3 January 1889 he saw a horse being whipped in a Turin street, threw his arms around its neck weeping, and collapsed. For eleven years he was insane, cared for first by his mother and then by his sister Elisabeth, an antisemite who doctored his manuscripts, fabricated the book The Will to Power and packaged him as a prophet of what became Nazism. By his death in 1900 his fame had begun. His influence is everywhere: Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Camus, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Freud, Thomas Mann, Rilke and nearly every writer of the twentieth century. He had predicted it himself: 'I am not a man, I am dynamite.'