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26. Four Letters (18889)

Four Letters (18889) in Nietzsche Reader, p. 517-523.

To Georg Brandes Turin (Italy),poste restante,

April 10, 1888

But, verehrter Herr,1 what a surprise! Where did you find the courage to consider

speaking

in public about a vir obscurissimus! 2 . . . Do you perhaps believe that I am known

in my own dear country? I am treated there as if I were something way-out and absurd,

something that one need not for the time being take seriously . . . Obviously you sense

that I do not take my compatriots seriously either: and how could I today, now that

German Geist3 has become a contradictio in adjecto!4 I am most grateful to you for the

photograph. Unfortunately nothing of the kind is to be had from my side: the last

pictures I had are in the possession of my married sister in South America.

I enclose a small curriculum vitae, the first I have written.

As regards the chronology of the particular books, you will find it on the back flyleaf

ofBeyond Good and Evil. Perhaps you no longer have that page.

The Birth of Tragedy was written between the summer of 1870 and the winter of

1871 (finished in Lugano, where I was living with Field Marshal Moltkes family).

The Untimely Meditations, between 1872 and summer, 1875 (there should have been

thirteen of these; my health fortunately said No!).

What you say about Schopenhauer as Educatorgives me pleasure. This little essay serves

me as a signal of recognition: the man to whom it says nothing personal will probably

not be further interested in me. It contains the basic scheme according to which

I have so far lived; it is a rigorous promise.

Human, All Too Human with its two continuations, summer, 187679.Daybreak,

1880. The Gay Science, January, 1882.Zarathustra, 188385 (each part in about ten

days). Perfect state of a man inspired. All parts conceived on strenuous marches;

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absolute certainty, as if every thought were being called out to me. At the same time

as the writing, the greatest physical elasticity and fullness ).

Beyond Good and Evil, summer, 1885, in the Oberengadin and the following winter

in Nice.

The Genealogy resolved on, written down, and the clean copy sent to the Leipzig

printer between July 10 and 30, 1887. (Of course there arephilologicaby me too. But

that does not concern either of us anymore.)

I am at the moment giving Turin a trial; I mean to stay here until June 5, and then

go to the Engadin. Weather so far hard and bad as in winter. But the city superbly

quiet and flattering to my instincts. The loveliest sidewalks in the world.

Greetings from your grateful and devoted Nietzsche

A wretched pity that I do not understand either Danish or Swedish.

Curriculum vitae. I was born on October 15, 1844, on the battlefield of Ltzen.

The first name I heard was that of Gustav Adolf. My forebears were Polish aristocrats

(Nizky); it seems that the type has been well preserved, despite three German mothers.

5 Abroad, I am usually taken for a Pole; even this last winter the aliens register

in Nice had me inscribed comme Polonais.6 I have been told that my head and features

appear in paintings by Matejko.7 My grandmother was associated with the Goethe

Schiller

circle in Weimar; her brother became Herders successor as superintendent-general of

the churches in the duchy of Weimar. I had the good fortune to be a pupil at the

distinguished Schulpforta, which produced so many men of note (Klopstock, Fichte,

Schlegel, Ranke, and so on, and so on) in German literature. We had teachers who

would have done honor to any University (or have done so). I was a student at Bonn,

and later in Leipzig; In his old age, Ritschl, in those days the foremost classical scholar

in Germany, picked me out almost from the start. At the age of twenty-two I was

contributing to theLiterarisches Zentralblatt(Zarncke). The establishment of a classical

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society at Leipzig, which exists to this day, was my doing. In the winter of 186869

the University of Basel offered me a professorship; I did not even have my doctorate.

Subsequently the University of Leipzig gave me the doctorate, in a very honorable

fashion, without any examination, without even a dissertation. From Easter, 1869, until

1879 I was at Basel; I had to give up my German citizenship, because as an officer

(mounted artillery) I would have been drafted too frequently and disturbed in my

academic duties. Nevertheless, I am versed in the use of two weapons: saber and

cannon and, perhaps, one other . . . At Basel everything went very well, in spite of

my youth; it happened, especially with examinations for doctorate, that the examinee

was older than the examiner. It was my great good fortune that friendly relations

developed between Jakob Burckhardt and myself, a very unusual thing for this very

hermetic and aloof thinker. An even greater good fortune that, from the beginning

of my life at Basel, I became indescribably intimate with Richard and Cosima Wager,

who were then living on the estate at Tribschen near Lucerne, as on an island cut off

from all their earlier associations. For several years we shared all our great and small

5 That is, three generations of maternal forebears: great-grandmother, grandmother, and

mother.

Nietzsches Polish ancestry has since been disproved.

6 French: as a Pole.

7 Jan Matejko (183893), Polands leading nineteenth-century artist, noted for his

monumental

historical pictures. It was Nietzsches friend Resa von Schirnhofer who saw the likeness.

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four letters (18889) 519

experiences there was limitless confidence between us. (In Wagners Collected

Writings, volume 7, you will find an epistle from him to me, written when the Birth

of Tragedy appeared). Through this relationship I met a wide circle of interesting men

(and man-esses) actually almost everyone sprouting between Paris and Petersburg.

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Around 1876 my health grew worse. I spent a winter in Sorrento then, with my old

friend Baroness Meysenbug (Memoirs of an Idealist) and the congenial

Dr. Re. My health did not improve. There were extremely painful and obstinate

headaches which exhausted all my strength. They increased over long years, to reach

a climax at which pain was habitual, so that any given year contained for me two

hundred days of pain. The malaise must have had an entirely local cause there was

no neuropathological basis for it at all. I have never had any symptoms of mental

disturbance

not even fever, no fainting. My pulse was as slow as that of the first Napoleon

(= 60). My specialty was to endure the extremity of pain, cru, vert,8 with complete

lucidity for two or three days in succession, with continuous vomiting of mucus. Rumors

have gone around that I am in a madhouse (have even died there). Nothing could be

further from the truth. During this terrible period my mind even attained maturity:

as testimony, theDaybreak, which I wrote in 1881 during a winter of unbelievable

misery in Genoa, far from doctors, friends, and relatives. The book is, for me, a kind

of dynamometer I wrote it when my strength and health were at a minimum.

From 1882 on, very slowly to be sure, my health was in the ascendant again: the crisis

was passed (my father died very young, at exactly the age at which I myself was

nearest to death). Even today I have to be extremely cautious; a few climatic and

meteorological

conditions are indispensable. It is not by choice it is by necessity that

I spend the summers in the Oberengadin, the winters on the Riviera . . . Recently

my sickness has done me the greatest service: it has liberated me, it has restored to

me the courage to be myself . . . Also I am, by instinct, a courageous animal, even a

military one. The long resistance has exasperated my pride a little. Am I a philosopher?

What does that matter!

To Karl Knortz9 Sils Maria, Oberengadin,

June 21, 1888

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Hochgeehrter Herr:

The arrival of two works of your pen, for which I am grateful to you, seems to vouch

for your having in the meantime received my writings. The task of giving you some

picture of myself, as a thinker, or as a writer and poet, seems to me extraordinarily

difficult. The first major attempt of this kind was made last winter by the excellent

Dane Dr. Georg Brandes, who will be known to you as a literary historian. He gave,

at the University of Copenhagen, a longish course of lectures about me, entitled The

German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the success of which, as I have been informed

from there, must have been brilliant. He imparted to an audience of three hundred

persons a lively interest in the audacity of the questions which I have posed and, as

8 French: raw, green.

9 Karl Knortz (18411918), American journalist who was planning an essay on

Nietzsche, and

went on to publish four pamphlets on him, in German, between 1898 and 1913.

he says himself, he has made my name a topic of conversation throughout the north.

In other respects, I have a more hidden circle of listeners and readers, to which also

a few Frenchmen, like M. Taine, belong. It is my inmost conviction that these problems

of mine this whole position of an Immoralist is still far too premature for

the present day, still far too unprepared. The thought of advertising myself is utterly

alien to me personally; I have not lifted a finger with that end in view.

Of myZarathustra, I tend to think that it is the profoundest work in the German

tongue, also the most perfect in its language. But for others to feel this will require

whole generations to catch up with the inner experiences from which that work could

arise. I would almost like to advise you to begin with the latest works, which are the

most far-reaching and important ones (Beyond Good and Eviland Genealogy of

Morality). To me, personally, the middle books are the most congenial,Daybreakand

The Gay Science (they are the most personal).

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The Untimely Meditations, youthful writings in a certain sense, deserve the closest

attention for my development. In Vlker,Zeiten und Menschen, by Karl Hillebrand, there

are a few very good essays on the first Untimely Meditations. The piece against Strauss

raised a great storm; the piece on Schopenhauer, which I especially recommend that

you read, shows how an energetic and instinctively affirmative mind can accept the

most salutory impulses even from a pessimist. With Richard Wagner and Frau Cosima

Wagner, I enjoyed for several years, which are among the most valuable in my life, a

relationship of deep confidence and inmost concord. If I am now one of the opponents

of the Wagnerite movement, there are, needless to say, no mean motives behind

this. In Wagners Collected Works, volume nine (if I remember rightly) there is a letter

to me which testifies to our relationship.

My pretension is that my books are of the first rank by virtue of their wealth of

psychological experience, their fearlessness in face of the greatest dangers, and their

sublime candor. I fear no comparison as far as the art of presentation in them and

their claims to artistry are concerned. A love of long duration binds me to the German

language a secret intimacy, a deep reverence. Reason enough for reading hardly any

books written in this language today.

I am, dear sir, yours truly, Professor Dr. Nietzsche

To Franz OverbeckTurin, October 18, 1888

Dear friend:

Yesterday, with your letter in my hand, I took my usual afternoon walk outside Turin.

The clearest October light everywhere: the glorious avenue of trees, which led me

for about an hour along beside the Po, still hardly touched by autumn. I am now the

most grateful man in the world autumnally minded in every good sense of the word;

it is my great harvest time. Everything comes to me easily, everything succeeds, although

it is unlikely that anyone has ever had such great things on his hands. That the first

book of the transvaluation of all values is finished, ready forpress, I announce to to

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you with a feeling for which I have no words.10 There will befourbooks; they will

appear singly. This time as an old artilleryman I bring out my heavy guns; I am

10 Reference to The Anti-Christ.

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afraid that I am shooting the history of mankind into two halves. With that work

which I gave you an inkling of in my last letter, we shall soon be ready; it has, in

order to save as much as possible of my now invaluable time, been printed with excellent

precision.11 Your quotation fromHuman, All Too Human came just at the right

time to be included.12 This work amounts to a hundred declarations of war, with distant

thunder in the mountains; in the foreground, much jollity, of my relative sort13 . . .

This work makes it amazingly easy for anyone to gauge my degree of heterodoxy,

which really leaves nothing at all intact. I attack the Germans along the whole front

you will have no complaints to make about ambiguity. This irresponsible race,

which has all the great misfortunes of culture on its conscience and at all decisivemoments

in history, was thinking of something else (the Reformation at the time of the

Renaissance; Kantian philosophy just when a scientific mode of thought had been

reached by England and France; wars of liberation when Napoleon appeared, the

only man hitherto strong enough to make Europe into a political and economic unity),

is thinking today of theReich, this recrudescence of the world of the petty kingdoms

and of culture atomism, at a moment when the great question of value is being asked

for the first time. There was never a more important moment in history but who

knows a thing about it? The disproportion here is altogether necessary; at a time when

an undreamed-of loftiness and freedom of intellectual passion is laying hold of the

highestproblem of humanity and is calling for a decision as to human destiny, the general

pettiness and obtuseness mustbecome all the more sharply distinct from it. There

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is no hostility to me whatever people are simply deaf to anything I say; consequently

there is neither afornor an against. . .

To Jacob BurckhardtOn January 6, 1889

[Postmarked Turin, January 5, 1889]

Dear Professor:

Actually I would much rather be a Basel professor than God; but I have not ventured

to carry my private egoism so far as to omit creating the world on his account. You

see, one must make sacrifices, however and wherever one may be living. Yet I have

kept a small student room for myself, which is situated opposite the Palazzo Carignano

(in which I was born as Vittorio Emanuele)14 and which moreover allows me to hear

from its desk the splendid music below me in the Galleria Subalpina. I pay twentyfive

francs, with service, make my own tea, and do my own shopping, suffer from

torn boots, and thank heaven every moment for the oldworld, for which human beings

have not been simple and quiet enough. Since I am condemned to entertain the next

eternity with bad jokes, I have a writing business here which really leaves nothing to

11 Reference to Twilight of the Idols.

12 Another reference to The Anti-Christ: Nietzsche had added a reference toHuman, All

Too

Human inAC55.

13 Nietzsches note: With the immense tension of this period, a duel with Wagner was

for

me a perfect relaxation; also it was necessary, now that I am entering the lists in open

warfare,

to prove once and for allpublicly that I have my hand free . . . The last expression

indicates

that he is sparring for a fight.

14 Vittorio Emanuele II (182078), king of Italy.

be desired very nice and not in the least strenuous. The post office is five paces

away; I post my letters there myself, to play the part of the greatfeuilletonistof the

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grande monde.15 Naturally I am in close contact with theFigaro, and so that you may

have some idea of how harmless I can be, listen to my first two bad jokes:

Do not take the Prado case seriously. I am Prado, I am also Prados father, I venture

to say that I am also Lesseps.16 . . . I wanted to give my Parisians, whom I love,

a new idea that of a decent criminal. I am also Chambige also a decent criminal.

Second joke. I greet the immortals. M. Daudet is one of the quarante.17

Astu18

The unpleasant thing, and one that nags my modesty, is that at root every name in

history is I; also as regards the children I have brought into the world, it is a case of

my considering with some distrust whether all of those who enter the Kingdom of

God do not also come out ofGod. This autumn, as lightly clad as possible, I twice

attended my funeral, first as Count Robilant (no, he is my son, insofar as I am Carlo

Alberto, my nature below), but I was Antonelli myself.19 Dear professor, you should

see this construction; since I have no experience of the things I create, you may be

as critical as you wish; I shall be grateful, without promising I shall make any use of

it. We artists are unteachable. Today I saw an operetta Moorish, of genius20 and

on this occasion have observed to my pleasure that Moscow nowadays and Rome also

are grandiose matters. Look, for landscape too my talent is not denied. Think it over,

we shall have a pleasant, pleasant talk together, Turin is not far, we have no very

serious professional duties, a glass of Veltliner could be come by. Informal dress the

rule of propriety.

With fond love Your Nietzsche

I go everywhere in my student overcoat; slap someone or other on the shoulder

and say: Siamo contenti? Son dio, ho fatto questa caricatura21 . . .

Tomorrow my son Umberto is coming with the charming Margherita whom I receive,

however, here too in my shirt sleeves.

15 French: writer of features on high society (e.g. for the Parisian paperLe Figaro).

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16 Prado and Chambige were criminals whose trials had recently been in the news;

Ferdinand de Lesseps (180594) was the French engineer responsible for building the

Suez

Canal (185969) and starting to build the Panama Canal (1879).

17 French: forty. Alphonse Daudet (184097), French novelist, whose most recent work

was

LImmortel(The Immortal, 1888).

18 Greek: city. Also a punning allusion to the hero of Daudets LImmortel, Lonard

Astier.

19 Politician Count Robilant (182688) had recently died; he was reputed to be the

illegitimate

son of Carlo Alberto, king of Sardinia (17981849), whose legitimate son was Vittorio

Emanuele II (see note 14 above). Nietzsches apartment in Turin overlooked the Piazza

Carlo

Alberto, in which the infamous incident with the carthorse took place. Alessandro

Antonelli

(17981888) architect of the Mole Antonelliana, Turins highest point and most striking

feature

had also recently died.

20 Nietzsche had developed a taste for French operetta by the later 1880s, and had been

bowled over by the Spanish zarzuela operaLa gran via when he heard it in mid-

December

1888.

21 Italian: Are we happy? I am God, I made this caricature.

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The restis for Frau Cosima . . . Ariadne22 . . . From time to time we practice magic

. . .

I have had Caiaphas put in chains;23 I too was crucified at great length last year by

the German doctors. Wilhelm Bismarck and all anti-Semites done away with.24

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You can make any use of this letter which does not make the people of Basel think

less highly of me.

22 Both refer to Wagners widow Cosima (18371930), to whom Nietzsche (in the guise

of

Dionysus) wrote on January 3, 1889 as Princess Ariadne, my beloved.

23 Caiaphas was the Jerusalem high priest who found Jesus guilty of blasphemy and sent

him

to Pilate for sentencing (Matthew 26: 57ff.; John 18: 13ff.).

24 That is, the German emperor Wilhelm II (18591941) and Chancellor Otto von

Bismarck (181598).