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 of Beyond 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 Educator gives 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;

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 are philologica by 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 the Literarisches Zentralblatt (Zarncke). The establishment of a classical

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. 518 v later writings (18889) 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.

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, the Daybreak, 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

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 my Zarathustra, 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 Evil and Genealogy of Morality). To me, personally, the middle books are the most congenial, Daybreak and The Gay Science (they are the most personal).

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 Overbeck Turin, 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 for press, I announce to to

you with a feeling for which I have no words.10 There will be four books; they will appear singly. This time as an old artilleryman I bring out my heavy guns; I am 10 Reference to The Anti-Christ. 520 v later writings (18889) four letters (18889) 521 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 from Human, 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 decisive moments 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 the Reich, 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 highest problem of humanity and is calling for a decision as to human destiny, the general pettiness and obtuseness must become all the more sharply distinct from it. There

is no hostility to me whatever people are simply deaf to anything I say; consequently there is neither a for nor an against . . . To Jacob Burckhardt On 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 old world, 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 to Human, All Too Human in AC 55. 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 all publicly 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 great feuilletonist of the

grande monde.15 Naturally I am in close contact with the Figaro, 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 of God. 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 paper Le Figaro).

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 opera La gran via when he heard it in midDecember 1888. 21 Italian: Are we happy? I am God, I made this caricature. 522 v later writings (18889) four letters (18889) 523 The rest is 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

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).