Nietzsche opposed antisemitism; his sister's edits tied him to the Nazis anyway
After Friedrich Nietzsche's death, his sister Elisabeth controlled his manuscripts and reshaped them to suit her ultranationalist views, contradicting his explicit rejection of antisemitism and nationalism. Her editions welded his name to fascism. It took scholars such as Walter Kaufmann decades to pry them apart.
Nietzsche was born on 15 October 1844 in Röcken, near Leipzig, on the Prussian king's 49th birthday, and was named in the monarch's honour; he later dropped his middle name, Wilhelm. His father, a Lutheran pastor, died of a brain disease in 1849 when Friedrich was four, and his younger brother died six months later. The family moved to Naumburg to live with his grandmother and two aunts. At school he excelled, notably in Christian theology.
His academic start was dazzling. Trained as a classical philologist, he was made professor at the University of Basel in 1869, aged just 24. Chronic illness forced him to resign in 1879, and he spent the following decade as an independent writer, often lonely and short of money, drifting among Swiss, Italian and southern French towns in the hope that the weather would ease his symptoms. Most of his central work was written in those years.
His writing mixes poetry, cultural criticism and essays, with a taste for aphorism and irony. He argued for perspectivism against the idea of objective truth, traced the genealogy of Christian morality through his theory of master and slave morality, and asked how to affirm life once religion weakened, the problem behind his line that God is dead. He contrasted the Apollonian and the Dionysian, described the self as competing drives summed up as will to power, and later developed the Übermensch, the revaluation of values and eternal return. Greek tragedy, Schopenhauer, Emerson and Wagner all fed his thinking.
In 1889, at 44, he suffered a neurological collapse that left him paralysed and with vascular dementia; his mother and then his sister cared for him until his death on 25 August 1900. Once corrected editions appeared, his reputation revived in the 1960s, and he shaped existentialism, postmodernism and post-structuralism, as well as art, music and literature.
Source: Friedrich Nietzsche
