NIETZSCHE, FRIEDRICH WILHELM goo), German philosopher, born Oct. 15, 1844 at Rocken near Lutzen, in the Prussian province of Saxony, came of a family of clergy men. Both his father and his grandfather were Protestant pastors, while his paternal grandmother and his mother, nee Oehler, were also pastors' daughters. They were honourable, pious people, cheerful and happy, with a social life embellished by poetry and music; while their official standing secured them from the petty cares of existence. Nietzsche's forbears also enjoyed singular bodily vigour, which they retained in all its freshness to old age. Nietzsche's father, who died prematurely from a fall down a flight of steps, was an exception. In his joy over the birth of a son, this father inserted in the Church register of ROcken at Friedrich's christening the question from Luke i., 66, "what manner of child shall this be?" Wagner and Schopenhauer.—The boy was educated at Naumburg and at the famous old Fiirstenschule of Pforta, which he left with an excellent leaving certificate (with only one "unsat isfactory," in mathematics). In the autumn (1864) he was en tered at the University of Bonn, as a student of theology and classical philology. As, however, he found at Bonn an exception ally gifted teacher of classical philology in Ritschl, he soon, to the great grief of his family, abandoned theology and devoted himself exclusively to philological studies. In fact, the undergraduate Nietzsche severed himself not only from theology but from Christianity; the determining influence in this change was his reading of Schopenhauer, whose great work, The World as Will and Idea, had fallen into his hands by accident.
His enthusiasm for Schopenhauer and for music—an art which Nietzsche loved and practised throughout his life—brought him into touch with Richard Wagner, who was then living at Trieb schen on the Lake of Lucerne. Nietzsche, as a young student of 25, had, on Ritschl's recommendation, been appointed professor at Basel; and close personal intercourse with Wagner followed. The two men agreed in their judgment of their own time, and in their appreciation of antiquity; Nietzsche combined Wagner's views and his own researches on Greek artistic achievement in Die Geburt der Tragodie (187o-71). But the book was severely
condemned by the official German school, under the leadership of Ulrich v. Wilamowitz, and Nietzsche as a classical scholar was outlawed.
He clung all the more closely to Wagner, at whose side he waged war against German lack of culture. The four Unzeitgemassen Betrachtungen, devoted to this struggle, were intended to restore Germany, whose development Nietzsche felt had been jeopardized by the victories of 1864, '66 and '70, to intellectual pursuits. These four polemical works (1873-76) are entitled David Strauss, der Bekenner und Schriftsteller; V om Nutzen und Nachteil der His torie fur das Leben; Schopenhauer als Erzieher; and Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.
In working on the last of these, Nietzsche began to be conscious of reservations both on the cultural value of Wagner's creations, and on his personality; during the Bayreuth Festival, these reser vations led to estrangement and ultimately to passionate re nunciation. (See Der Fall Wagner, Nietzsche contra Wagner, 1888.) Nietzsche held that 'Wagner's art was nothing more than the dope required by a decadent generation, and the whitewashing of Schopenhauer's pessimism. In both his models, Schopenhauer and Wagner, he began to discern tendencies towards Christian and Buddhistic negation, and therefore, though with much pain, broke loose from them. The first expression of this emancipation is found in illenschliches all-zu Menschliches (2 vols. 1878), in which Nietzsche enters on his essentially negative critical period. In 1879, probably owing to the pain caused by his violent separa tion from his friends and masters, Nietzsche's health became so bad that he had to resign his professorship at Basle. Thence forward, he lived chiefly in northern Italy, the Engadine, or the French Riviera, on the small pension granted him by the uni versity of Basle.