Nietzsche in Turin

The End of the Future

Lesley Chamberlain

• Publisher: Pushkin Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781911590477
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

Reissue of the vividly lyrical biography of Nietzsche that John Banville called 'a major intellectual event'

In 1888, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche moved to Turin. This would be the year in which he wrote three of his greatest works: Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo; it would also be his last year of writing. He suffered a debilitating nervous breakdown in the first days of the following year.

In this probing, elegant biography of that pivotal year, Lesley Chamberlain undoes popular clichés and misconceptions about Nietzsche by offering a deeply complex approach to his character and work. Focusing as much on Nietzsche's daily habits, anxieties and insecurities as on the development of his philosophy, Nietzsche in Turin offers a uniquely lively portrait of the great thinker, and of the furiously productive days that preceded his decline.

ONE

Forty-three Years behind Me and Just as Alone as When a Child…

Nietzsche’s friend the composer Henrich Köselitz gave him the idea of Turin in the springtime. Nietzsche, who suffered from headaches, never knew quite where he wanted to live, only that he should avoid extreme sunlight, heat and cold. Summers he spent in the Swiss Alps, winters on the French Riviera. In April and May he knew of nowhere that particularly suited him. Köselitz thought the Piedmontese capital at the foot of the Alps an ideal station between seaside resort and high mountain. Others praised its mild, dry air, its grand regular perspectives and the long stone-covered porticoes which would allow sheltered walks in the open air. From Nice where he had spent the winter Nietzsche made up his mind at the last minute. He wrote a flurry of letters saying he would move on to Turin by train on Monday, 2 April.

It was a matter of less than a day’s transit, across what had only recently ceased being one country, the kingdom of Savoy. But true to Nietzsche’s neurotic fears, everything went wrong on the journey along the north Mediterranean coast, and inland via Alessandria and Asti. He lost his luggage, got into the wrong train at his one connection point in Savona, then felt so ill at the ensuing complications he had to rent a room in Sampierdarena, just outside Genoa, for two unscheduled nights. He made an unplanned visit then to the old centre of Genoa before finally proceeding to Turin on Thursday, 5 April.

In Savona he probably misread a platform sign, or the destination on the side of a train. He spoke only a few words of Italian and was three-quarters blind without his spectacles. He put himself and his hand luggage in the Genoa train, instead of the one bound for Turin. Hurt by his own incompetence he turned his rage on the Sampierdarena locals, accusing them of exploiting him with high prices he could neither afford nor avoid. The result was an immobilizing migraine attack. This, he told another old friend, Franz Overbeck, was his worst journey ever.

‘Apparently just a little trip, it was perhaps the most unfortunate I have [ever] made. A deep weakness overcame me on the way, so that I did everything wrong and stupidly… I ought not to risk travelling alone any more.’1 What was important here, for a philosopher who was going to make himself understood, was that he didn’t lack the gift of self-dramatization.

The drama continued when he arrived in Turin, tired and for the first few days in his new rented accommodation unable to sleep. Also the weather disappointed him. It was dull and raining and the temperature fluctuated uncomfortably. ‘Not even old yet! Just a philosopher, just someone on the fringe of things, compromisingly only on the fringe of things!’ he groaned. He was a terrible hypochondriac – within a week he was feeling almost normal.2

On the other hand what he had just rehearsed were the two experiences of pain which structured his inner life and by which he gave himself, Friedrich Nietzsche, shunned German writer, loveless professor, a profound meaning. The first was a melodrama of loneliness, compounded by a sense of himself as a genius and a prophet unheard. The second was the tragic cycle of sickness and recovery which would make Turin his last conscious home. He did feel shaken. He was living in a strange place, surrounded by strangers speaking a foreign tongue. Memories crowded in from the past.

Loneliness was his destiny after he retired from Basel University in 1879. He was only thirty-four. He cited sickness and lack of sufficient time to pursue his own work as reasons for inviting solitude. He had that Machtgefühl, a sense of what he must do with his talents and powers. Without severing himself from a demanding institution he probably wouldn’t have written the majority of the books – all those after Human, All Too Human – which made his mark in history. But he was also wretchedly ill, and therefore most vulnerable, when he took up the itinerant writing life. He had to be prepared to suffer.

To strike out alone was at least a way of life symbolically suited to his intellectual calling as a cosmopolitan Renaissance thinker. We might take a mental snapshot of him now, as a brilliant wanderer in search of passing princely patronage, somehow strayed into the modern world. As much as he was influenced by the tragic Greeks, Nietzsche, thanks to the renowned Swiss scholar Burckhardt, also loved Italian Renaissance culture. Jacob Burckhardt spoke of the quattrocento humanists living off ‘the abundance of neutral intellectual pleasure which is independent of local circumstances’. Nietzsche heard him with enormous pleasure in Basel and ever after loved and venerated a man who could see the intellectual joy in not belonging.3

Ubi bene, ibi patria. Before Turin, in almost ten years of wandering, Nietzsche had lived in Sorrento, Genoa, Venice, the Swiss Alps, Zurich and Nice. Becoming a Wanderer, talking to his Shadow, gave him common experience with exiles from Diogenes to Dante. What glory it was to be homeless and how it deepened his sense of being European! His unique, powerful attacks on Western tradition he framed sitting in small boarding-houses in fashionable European resorts and cities. Like Nietzsche’s life they are truncated, fragmentary and portable. Intellectually, except for their language, they easily cross borders. In that sense the wandering life made him.

But he was lonely and isolated and socially impotent. How can we take such pleasure in his plight? He turned on the Sampierdarena locals because he had a headache, because he was panicking over his inability to organize his life and because he was also desperately hard up. The books earned him nothing. Only the previous year he had paid for The Genealogy of Morals to be published and he had to borrow where he could. He depended on a small pension from Basel, the kindness of friends and the company of strangers. All these things, lack of money, isolation, lack of friends encouraged a sense of self-consciousness and powerlessness in Nietzsche’s inner world.

The pressures had all worsened too by 1888. His sister Elisabeth for seven years before her marriage had often acted as his housekeeper and travelling companion. Since she emigrated to Paraguay with her husband in 1886 Nietzsche had been doubly alone. His friendships depended on correspondence and he belonged to no institutions. As a writer he had no public to speak of. Indeed he felt positively hated or at least ignored by the German public – the standard way, he said, in which the Germans showed dislike, for it happened to Schopenhauer too. He could retreat into his imagination, and books, but to the sense of being outcast there was only one real counterweight: his memory of friendship with Richard and Cosima Wagner in the early Basel years. Nietzsche was never happier as a German, an artist and a man than when in their stimulating company. The memory of this great artistic and personal intimacy kept resurfacing through 1888. It lived on despite Wagner’s death in 1883, the great psychological and geographical distance and the passing of the years. To be sure, Nietzsche remembered the Tribschen – Bayreuth era as a time when he struggled to define his intellectual character against Wagner. Still the Wagners, their music, their personalities, their passionate relationship inspired him, because through all those means they brought him to experience love. That best felt life he kept rehearing in Wagner’s music, which he would play to himself wherever he found a piano.

In a similar, lesser vein of subconscious remembrance, Nietzsche also worked continually on a piece of music which had been with him through most of his compositional life, as a hymn to friendship, and to the joyful acceptance of life despite pain. Halfway through the career of what would finally be the Hymn to Life, Nietzsche’s greatest female love, Lou Andreas Salomé, provided the words. The words then of his musical work-in-hand dated from 1882. It was the case, contributing to the growing apocalyptic atmosphere of 1888, that now he could only live on memories.

He was never one to conceal or deny his loneliness. He had relished the sociable life with the Wagners and the celebrity his precocious brilliance as a classical scholar won him in Leipzig and, initially, in Basel. But he grew up, grew into his more difficult self, found his course. His conscience over religion, over art, over Bismarck’s Imperial Germany compelled him to dissociate himself from Wagner and what seemed like Christian nationalist humbug. In fact he had always shown originality and waywardness in his writings. The Birth of Tragedy, dedicated to Wagner and eccentrically combining his love of the Greeks with his hopes for German music, alienated the staid academic world even when it was published in 1872. Gradually his disruptiveness became more widely known and resented. He hardly helped his position by writing an essay on the mediocrity and servility of German universities. Then illness stepped in and cut him off still further. After Wagner died and Elisabeth became engaged and the unfulfilled love affair with Lou Salomé collapsed, three disasters which all happened in the years 1882–3, Overbeck feared for his friend’s well-being in such an emotional desert, when he was not yet forty.

Nietzsche himself felt it. In the autumn of 1887 he had tried to revive a relationship with Erwin Rohde, his closest friend as a student, with whom he had once shared his passion for the Greek world and Wagner. The letter ended with the pathetic words I have inscribed over this chapter: ‘I have now forty-three years behind me and I am just as alone as I was when a child.’ Yet the general tone of this letter was hectoring and uninviting. Nietzsche didn’t necessarily want friends. He had to get on.4

As for the drama of ill-health, it never left him after he reached his mid-twenties. Even in childhood he had suffered headaches and myopia, and the weakness seemed to run in the family since it also afflicted Elisabeth, and their father Carl Ludwig, who had died at thirty-six of a brain disease. Nietzsche gave out never to know quite what was wrong with himself, though he suspected a hereditary problem and congratulated himself on surviving beyond his father’s age. Yet how can he not have known he had syphilis, with a scar close to his foreskin and a history, albeit brief, of treatment? He surely lied to Wagner’s doctor, Otto Eiser. The syphilis caught from prostitutes in his student days was complicated by diphtheria and dysentery contracted as a medical orderly in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War. Nietzsche was left with a delicate stomach and poor digestion and a recurring migraine, with constant vomiting and retching maximizing the pain in his head and the disruption to work. For days he could do nothing but lie in a dark room, as now at Sampierdarena.

In Sampierdarena though, there is a double drama to examine: not only what happened to poor lonely sickly Professor Nietzsche who got into the wrong train, but how the whole experience became translated into ideas on the page. The combined pressures of sickness, penury and obscurity go part way to explain the frequency of such terms as power (Macht) and strength (Kraft), sickness (Krankheit), rottenness (Verdorbenheit, Verderbnis) and decay (décadence, Dekadenz) in his writing. But we come closest to Nietzsche in seeing how he transforms pain.

Sampierdarena one day signified illness and weakness and poverty; but the next day, which Nietzsche spent against his original intentions revisiting Genoa, brought a complete revaluation of his position. He felt better, his mind was working again, and it threw up quite a different set of ideas: love, pleasure, nobility, gratitude, personal fate, will, courage and cure. He had in ordinary terms something Wagner noticed about him: the power to bounce back; the physical and spiritual capacity to be an Übermensch. No one was better qualified to ‘overcome himself’. This I think is the physiological and psychological explanation of why revaluation lay at the heart of the intellectual project which dominated his maturity. He constantly discussed it in 1888 as the ‘transvaluation of all values’, Die Umwertung aller Werte. The very idea of transformation invited his best capacities and the qualities in himself he most cherished.

Genoa is a spectacular Ligurian port built into the steep hillside, with a warren of dark narrow alleys animated by the rituals of Italian life and made startlingly beautiful by churches and palaces from rich past ages of sea-trading. Christopher Columbus was born there, and has come to symbolize Genoa’s mystery, its mingling of peoples because of the proximity of the ocean, and its adventurous mercantile heart. Nietzsche absorbed the symbolism of Columbus, but for the rest was not a great external observer. Everywhere he went the inner life overwhelmingly concerned him. This or that place simply provided a backdrop. Thus Genoa, when he returned, principally evoked memories of the winter of 1880 – 81 when in a cold garret he wrote Daybreak, and souvenirs of the next visit when he conceived parts of The Science of Joy. His room had been on the top floor, in a row of houses descending steeply down the cobbled hillside, and very close to the Opera House. He recalled, retreading those high-sided narrow streets and steep alleys, ‘this hard and gloomy town’ and ‘a winter of incredible wretchedness, cut off from doctors, friends and relations’. He certainly had been hard and gloomy in Genoa, despite hearing there his beloved Carmen for the first time.

For half a day in April 1888 he was completely absorbed in that painful, still cherishable past. These were amongst the first words he wrote from Turin to Köselitz:

In Genoa I was so full of memories I went about like a shadow. What I used to love there, five or six chosen spots, pleased me even more this time; it seemed to me to be of an incomparable pale nobility, and far above anything the Riviera has to offer. I thank fate that in the years of décadence it sentenced me to this hard and gloomy town; every time you go out of it you go out of yourself too – the will extends itself again and one no longer has the courage to be cowardly. I was never so grateful as during that hermit’s existence in Genoa.5

These are enigmatic words but let me try to make sense of them. In letters from the winter of Daybreak he described himself as wanting death but feeling exuberance. The impulse to write that book, the first wholly new work since leaving Basel, emanated from a unique combination of misery and high spirits. ‘My spirit matured for the first time in those fearful days.’

That inner disposition he remembered now. The more extreme his pain, the greater his creative élan. He welcomed the scourge of illness which made romantic idealism and religious faith impossible. These were ‘sick’, ‘decadent’ cultural phenomena for him. The logic was, why should he want further to weaken his life? It was illness, therefore, which would give him his philosopher’s insights and set him on his unique course. He would oppose all forms of cultural debility.

Daybreak shows this happening. Nietzsche began to think from a beyond which was equally close to death and to absurd gaiety. He vomited questions. What did men need to live? What help was philosophy? For instance, was it helpful to believe certain things were good and others evil? Was there a happiness available to the mind no longer able to believe in God? He posed these questions with a devilish self-confidence which cannot be adequately translated from the German word Bosheit, a word which has a range of meanings from naughty to malicious and sits ominously alongside the related word böse, meaning evil. He was to be a thorn in everyone’s side, a naughty boy among the philosophers, a malicious dissident and apparent Antichrist amongst the men of the cloth.

Vomiting questions, Nietzsche sought remedies. Notorious for his amateur pharmacology, and his diets, he made himself physically strong in the face of essential weakness, and that was exactly what he did in philosophy too, with his fondness for Feuerbach and Schopenhauer. Ludwig Feuerbach, who declared the next life promised by Christianity a waste of the energy of the human spirit when this life alone demanded so much, and spoke of man’s need to take the divine back into himself, was a tonic to Nietzsche’s whole generation. They suffered from the inheritance of Idealism which Nietzsche believed drained the individual’s capacity to flourish. Arthur Schopenhauer though left a deeper and more problematic mark on the young men of the 1860s. He suggested life was essentially brutal and morality an illusion. Only art was available to compensate the clear-sighted soul forced into Buddhist-like retreat. Wagner took the view that reading Schopenhauer sapped Nietzsche’s spirits, and he was probably right, because Nietzsche by the time of Genoa had turned violently against this pessimism – this ‘courage to be cowardly’. He formulated what he called his ‘pessimism of strength’ in defiance. Still he remained a complex man who knew more pain than joy, and his ‘pessimism of strength’ is best understood as a tribute to the fine balance between the triumph and the collapse of the human spirit. His contribution to Schopenhauer was to assert that the perpetual illusoriness of the world was not a sufficient cause for despair.

That apparent paradox, therefore, about no longer having the courage to be cowardly, is explicable in terms of Nietzsche’s refutation of Schopenhauer. Self-overcoming was literally a ‘going over’, an übergehen, a way of gaining a high vantage over that human fallibility which demands an answer to eternal questions and a release from pain. After Sampierdarena Nietzsche spoke to Köselitz in just those terms, of his ‘going out of himself’ and no longer fighting an inner moral battle (because that in itself was debilitating). The letter was written in a kind of code, in which Genoa’s pale nobility stood for Nietzsche’s own sickly pallor after his collapse in transit. He set his pain outside himself, he admired it for what it was, and he moved on. It...