That which does not kill me only makes me stronger.
The man behind this famous cliché is none other than Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher and influential thinker from the late 19th century. No other philosopher (OK, except Karl Marx) has been more mishandled, misappropriated, misquoted, misconstrued, and misunderstood. One need look no further than Adolf Hitler or Otto (played brilliantly by Kevin Kline) in the film A Fish Called Wanda to see these misses.
But Nietzsche was a human being, literally a man without a country (he gave up his German citizenship and didn’t bother getting another passport) and he, like the rest of us, ate, drank, put his pants on one leg at a time, and…fell in love.
By all accounts, the love of Nietzsche’s life was a Russian intellectual starlet, Lou von Salome. Like many couples, Nietzsche and Salome met through mutual friends, writers Paul Rée and Malvida von Meysenburg, who probably exclaimed in proper 19th-century German “you two simply must meet.”
And so the hype began. Rée, Meysenburg, and Salome are hunkered down in Rome, trying to get the famous tortured soul to join them so witty repartee can keep them all up until all hours of the night. Rée tells Nietzsche, via that archaic form of communication now known as letter-writing, that Salome was exactly the woman he was looking for – witty, intelligent, eloquent, and charming. Intrigued, Nietzsche responds to Rée, indicating that he is indeed looking for a soulmate, expiration date two years’ hence:
Give my regards to this Russian lady if this makes any sense: I am yearning for this kind of soul, nay, I will have to resort to robbing one, soon – in light of what I want to do within the next ten years, I need such a soul. Quite another matter is marriage – I could only agree to a two-year marriage, and this only in view of the fact what I plan on doing during the next ten years.
(Whether Nietzsche planned on it or not, in the next ten years he would produce his masterpieces Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, and his autobiography Ecce Homo. He was right; he was going to be busy.)
Meanwhile, Meysenburg implores Nietzsche to make their intellectual trio a quad:
[Salome] appears to have arrived at the same results in her philosophical thinking as you have recently…Rée and I agree in wanting to see you and this extraordinary creature together at a certain point in time.
But Nietzsche turns down the invitation to meet up with them and heads to Messina, Italy, instead. Maybe he was off looking for his new country.
The intellectual diva Salome was upset by this rebuff, as evinced by Rée’s follow-up letter to Nietzsche, who is presumably standing in the passport line in Messina:
With your move…you have puzzled and disappointed the young Russian lady, since she had become so eager to see you and to speak to you…and she was very angry to see you having removed yourself entirely. She is an energetic, incredibly smart creature with the most peculiar, even child-like characteristics. She wanted to, as she said, spend a very nice year, and that should be next…winter.
This “very nice year” entailed the three of them: Salome, Rée, and Nietzsche living and studying together in a genius commune.
The prospect of a genius commune would show some promise. After a few months of letter-writing, the two finally meet in Rome. Nietzsche reportedly asked the young Russian, “From which stars have we been brought together here?”
The man without a country was starstruck by the young beauty-genius. At their second meeting, Nietzsche proposed.
Does she accept? Don’t Google the hyped-up lovers, wait for Part II next week.
Tracey McCormick is Managing Editor at GreatHistory.com.
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[...] Part I here. [...]
May 9th, 2009 at 9:45 am
danmihalache said:
Thanks for your visit. You have a very interesting site. I’ll come back.
Best Regards, Dan
August 9th, 2009 at 11:25 pm