Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born into a Lutheran family in Roecken in 1844. His life gruesomely illustrated Schopenhauer's declamations on human misery. At the age of five he lost his father and so was brought up as the only male in a household of five females, who dressed him and treated him like he was a girl, which made him a sissified boy. When he went to the university of Bonn to study theology he joined a fraternity and visited a brothel once or twice, trying to be just as his fellow students. His sexual contacts in the bordels may have been his first as well his last sexual experiences. It was from them he contracted syphilis, which made him an invalid all his life and resulted in madness and extinction of his intellect when he was in his forty-fifth year.

Nietzsche abandoned theology and went to Leipzig to study Greek. He was a brilliant student and at the age of twenty-four he was awarded a doctorate and became a professor of Greek at the University of Basel.

Nietzsche had no fondness for academic routine, partly caused by his disease. In 1879 he retired from the faculty with a pension. At this time he was nearly blind and suffering from migraine headaches and insomnia.

He travelled form boardinghouse to boardinghouse in Italy, Switzerland and Southern France. During this period he wrote a book every year, published mostly at his own expense and almost completely ignored. The tone of his writings became more and more aggressive and furious and therefore nowadays his philosophy is called ‘philosophy by hammer'. He hated the academic way of writing and therefore his books are not syastematic dissertations, but poems and passionate tirades.

This ignorance of his books infuriated him against the Germans. In January 1889 in Turin, excited by the effort of trying to protect a horse from being beaten by talking and embracing the animal (his madness was very serious at this time), he suffered complete mental breakdown. Nursed by his mother and sister, he vegetated for eleven years, expiring in 1900. By that time his books had made him a celebrity, but he never knew it.

Among his most famous books are The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Human, All too Human (1878), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1892), On the genealogy of morals (1887), The antichrist (1889) and The Will to Power (1891).see also: Dionysus against the cRucified
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edvard munch, who made a portrait of nietzsche
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