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    Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Selections)/Also sprach Zarathustra (Auswahl): A Dual-Language Book
    Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Selections)/Also sprach Zarathustra (Auswahl): A Dual-Language Book
    Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Selections)/Also sprach Zarathustra (Auswahl): A Dual-Language Book
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    Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Selections)/Also sprach Zarathustra (Auswahl): A Dual-Language Book

    By Friedrich Nietzsche

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    The most popular of Friedrich Nietzsche's works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra ranks among the most remarkable feats of German literature. A symphony of language, it abounds in every kind of wordplay and an intricate network of leitmotifs. This dual-language edition features one third of Nietzsche's work, keeping the most famous concepts intact and encompassing a variety of moods and modes as well as the author's full linguistic scope.
    These selections reflect the most important philosophic concepts in the book, such as the "death of God" (i.e., the bankruptcy of the traditional Christian morality), with the subsequent need for a new morality administered by a more evolved humanity (the Übermensch), and the "will to power." Editor Stanley Appelbaum presents accurate English translations on the pages facing the original German, an informative introduction to the author's life and oeuvre, plus notes throughout the text and brief summaries of the omitted chapters.
    Nietzsche's influence on twentieth-century thought is incalculable. Freud is reputed to have developed his theory of the ego from some passages in Zarathustra. The Surrealists and Existentialists admired Nietzsche, and his skepticism made him a model for Postmodernist thinkers. This volume represents an outstanding resource not only for students and teachers of German language and literature but also for anyone with an interest in literature, philosophy, and psychology.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateMay 5, 2014
    ISBN9780486120621
    Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Selections)/Also sprach Zarathustra (Auswahl): A Dual-Language Book
    Author

    Friedrich Nietzsche

    Friedrich Nietzsche was a German philosopher and author. Born into a line of Protestant churchman, Nietzsche studied Classical literature and language before becoming a professor at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He became a philosopher after reading Schopenhauer, who suggested that God does not exist, and that life is filled with pain and suffering. Nietzsche’s first work of prominence was The Birth of Tragedy in 1872, which contained new theories regarding the origins of classical Greek culture. From 1883 to 1885 Nietzsche composed his most famous work, Thus Spake Zarathustra, in which he famously proclaimed that “God is dead.” He went on to release several more notable works including Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals, both of which dealt with the origins of moral values. Nietzsche suffered a nervous breakdown in 1889 and passed away in 1900, but not before giving us his most famous quote, “From life's school of war: what does not kill me makes me stronger.”

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    Reviews for Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Selections)/Also sprach Zarathustra (Auswahl)

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    1,601 ratings23 reviews

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    • 3/5
      I find it very difficult to rate or access--or even make much sense of this book. Reading it I often thought to myself it was little wonder Nietzsche ended his life in an insane asylum. I don't know that I can say I really "liked" it (three stars) or found it "OK" (two stars on Goodreads) but I just can't say I had a "meh" reaction or hated it--I did find it worthwhile a read--thought-provoking and even beautiful in parts.It's not what I expected. I'd heard various things about Nietzsche. That he was Ayn Rand on steroids. That he was a seminal philosopher and this his most important (or just infamous?) work. That he is the "Godfather of Fascism." I can't say I saw any of those things in this work. Whatever you might think of Ayn Rand's arguments, she does have them, even in her novels--indeed, it's what many readers complain about in her speechifying. Whatever I might think of Plato or Kant or Rousseau, or find difficult or abstruse, I do recognize they are presenting reasoned logical arguments for their positions worthy of philosophy. Nietzsche is different, or at least Thus Spake Zarathustra is. It's famously full of aphorisms--that is strikingly stated views we're supposed to take on faith so to speak--as in sacred texts. Indeed, the style very deliberately echoes the rhythms and rhetoric of scripture. Zarathustra is the character and mouthpiece for a philosophy presented through speeches, parables and stories--such as what happens when he's bitten by a snake--but not really through reasoned argument. To my mind that takes it out of the realm of philosophy and makes this more akin to Lao-Tzu's Tao Te Ching than Plato's Republic.And I admit, for all the notorious calls for the "Superman" and references to a "will to power" I found it hard to see the roots of fascism here--unless you really, really twist things. In contrast it was easy to see the roots of the totalitarian left in Plato's Republic and Rousseau's Social Contract. Maybe it's just that given we're much more sympathetic to the totalitarian left in America (I had several Marxist professors) I'm much more alive to the implications in works that tend that way. But I could see Nietzsche's call for the Superman as a call to aspire to the best in ourselves--I didn't detect anything racist or particularly Darwinian in it. Similarly I could see the "will to power" as more ambitious striving than a call for domination. Nor did I find anything anti-semitic in its thrust--Nietzsche seems an equal opportunity iconoclast. I do resonate a bit with his message about religion presenting a "slave" mentality. That's one of the things I find most disturbing about religion, besides its basis in the supernatural. That the call of religion above all is for unquestioning obedience, and every time I see a reference to God using "He" in uppercase I'm reminded of and am disturbed by that. But then the assessment above means assuming I read Nietzsche right, and I'm by no means sure about that on a first read, and am doubtful I'd go in for seconds. He's certainly an interesting if disturbing thinker.
    • 5/5
      One of those books that, at the time, changes your whole world view...
    • 5/5
      Nietzsche was brilliant and insane. In fact, whatever disease that killed him 8 years after writing this book had already started by this time. His evolution of the "overman" (ubermensch) is created through the travels and musings of Zarathustra. The best conceivable description of the style is that of a negative version of Kahlil Gibran. It's earthy, it's about the earth, but it's a violent form of passion based on the least desirable creatures, both human and animal -- when you can tell the difference. During the 4 books, Zarathustra first learns not to talk to the common man (in the "marketplace"), then learns to conquer his nausea, and finally conquers his pity. His loyal companions -- a variety of animals but primarily a snake and an eagle -- crowd about him during his repeated returns to his cave, wherein he contemplates and discovers more meaning about the overman. The evolution of the overman would require three stages: that of a camel (carrying the load), that of the lion (fighting the dragon), and that of the child (asking the obvious questions?).
    • 4/5
      A must for those of philosophic.
    • 5/5
      It will excite any teenager, but highly recommended to anyone.
    • 2/5
      Zeer taaie lectuur. Mooie openingscene: ik leer u de Uebermens, God is dood...
    • 5/5
      This book is meant to be an anchor for Nietzsche's philosophical system. With that in mind it makes a great place for anyone interested in his works or of existentialism in general to begin. The exercise (read 'incredible difficulty') to tease Nietzsche's meaning out from the complex metaphors and puns that he employs is greatly alleviated by the translator's notes provided by Walter Kaufmann. These are helpful both to crystallize the function of each section and also to explain Nietzsche's elaborate plays on words, which often translate incompletely or not at all. This added guidance is often the difference between a successful or failed read of Zarathustra. The book is written largely as a series of sermons and parables by the teacher Zarathustra, a vehicle meant to lampoon the biblical teachings of Christ. The joke lies in the fact that Nietzsche is employing the stylistic trappings of Christianity to deliver an individualist message which was meant not just to criticize the traditional morality of the time, but to charge each individual with crafting their own replacement. It represents a major break with all preceding philosophies in that it abhors the metaphysical and divine as foundations of human morality and announces the need for valuations which acknowledge the relative and subjective nature of human life. Thus the teachings in Zarathustra are not just a rewriting of older moral systems with new objects of authority with differences only in ritual or mythical basis, but a radical shift in the relation of those moral systems in relation to the people who develop and practice them. Nietzsche's Zarathustra is one of the formative works of existential philosophy as well as one of the first works of what could be called modern philosophies.
    • 4/5
      How do you overcome your life? Perhaps by reading Schopenhauer or better yet by reading Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is Nietzsche as poet philosopher. The titular character and protagonist of the book, Zarathustra, is portrayed in the chapter "Thousand and One Goals" as "the creator" (p 58). Through his travels and speeches and especially his introspective monologues we experience discourse on the nature of knowledge (gnosis), spirit, language, judgement and consciousness. This is a work that expounds some of Nietzsche's key ideas such as "eternal recurrence" and the "death of god". The latter represents a shift in the grounding of morality as Nietzsche rejects the traditional view the morality comes from God above. Instead replacing this view with a morality based in the existence of the individual, thus making Nietzsche a precursor if not one of the founders of existentialist philosophy. The mythic poetical style of this work mark its literary quality and make it read like a spiritual work. It also has an aphoristic quality that permeates Nietzsche's writing. While it is a difficult book to read the questions it raises make it worth the effort of those interested in a more literary approach to philosophy.
    • 4/5
      Although Professor Alderman credits his own interpretation of Nietzsche as a derivation of Heidegger's, Alderman takes Zarathustra as the paradigm of the philosopher, leaving Heidegger to his Will to Power notebook. But Heidegger is wrong-- about philosophy and about Nietzsche and about Zarathustra...Zarathustra is NOT a proponent of objectivist nihilism. He is explicitly, explicitly and songfully, and beingfully trying to FREE humankind from metaphysics and its thin-lipped sour Schopenhauer bower. It is Socratic! The opposite of a Will with a need to be UBER. [do the love dance]
    • 3/5
      Reminded me of the Koran. Short, Sweet and Authoritarian. Nietzsche being Nietzsche nonetheless, very difficult not to appreciate the satirical, nihilistic effect of the big metaphorical picture.
    • 3/5
      I am always hopeful that a philosophy will confirm my beliefs and put them better than I can put them myself. I am always dissapointed that what I read fails to meet my expectations. I enjoyed this book a little more than most because of the way it was written. There were parts of the book where I did feel that Nietzsche did confirm my beliefs, and put things well. Much of the book either missed my expectation, or I simply couldn't see things the way they were intended. Interestingly enough, immediately after this I read Ibsen's "An Enemy of the People" where Ibsen outlines "the strongest man in the world". Contrasting that with Nietzsche's superman helped me get more out of each book.
    • 4/5
      A classical work of filosophical significance. A treasure for the interested 'few'.
    • 4/5
      This book is so different from anything else I've ever read that I don't quite know what to say. Don't... try... this... at home?
    • 3/5
      It has been said that Thus Spoke Zarathustra is best read in high school because it is the only time a reader can tolerate such transparent exposition. This is probably accurate. I would recommend The Gay Science to a new reader of Nietzsche, but Thus Spoke Zarathustra is shorter and more popular.
    • 3/5
      I find a lot that is admirable in Nietzsche's philosophy... and there's some that i think Nietzsche was a bit naieve about. I found this book to be incredibly hard going, despite its easy 350 pages, it probably took me two weeks or more to finish. Mostly, i suppose, because the book is almost entirely composed of sermons by Nietzsche's Zarathustra with almost no motion or narration apart from his speaking. Also, Nietzsche seems to have written this book in almost a sort of prose-poetry, relying heavily on metaphor, his meaning is not always clear. I might have had an easier time of it if i were more familiar with some of his other works, so i could readily identify what he was refering to.In any case, this is a famous, important book for Western thought, arts, culture etc. You should read it, even if its hard. Some things that are worthwhile are.
    • 3/5
      Ah Nietzsche, you crazy old cat. Doesn't hold up nearly as well to a re-reading in my 40s, compared to the impression it made upon me in my 20s. Beautiful Folio Society edition.
    • 3/5
      This book is of a very odd type. It is presented very much as one would envision a prophet's tale from any number of religious backgrounds. This seems like an attempt to create a following for a gnostic religious outlook, and a way for Nietzsche to live on in a form similar to the christian prophets and stories he so adamantly spoke out against in his book "Beyond Good and Evil".
    • 5/5
      Seductively attractive writing style.
    • 5/5
      Being Nietzsche's attempt to provide a summary of his Weltanschauung in an unsystematic, literary format (for a somewhat more conventional version of same, try Beyond good and evil). The book is wonderful, heady reading, though Nietzsche's philosophy, never conventional anyway, does sometimes become a trifle difficult to excavate from the poetic turns.
    • 3/5
      Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a difficult book to read. In fact, literary critic like Harold Bloom called it "unreadable"! Why, then is it one of Nietzsche's most famous works? Why is it reprinted generation after generation? What made it "the book of choice" (345) for German soldiers on the battlefield?Zarathustra is the story of a man who leaves his contemplation to share his wisdom with the rest of humanity. The book contains eighty short chapters on various repetitive themes and ideas that have no logical order. This is not a carefully crafted philosophical argument—it is a collection of ideas thrown out to take root in people's minds.Three themes stand out above the rest:1) It was here that Nietzsche first claimed that God is dead.2) Humanity needs to evolve into the Superman (or Overman), a person beyond good and evil.3) The Superman embraces "eternal recurrence"(341) by taking ownership of everything that has happened and will happen again.In Zarathustra, Nietzsche called on people to reject the moral claims of the religious and embrace the will to power. Nietzsche viewed Christianity as a religion of weakness (which, ironically, it is—God's strength demonstrated in weakness).Nietzsche's desire to evolve beyond mere humanity to the Superman is a lonely task. In the end, Zarathustra leaves all his weak followers behind. There is no room for a community of Supermen—only a lone powermonger. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is no less than a manifesto for an anti-Christ.
    • 4/5
      Nietzsche was one tortured dude. He suffered to an extreme physically, with insomnia, stomach cramps, migraines, bloody vomiting, hemorrhoids, lack of appetite, and night sweats, and on top of all that, he was nearly blind. He spent long, lonely hours hunched over his writings and ultimately suffered a complete mental breakdown at the age of 45 that left him in the care of his mother for most of what remained of his life. It’s ironic that such a cowed man would write feverishly of transcending the all-too-human in the form of the “Ubermensch” (Overman, or Superman). Zarathustra is the prophet who descends down from the mountains in Biblical fashion to deliver this message to humanity. His main principles:1. God is dead.2. Traditional virtues and the morality of the masses (e.g. Christianity) promote mediocrity.3. Education of the masses and popular culture also promotes mediocrity, lowering social standards.4. Man must rise above the masses and the “all-too-human” to give his life meaning, and he who does this will be the Ubermensch. “What is the ape to man? A laughing-stock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman…”5. Power and strength of will characterize the Ubermensch, as do lightness of mind and exuberance, as seen in dance.As with a lot of original thinkers, Nietzsche was controversial all around: radicals claimed him for #1 and #2; conservatives for #3 and #4. The German military used portion of Nietzsche as a part of the mindset for both WWI and WWII; it was easy to extrapolate “Ubermensch” to “Master Race”, which is obviously an ugly association.There are elements of truth in #3 and #4 but the reverse, to over-stratify society and threaten a return to conditions at the time of the Industrial Revolution or prior, rubs me the wrong way. It’s a fine balance and it seems to me Nietzsche was too much of a reactionary. Another theme in this book, eternal recurrence, also seems a little odd in the extreme he takes it, and I’m not a big fan of his views on women.However, I do like and agree with the concept of needing to develop meaning for ourselves in this bleak universe and all-too-short life, and of needing to transcend the baser aspects of humanity. I also appreciate the strength of his writing, his originality, and elements of his arguments. In that way I am reminded of Ayn Rand, who I also like in spite of my liberal political views. I guess what I’m saying is, thumbs up, even if you’re not a Nazi.Quotes:On the lightness of being, and individuality:“I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity - through him all things fall.Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!I have learned to walk: ever since, I let myself run. I have learned to fly: ever since, I do not want to be pushed before moving along.Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me.”On loneliness:“O you loving fool, Zarathustra, you are trust-overfull. But thus you have always been: you have always approached everything terrible trustfully. You have wanted to pet every monster. A whiff of warm breath, a little soft tuft on the paw - and at once you were ready to love and to lure it.Love is the danger of the loneliest; love of everything if only it is alive. Laughable, verily, are my folly and my modesty in love.”
    • 4/5
      Thus Spake Zarathustra differs from most of Nietzsche's other works in that it has as much in common with a novel as a philosophical work. This makes it more difficult to interpret than his more traditionally academic works, as he tries to convey his philosophy not only in words, but in narration of actions, moods, and tone, more so than elsewhere. Sometimes the message is too loud, or the writing too exuberant for it to possess the clarity found in his more restrained works. It would be more difficult to attempt a summary of what this book says than to describe what it variously is: bombastic, profound, lyrical, sentimental, ruthless, tender, and hearty in several senses of the word.Though the book appears to be full of meaning, some of Nietzsche's thoughts come across less ambiguously than others. One of these being the exaltation of the strong and despising of the weak; this he justifies on a moral level, which is in itself worth discussing. How can someone be truly good, unless he has the power to do evil and refrains? How can someone be truly virtuous who is weak and lacks the strength for proper wickedness? This mirrors the other aspect of the question of morality: who can be evil who knows not what wickedness is? Can only the wise, who has an intellectual understanding of moral questions be truly virtuous, as they can knowingly choose between good and evil? This elevation of power and knowledge as necessary for virtue is at least partly why he places the superman, or ubermensch, as the goal of humanity – as they alone are capable of true virtue, a state which Nietzsche describes as being beyond good and evil. There is also the recurring theme of the mountain, which he implies to be where the Ubermensch belongs, at least some of the time. This is surely metaphorical for, amongst other things, surpassing oneself and others, solitude, and elevation. This, I feel, is partly just him justifying post hoc what he feels instinctively; Nietzsche was very athletic in his youth, and undoubtedly an intellect, and he could be accused of praising the qualities that he feels that he himself possesses. Whether this was a conscious undertaking, or something driven from the subconscious, it would be difficult to say, but I think that it is mainly the latter. I don't think Nietzsche was dishonest or vain, I think he is was driven to write in support of what he thought was the truth. Even if the delivery of his message might be objectionable to some, which I cannot doubt, I think his thoughts deserve an open-minded scrutiny. To react emotionally to a question inhibits one from making a fair answer, yet this plays both ways for Nietzsche, much of what he writes is written in a way that makes it palatable and attractive by way of the lifefulness of it. The final third of the book then goes onto what seems like a partly separate track, and I don't think it was quite obvious what Nietzsche meant by it all. He talks about the "Higher Man" a lot, but this idea is then broken down into a multiplicity of things which do not seem higher at all, and it is doubtful at the end whether this can either be reassembled, or if it ever existed in the first place. Night, and then Day, also replace the mountain in importance in the final section. There is also the recurring theme of "God is dead", and while this seems to mean something in some places, it doesn't in others, yet the meaning does seem clear in Nietzsche's Joyful Wisdom. In addition to this there are numerous other Biblical allusions and quotation.Something I found curious was a parallel between events and moods in the book and stages in Carl Jung's description of individuation, which would probably be worth closer examination. Nietzsche had psychological problems, and went mad, and that his writing has parallels with stages of psychological development is intriguing.The questions and thoughts mentioned above are all to be found in the book, though more often than not they must be read from between the lines. Sometimes a sentence in itself will contain an hours worth of thought, but much of the philosophy in this book runs below the surface, and must be extracted by the thinking reader. This book is not a good introduction to the philosophy of Nietzsche as it is more challenging than most of his other works. His Joyful Wisdom has many of the same themes as this and a somewhat similar tone; much of what he says here in a roundabout way he says there clearly.
    • 5/5
      Love it! Translators seem to be enjoying something of a bitchfest contra Walter Kaufmann's earlier beautiful English translation, which doubles the fun really. Incorrigibly weird and deliriously funny - woe to anyone who teaches this as philosophy! No no no! No

    Book preview

    Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Selections)/Also sprach Zarathustra (Auswahl) - Friedrich Nietzsche

    Thus Spoke Zarathustra

    (Selections)

    Also sprach Zarathustra

    (Auswahl)

    FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

    A Dual-Language Book

    Edited and Translated by

    STANLEY APPELBAUM

    DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

    Mineola, New York

    Copyright

    English translation, Introduction, summaries, and footnotes copyright © 2004 by Dover Publications, Inc.

    All rights reserved.

    Bibliographical Note

    This Dover edition, first published in 2004, is a new selection of complete chapters from the German work originally published between 1883 and 1885 (see the Introduction for bibliographical details), together with a new English translation by Stanley Appelbaum, who also supplied the Introduction, the footnotes, and the summaries of the chapters not included.

    International Standard Book Number eISBN 13: 978-0-486-12062-1

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    Dover Publications, Inc., 31 East 2nd Street, Mineola, N.Y. 11501

    CONTENTS

    [Only the chapters included in this volume are listed below; each one is complete. Summaries in English of all omitted chapters occur at their proper place in the text. In Part One of the entire work, all chapters after Zarathustra’s Prologue fall under the sub-heading Zarathustras Reden (Zarathustra’s Orations).]

    Introduction

    Erster Teil / Part One

    Zarathustras Vorrede / Zarathustra’s Prologue

    Von den drei Verwandlungen / Of the Three Transformations

    Von den Hinterweltlern / Of the Backworldsmen

    Von den Freuden- und Leidenschaften / Of Joyful and Painful Passions

    Vom Lesen und Schreiben / Of Reading and Writing

    Von den Predigern des Todes / Of the Preachers of Death

    Von Krieg und Kriegsvolke / Of War and Warriors

    Vom neuen Götzen / Of the New Idol

    Von den Fliegen des Marktes / Of the Flies in the Marketplace

    Von alten und jungen Weiblein / Of Females Old and Young

    Von der schenkenden Tugend / Of the Virtue That Gives of Itself

    Zweiter Teil / Part Two

    Das Kind mit dem Spiegel / The Child with the Mirror

    Auf den glückseligen Inseln / On the Fortunate Islands

    Vom Gesindel / Of the Rabble

    Das Nachtlied / The Night Song

    Von der Selbst-Überwindung / Of Self-Overcoming

    Von der Erlösung / Of Redemption

    Die stillste Stunde / The Quietest Hour

    Dritter Teil / Part Three

    Der Wanderer / The Wayfarer

    Vom Gesicht und Rätsel / Of the Vision and the Riddle

    Vom Vorübergehen / Of Passing By

    Vom Geist der Schwere / Of the Spirit of Gravity

    Von alten und neuen Tafeln / Of Old and New Tablets of the Law

    Die sieben Siegel / The Seven Seals

    Vierter und letzter Teil / Fourth and Last Part

    Das Honig-Opfer / The Honey Offering

    Die Erweckung / The Awakening

    Das Eselsfest / The Festival of the Donkey

    Das trunkne Lied / The Drunken Song

    Das Zeichen / The Sign

    INTRODUCTION

    Nietzsche’s Life and Major Works

    Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Röcken, near the larger town of Lützen, not far to the southwest of the great Saxon metropolis Leipzig. Röcken was in the Prussian province of Saxony, formerly the northern half of that kingdom, annexed by Prussia in 1815 because Saxony had abetted Napoleon. Nietzsche was born on October 15, the birthday of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, king of Prussia (reigned 1840–1861), after whom he was named. His father, a Lutheran pastor, died in 1849 after a protracted cerebral ailment (possibly caused by a fall); biographers differ as to the extent of Nietzsche’s lifelong traumatic reaction to this experience.

    In 1850 the family moved the short distance to Naumburg, which was to be the home that Nietzsche could return to for as long as his mother lived (until 1897). By 1856 he was already suffering sporadically from sore eyes and headaches. Between October 1858 and September 1864 he attended the prestigious secondary school at nearby Schulpforta, a seedbed for philologists (students of Latin and Greek, primarily). During these years the boy began to write poems, and definitively lost his religious faith.

    From October 1864 to August 1865 he studied theology (nevertheless!) and philology at the University of Bonn. In February 1865, as he once confided to a close friend, he paid a visit to a brothel in the closest big city, Cologne; he reported the outing as completely innocuous, but it may have been there that he contracted syphilis, if that is indeed what eventually drove him mad and killed him. (Other theories are that his madness, or brain condition, was inherited, the cause of his headaches, etc.; or that he contracted some awful disease while tending sick soldiers in 1870.)

    From late 1865 to the summer of 1867, he studied philology (only) at the University of Leipzig; in this period he discovered the extremely stimulating philosophy of Schopenhauer. A projected year’s military service, beginning in October 1867, was cut short by an accident due to clumsiness, and by May 1868 Nietzsche was off active duty, though he never stopped boasting of his old days in the artillery as a noble warrior. Before the year was over, back in Leipzig, he met one of the most influential men in his life, Wagner, whose disciple he soon became (besides his innovative stage ideas, Wagner also cultivated serious social thought).

    In February 1869 Nietzsche was invited to teach the classics at the University of Basel (and at a top secondary school there); various prerequisites were waived for the brilliant student. Answering the call, he necessarily became a Swiss citizen. In May he paid his first visit to the Wagners’ villa near Lucerne. When war broke out between France and Prussia in 1870, Nietzsche wanted to serve, but now, as a Swiss, he could only volunteer as a medic in the Prussian army. After just a few days’ work he developed dysentery and diphtheria; on recovering (if he ever did fully), he resumed his professional duties in Basel.

    Ill health plagued him; in February 1871 he was granted time off to cure indigestion and insomnia. Later that year he failed in his attempt to acquire a chair in philosophy as well as philology. From the early 1870s on, he toyed frequently with thoughts of marriage; he was never truly committed to the idea, and no woman ever seems to have desired him as a mate.

    In 1872 he published his first major work, the long essay Die Geburt der Tragödie (The Birth of Tragedy), summarizing many of his concepts of the few previous years. Classical scholars were alienated by his revolutionary view of Greek culture (the unruly spirit represented by Dionysus partially restrained by the rationality represented by Apollo; Euripides and Socrates as the excessively rational destroyers of Greek tragedy, with its dependence on Dionysus), by the lack of scholarly apparatus and afflatus, and by what looked like a shameless plug for Wagner as restorer of the Greek music drama.

    In 1873, ill, with sore eyes, he began the work, eventually consisting of four medium-length essays on a variety of subjects, that would be called Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen (Inopportune Thoughts; aka Untimely Meditations; Unfashionable Observations). The first essay was published in August 1873; the second and third, in 1874; and the fourth (his last good word about Wagner), in 1876. In 1875 he became quite ill, and had to request a short leave from teaching in February 1876 and then a year’s leave beginning in October. In between, during the summer, he had attended the first complete Ring des Nibelungen performances at Bayreuth, but his honeymoon with Wagner, who had been using him as a tool and who was no longer behaving like an Übermensch, was over.

    In 1877 the leave from teaching was extended to Easter of 1878. Nietzsche resided in spas and in sunny Italy, participating in an orgy of futile matchmaking in Sorrento. By 1878 he was relieved of his secondary-school duties in Basel. During that year he published Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, All Too Human), in which he states that even the loftiest human ideas are not divinely inspired, but are sublimations of earthly drives. Like the later Morgenröte (Dawn; also translated by every equivalent for dawn) and Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (The Cheerful Body of Knowledge; usually called The Gay Science), Menschliches is in the form of quite brief individual sections which Nietzsche called aphorisms. Late in 1878 he became very ill again, and friends who hadn’t seen him for a while reported that he was greatly altered in temperament.

    In 1879 he published two supplements to Menschliches and was finally pensioned off by the university. He then began a life of incessant wandering, usually to warm and/or isolated places: too many to be listed in an Introduction of this modest length. Just as an example, in 1880 alone he resided in Riva del Garda, Venice, Marienbad, Stresa, and Genoa. In the summer of 1881 he paid his first visit to the village of Sils-Maria in the Engadine, where he had his revelation about the eternal return (or recurrence) in August (more of this below, in the next section). In that year he published Morgenröte, his first direct attack on conventional Christian morality (in this book, the will to power appears as just one among other human drives; it is not yet the leading one).

    The year 1882 was a crucial one, not only in Nietzsche’s life as a whole, but also as preparatory experience for Zarathustra. In that year he met Lou von Salomé (later in life, Lou Andreas-Salomé), a Russian-born pioneering female student (1861–1937) of extremely emancipated views. (Subsequently she wrote stories and essays, and became the mistress of the poet Rilke and a close associate of Freud.) After meeting her in Rome (where the gurgling fountains inspired the Nachtlied in Zarathustra), Nietzsche contemplated a trial marriage or even a ménage à trois in which they would be joined by a male friend of his who knew her first. He thought he was deeply in love and had found the only true soulmate and helpmate for him (she was aloof), but he gave her up after the violent reactions she aroused in his mother and his possessive sister (Elisabeth; later, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche; 1846–1935). His resentment is clearly mirrored in Introduction Zarathustra: in its misogyny, in its plaints of betrayal, and in its condemnation of compassion, which can be seen as equivalent to his family’s benevolent interference.

    Also in 1882, he published the first four parts of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, in which he appears as a prejudice-free pan-European, and in which he tentatively introduces Zarathustra as a character and the concept of the eternal return (see the next section, which is entirely devoted to Zarathustra, the work that occupied most of his time and attention from the beginning of 1883 through the first third of 1885).

    In the summer of 1885, he dictated to secretaries much of the material that ended up in the volume Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good and Evil), published in 1886 by C[onstantin] G[eorg] Naumann in Leipzig (though Nietzsche paid for it, as he had for Part Four of Zarathustra). Jenseits is a relatively more traditionally philosophical formulation of ideas enunciated without demonstration in Zarathustra; like Nietzsche’s next complete work, it is also in more regular essay form, the aphorisms being tucked into the running text. (In 1885 Nietzsche also worked on a fifth part to Die fröhliche Wissenschaft.)

    In Sils-Maria, in July 1887, Nietzsche wrote Zur Genealogie der Moral (On the Genealogy of Morals), his version of the historical development of morality. It was published by early November. His books didn’t sell, and he remained virtually unknown (magnifying in his mind each review that wasn’t totally damning and each letter from an individual adherent). Thus he was greatly encouraged in 1888 by significant public evaluations of his work by such authors, critics, philosophers, and lecturers as Carl Spitteler in Switzerland and Georg Brandes in Denmark (and personal congratulations from the novelist and playwright August Strindberg in Sweden, also mentally unbalanced).

    In the spring of that year Nietzsche thought he had found the ideal place to live in: Turin. There he wrote his anti-Wagner treatise Der Fall Wagner (The Wagner Case—case being either judicial or medical), which was published later in the year. In Sils-Maria, in the summer, he wrote Die Götzen-Dämmerung (The Twilight of the Idols; the title is a lampoon on that of the last part of Wagner’s Ring), which elaborates on the will to power (he received advance copies in November; it was published early the next year). He was also planning a major four-part work to be called Der Wille zur Macht: Versuch einer Umwertung aller Werte (The Will to Power: Essay on the Revaluation of All Values); the completed volume Antichrist may have represented to him the first part of this large work, or possibly all of it that he finally wished to write.

    In the fall of 1888, he returned to Turin (this was to be his last change of residence under his own control). He then wrote the peculiar, megalomaniac autobiography Ecce homo (not published until 1908) in an effort to stimulate sales for his forthcoming philosophic pieces. He also compiled a sort of dossier of his dealings with the titan of Bayreuth in Nietzsche contra Wagner.

    On January 3 he suffered a nervous breakdown on the street in Turin, and never regained all his wits. He immediately dashed off a series of letters indicative of delusions of grandeur. (The perfect wording of these letters belies those biographers who find no hint of incipient insanity in Ecce homo and many 1888 personal letters, just because the syntax is rational.) Later came clinics in Basel and Jena. He was released into his mother’s care in 1890. A victim of creeping paralysis, he became more and more detached from the world. Meanwhile, he was taken over (in every sense of the term) by his sister, a proto-Nazi who later welcomed Hitler’s advent. She destroyed and falsified documents, published waste scraps, and oversaw editions to suit her purposes (the Wille zur Macht published under her aegis has been called both Nietzsche’s greatest work and a worthless, if not dangerous, omnium gatherum). She set up a Nietzsche Archive in Naumburg in 1894, moving it in 1896 to Weimar, where she and her brother’s living corpse moved in 1897. He died on August 25, 1900.

    There will probably never be an end to the discussions, not only of the nature of his madness, but also of how soon it manifested itself. Was drug addiction part of his problem? (He insisted on doctoring himself.) Was his hermitlike isolation a cause of his madness, or a result of it? And so on.

    Besides the works mentioned above, Nietzsche wrote many lyric poems, minor essays, lectures, and letters. He was also a good pianist, a music lover of sometimes erratic tastes, and an amateur composer of piano and choral works.

    Also sprach Zarathustra

    Each of some half-dozen works written by Nietzsche in the 1880s has been called his finest, but Also sprach Zarathustra remains the most widely popular, and seems to have been the author’s own favorite. Its subtitle, not often cited, in Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen (A Book for Everybody and Nobody).

    Part One (not so labeled until the second part appeared) was written at Rapallo in January 1883. Nietzsche mailed the typesetter’s manuscript to the publisher from Genoa on February 14, the day after Wagner died in Venice. The typesetting was done between March 31 and April 26, with ongoing proofreading (Nietzsche was in Genoa). The volume was published some time between the end of April and the beginning of June (accounts differ); by the latter date the author was in Rome. The publisher, located in Chemnitz, was E[rnst] Schmeitzner, who had taken over some of Nietzsche’s earlier titles when their original publisher, E[rnst] W[ilhelm] Fritzsch of Leipzig, went bankrupt in 1878. (In turn, Fritzsch was to buy up old Nietzsche stock from Schmeitzner in 1886.)

    Part Two was prepared during the spring and summer of 1883, largely at Sils-Maria in July. The setting copy was written out during the first half of that month, then mailed to Schmeitzner. Proofreading was done from the end of July to the end of August, and the volume was published shortly thereafter.

    Part Three occupied Nietzsche between the late summer of 1883 and the very beginning of 1884, when he was in Nice. Proofs were ready by late February, and Schmeitzner published the volume in March. For the moment Nietzsche thought that Zarathustra was concluded, but circumstances brought about an unintended fourth part. While at Menton and Nice in the winter 1884–85, he conceived of a new three-volume work to be called Mittag und Ewigkeit (Noonday and Eternity), and, dissatisfied with sales of his previous books (though he was more to blame than any publisher), he decided to leave Schmeitzner. Failing to find any publisher even after he had reduced his pretensions to one further volume of Zarathustra (and even after agreeing to a title change to disguise the fact that it was a continuation volume), he himself reluctantly paid for a small printing of Part Four (40 or 45 copies), prepared by the Leipzig publisher C[onstantin] G[eorg] Naumann. The writing was completed in Nice, and he read proof in Venice in March and April. The volume appeared in mid-April of 1885.

    Unsold sets of pages of Parts One through Three were bound into single volumes by Fritzsch in 1887, but the particularly blasphemous fourth part didn’t reach a broader readership until 1892, when the first complete Zarathustra appeared as part of an ill-fated first collected-works edition halted by Nietzsche’s sister.

    In his often hard-to-swallow Ecce homo Nietzsche declared that the writing of each part of Zarathustra had taken him ten days. One modern editor considers this possible if the writing is taken to mean the assemblage into finished form of numerous preliminary jottings over much greater time periods: because Zarathustra, too, is essentially a collection of aphorisms and maxims, though here they are skillfully gathered into Gospel-like prophetic sermons and parable-like incidents within a very loose narrative framework per part.

    The real Zarathustra (Zerdusht; Zoroaster), who probably lived around 600 B.C., reputedly formulated the dualistic principles of pre-Islamic Persian religion. (In Nietzsche’s day he was generally thought to date back to the second pre-Christian millennium.) To Nietzsche, according to Ecce homo, Zarathustra was the first philosopher to make a metaphysics out of morality, with truth as the highest virtue; Nietzsche boasted that he, the immoralist, had gone beyond that primitive stance, and that his fictional hero successfully combated the historical Zarathustra’s error.

    Nietzsche, an ardent admirer of Emerson (in German translation), seems to have been attracted to the figure of Zarathustra by the New Englander’s writings. In Emerson’s essay History, Zarathustra is merely mentioned by name as an ancient religious legislator. But the essay Character (the third essay in the second, 1844, collection), in which Emerson proclaims his belief in the influence of great men, no two of whom were alike, contains this crucial passage:

    The most credible pictures are those of majestic men who prevailed at their entrance, and convinced the senses; as happened to the eastern magian who was sent to test the merits of Zertusht or Zoroaster. When the Yunani sage arrived at Balkh, the Persians tell us, Gushtasp appointed a day on which the Mobeds of every country should assemble, and a golden chair was placed for the Yunani sage. Then the beloved of Yezdam, the prophet Zertusht, advanced into the midst of the assembly. The Yunani sage, on seeing that chief, said, ‘This form and this gait cannot lie, and nothing but truth can proceed from them.’

    Zarathustra’s name appears frequently in Nietzsche’s notes (autumn 1881) for Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (published 1882), but in the published work (at the time, containing only the first four parts), it appears only in the final aphorism (section 342), the wording of which Nietzsche took over virtually verbatim as the first subsection of Zarathustras Vorrede in Also sprach Zarathustra. (The preceding section of Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, no. 341, contains the earliest published adumbration of the eternal return concept, which Nietzsche later reported as having come to him in a blinding flash on August 26, 1881 near Sils-Maria. The thought in section 341 is: How would you react if you learned you would have to relive your entire life in exactly the same way? In Zarathustra and later works, Nietzsche makes it clear that his ideal hero would be glad to! One suspects that this idea originally preceded, and even entailed, the very shaky metaphysical concept that the eternal return is inevitable because time is infinite in either direction (any stasis at any point would have wrecked the whole thing, philosophically), whereas the number of possible combinations of events, though large, must be finite (why??), and thus history must repeat itself again and again. At any rate, in Ecce homo Nietzsche considers the eternal return to be the greatest human idea ever conceived, and the writing of Also sprach Zarathustra to be the greatest human achievement of all time.

    Eschewing formal, scholastic reasoning in general, Zarathustra is a dithyrambic prophecy and one of the most remarkable Germanlanguage works: a symphony for the language in the sense that Rimsky-Korsakov called his Scheherazade a composition for the orchestra rather than a piece of music that just happened to get scored for many instruments. Truly untranslatable in detail, the language of Zarathustra abounds in every kind of wordplay, new thoughts often being conjured up by the sound of contiguous ones; and there is an extremely intricate network of leitmotifs. There are numerous allusions (often parodistic) to the New Testament, Wagner, Goethe, Shakespeare, and others, and the political situation of Nietzsche’s own time (e.g., Bismarck’s heavy-handed creation of the German Empire) is very much in evidence in the background.

    Works are obviously included in this Dover dual-language series primarily as pieces of world literature, but the Zarathustra chapters included here also reflect the most important philosophic concepts in the book, such as the death of God (i.e., the bankruptcy of traditional Christian morality), with the subsequent need for a new morality and of a more evolved humanity to administrate it (the Übermensch), and the will to power (which, Nietzsche stated in Ecce homo, was inspired in him by his chronic illness). The repeated notion of the spontaneously rolling wheel was derived from the 1675 Cherubinischer Wandersmann by Angelus Silesius (Johann Scheffler; 1624–1677). The donkey festival (the most scandalous incident in Part Four) was suggested by the medieval Feast of Fools held between Christmas and New Year’s as a holdover from the ancient Roman Saturnalia (same time of the year); this mock feast, instituted for clerics in the eleventh century in a vain attempt to channel at least their seasonal boisterousness, sometimes included (chiefly in France) a Festum Asinarium, in celebration of the outstanding donkeys in the Bible, at which parody hymns were sung. (The long chapter in Part Three, Von alten und neuen Tafeln, which purportedly sprang to Nietzsche’s mind en bloc during a long hike from Nice, is useful among other things, as a general summary of the main philosophical concepts in the whole book.)

    Scholars disagree on the extent to which the Zarathustra in the book is to be equated with Nietzsche himself; after all, he is a fictional character, and even his creator once warned against too close an identification, but the attempt by some writers at drastic differentiation seems misguided, not only because so many of the philosophical standpoints are so readily explainable in terms of Nietzsche’s personal experiences and reactions to them, but also because he shows no hesitation throughout the book in proclaiming his own real preferences in food, climate, pastimes, etc., as being those of Zarathustra (and, presumably, the only ones to be taken seriously).

    Known only to a few kindred spirits until the very end of his life, Nietzsche’s work rapidly became more widely appreciated by the 1890s. This is strikingly evidenced by the early use, made by three great composers, of texts and concepts from Also sprach Zarathustra. In 1896 Richard Strauss wrote his famous tone poem of that name (the opening motif of which became wildly popular after its use in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey), and Mahler set the Trunknes Lied in the fourth movement of his Third Symphony. In 1909 Delius compiled the

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