His radical questioning of the objectivity of truth has been a great influence on the continental philosophical tradition comprising existentialism, postmodernism, and post-structuralism.

 

Nietzsche was born in the small town of Röcken, in the Prussian Province of Saxony.

 

He was named after King Frederick William IV of Prussia. Nietzsche's parents, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, a Lutheran pastor and former teacher, and Franziska Oehler, had two other children: a daughter, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and a second son, Ludwig Joseph. Nietzsche's father died from a brain ailment in 1849; Ludwig Joseph died the next year, at age two.

 

The family then moved to Naumburg, where they lived with Nietzsche's maternal grandmother.

 

After the death of Nietzsche's grandmother in 1856, the family moved into their own house, now a museum and Nietzsche study center.

 

Nietzsche began his career as a classical philologist — a scholar of Greek and Roman textual criticism, while his broad knowledge of Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and French made it possible for him to read important primary sources.

 

In 1869, when he is only twenty-four years old, he was appointed to the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel.

 

To this day, Nietzsche is still among the youngest of the tenured Classics professors on record.

Before moving to Basel, Nietzsche renounced his Prussian citizenship and for the rest of his life he remained officially stateless.

Nevertheless, he still served in the Prussian forces during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) as a medical orderly. In his short military service he witnessed the traumatic effects of battle and also contracted diphtheria and dysentery..

 

Nietzsche had already met Richard Wagner in Leipzig in 1868 and admired him greatly.

During his time at Basel, he frequently visited Wagner's house in Tribschen in Lucerne and in 1872, Nietzsche published his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. With the publication in 1878 of Human, All Too Human (a book of aphorisms ranging from metaphysics to morality to religion to gender studies), a new style of Nietzsche's work became clear, reacting against the pessimistic philosophy of Wagner and Schopenhauer.

At that time Nietzsche stood at the beginning of his most productive period. Beginning with Human, All Too Human in 1878, Nietzsche would publish one book or major section of a book each year until 1888, his last year of writing; that year, he completed five.

He resigned his Basel’s position in 1879 due to health problems that oppressed him most of his adult life.

The 1868 riding accident and diseases in 1870 may have aggravated these persistent conditions.

Living off his pension from Basel and aid from friends, Nietzsche travelled to find climates more conducive to his health status and lived as independent author in different cities till 1889.

He spent summers in Sils Maria near St. Moritz in Switzerland and his winters in the Italian cities of Genoa, Rapallo, and Turin and the French city of Nice.

 

In 1882, Nietzsche published the first part of The Gay Science.

Nietzsche fled to Rapallo. Here he wrote the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra in only ten days.

Now, with the new style of Zarathustra, his work became even more alienating and the market received it only to the degree required by politeness.

 

His books remained largely unsold. In 1885, he printed only 40 copies of the fourth part of Zarathustra and distributed only a fraction of these among close friends.

In 1883 he failed to obtain a lecturing position at the University of Leipzig. It was made clear to him that, in view of the attitude towards Christianity and the concept of God expressed in Zarathustra, he had become effectively outcast by any German university.

 

In 1886 Nietzsche broke with his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner, disgusted by his antisemitic opinions and printed Beyond Good and Evil at his own expense.

In 1887 Nietzsche wrote the polemic "On the Genealogy of Morals".

On his 44th birthday, after completing Twilight of the Idols and The Antichrist, he decided to write the autobiography Ecce Homo. In the preface to this work — which suggests Nietzsche was well aware of the interpretive difficulties his work would generate — he declares, "Hear me! For I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else".

 

On 3 January 1889, at the age of 44, Nietzsche suffered a mental collapse and a loss of his mental faculties.

Two policemen approached him after he caused a public disturbance in the streets of Turin.

What happened remains unknown, but a repeated tale states that Nietzsche witnessed the flogging of a horse at the other end of the Piazza Carlo Alberto, ran to the horse, threw his arms up around its neck to protect it, and then collapsed to the ground.

In the following days, Nietzsche sent short writings, also known as the Wahnbriefe ("Madness Letters") to a number of friends Most of them were signed "Dionysos".

To his former colleague Burckhardt, Nietzsche wrote: "I have had Caiaphas put in fetters. Also, last year I was crucified by the German doctors in a very drawn-out manner.

Wilhelm, Bismarck, and all anti-Semites abolished." Additionally, he commanded the German emperor to go to Rome to be shot and summoned the European powers to take military action against Germany.

 

In 1898 and 1899 Nietzsche suffered strokes which left him unable to speak or walk. After contracting pneumonia in mid-August 1900, he had another stroke during the night of 24–25 August and died on 25 August.

 

His friends gave his funeral oration, proclaiming: "Holy be your name to all future generations!"

 

Nietzsche had written in Ecce Homo of his fear that one day his name would be regarded as "holy".