Stefan Zweig penned several biographical miniatures who he believed shaped his writing and European culture overall, including Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevski, Casanova, Tolstoy, Stendhal, and Nietzsche. In Nietzsche, rather than focusing on the philosopher's physical timeline of dates and events, Zweig presents us with his insight into the man’s psyche, his spirit, and the gruesome suffering of the man’s creative process.
Where the great German minds of philosophy (Hegel, Goethe, and Schopenhauer) preferred order, a tendency to discipline the spirit, creating an architecture of ‘truth’, a grand narrative, Nietzsche followed the opposite path, abolishing these grand stories of the soul, listening to his demons, he revealed the big lies, and taught us a different way of viewing reality, tearing apart staid perceptions of ourselves, and existence. His approach to knowledge, “...born from an altogether different temperament, from a virtually antipodal universe of the spirit...wholly of the demonic kind; a hot breathed, nerve quivering, inquisitorial passion which never satisfies itself and is never exhausted...never does he allow himself a knowledge set in stone...” (P.28)
Nietzsche physically was a very sick man. Moments of respite from his suffering were few and far between. The man’s diet was strict, and sticking to this eating regimen was paramount to his continued existence. The philosopher constantly plunged himself into the abyss of uncertainty, deconstructing contemporary knowledge, always alone, but pushing forward anyway. Any human being both sick physically and mentally stretched must have a place to escape this suffering, and for Nietzsche it was music. But this was not the music of his youth, Wagner, the loud, bombastic and stimulating dramatic, though now a refuge of escape, ...a kind of psychic bromide, an interior sedative. (P.70)
Art and nothing but art – we have art so that we might not die of truth. (P.70)
Nietzsche’s last years before his mental breakdown was the most productive and inspired. It is reported that many if not of all his friends and colleagues, abandoned him, claiming that the man had finally gone completely insane. In the end, no publisher considered publishing his books. Thus, he had to resort to self-publishing, spending his last savings, only to be read by no one.
In a moment of despair, the philosopher writes: After a call like my Zarathustra, from the very innermost recesses of my being, to not hear a single word of response, nothing, nothing, only immutable solitude multiplied, there is an inconceivable horror in this and even the strongest would perish before it. (P.75)
Close to his last mental breakdown he wrote a prophetic line: They will understand me after the next European war. (P.87) Of course without question this turned out to be true. And his work continues to be studied and debated in the present time.
Zweig’s Nietzsche is a masterpiece of psychological and spiritual erudition of one of our great western philosophers.
