25 Freaky Facts About Nihilism's Godfather Nietzsche
Who was the real Nietzsche? How did he accidentally kick off fascism while getting dunked on for masturbating? Keep reading to find out!
1.
After Nietzsche's death, his sister Elisabeth curated and edited his manuscripts, reworking Nietzsche's unpublished writings to fit her own German nationalist ideology while often contradicting or distorting his stated opinions, which were explicitly opposed to antisemitism and nationalism. -u/LegendaryFalcon
2.
At 32, Richard Strauss was already widely regarded as the leading German composer of the day, Wagner’s musical heir and a controversial modernist bad boy. He intended the opening of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (which later became the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey) to depict the mountaintop sunrise that opens Nietzsche’s book of the same name. -u/yaboodooect
3.
Nietzsche was not a nihilist and feared that if nihilism took hold it could lead to great wars in the twentieth century. -u/Narwall776
4.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) and Richard Wagner (1813-1883) were frenemies, and one of the last nails in the coffin of their friendship was Wagner's allusion that Nietzsche's ill health was the result of "excessive masturbation". -u/danifrancuzrose
5.
Fascism and the rise of power of Nazism, was indirectly due to the misinterpreted understandings of Übermensch, posited by Zarathustra, in Also Sprach Zarathustra, written by Nietzsche. -u/garimus
6.
Freud repeatedly stated that he had never read Nietzsche. But evidence contradicting this are in his references to Nietzsche, his quotations and paraphrases of him, in casual conversation and his now published personal correspondence, as well as in his early and later writings. -u/imstayinalive
7.
There's a book written by Friedrich Nietzsche whose translated title is "The Gay Science", back when the word "gay" was a synonym of "cheerful." -u/elSenorMaquina
8.
Nietzsche drank only water – and as a special treat, milk. And he thought we should do likewise. The idea went to the heart of his philosophy, as contained in his declaration: ‘There have been two great narcotics in European civilization: Christianity and alcohol.’ -u/eggheado
9.
The Aryan Brotherhood has a required reading list for prospective members. It includes Sun Tzu's "The Art of War", "The Prince" by Machiavelli, and "Beyond Good and Evil" and "The Will to Power" by Nietzsche. -u/dresdnhope
10.
Superman was originally created to be a villain based on the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. -u/Momofashow
11.
Bipolar disorder is linked to creativity, with people like Van Gogh, Amy Winehouse, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Cobain, Georg Cantor and Friedrich Nietzsche having suffered from this condition. -u/malonemuistu
12.
Friedrich Nietzsche was a composer of music, not just an existential philosopher. -u/annaanonymous
13.
While the Nazis destroyed thousands of artwork by modernists such as Otto Dix, Kandinsky and Metzinger, Gustav Klimt's paintings were sparred destruction because they echoed the ideals of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Schiller. -u/AvalancheMaster
15.
In 1934, a walking stick that had belonged to Friedrich Nietzsche was presented by his sister Elisabeth to Adolf Hitler. -u/JerkyOnassis
16.
'Amor fati', coined by Nietzsche, is a phrase used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one's life, including suffering and loss, as good. -u/fuzzo
17.
When Friedrich Nietzsche switched from pen & paper to the typewriter he began writing with more generalizations, with more puns, and in a style more similar to Telegraph messages. -u/ImportantLoLFacts
18.
On his 60th birthday, Mussolini received a gift from Hitler of a complete twenty-four-volume set of the works of Nietzsche. -deleted user
19.
Despite renouncing his citizenship Friedrich Nietzsche served as a medical attendant during the Franco-Prussian War. He was present at the 1870 Siege of Metz where he contracted dysentery and diphtheria. -u/Ekolot
20.
Stephen Fry referenced Star Trek in his Cambridge dissertation on Nietzsche to exemplify the dichotomy of human nature and rational philosophy. -u/EternalRecurrence
21.
Friedrich Nietzsche owned a shrivekugel, the world's first electric typewriter, and even wrote a poem about it. -u/kcripe
22.
22 years before another horse famously brought about his nervous breakdown, Nietzsche was severely injured in the chest by trying to jump up on a saddle. “I am understating it,” he wrote a few days later, “if I say that already four to five cups of pus have come out of each wound.” -u/metallicsonatas
23.
Trevor Brown has illustrated one version of Friedrich Nietzsche's Der Antichrist. -u/PLx77dm54AchngX
24.
The Persian prophet Zoroaster was also known as Zarathustra—the namesake of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," the novel where Friedrich Nietzsche originated the concept of the "übermensch." -u/cmplsv
25.
Nietzsche criticized antisemitism and German nationalism, believing in his final years he was "a pure-blooded Polish nobleman, without a single drop of bad blood, certainly not German". He claimed he and Germany were great thanks to "Polish blood in their veins" and wanted "all antisemites shot." -u/Sandvich18
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