Today, on August 25, 2025, we mark the 125th anniversary of Friedrich Nietzsche’s death – for me, the most important thinker the world has ever brought forth. Already this first sentence reveals it: I am a true Nietzsche-friend ❤️.
It was my beloved Friedrich who first led me to Switzerland, in the summer of 2018. He loved the village of Sils in the Engadin, where he spent seven summers between 1881 and 1888. “In the Engadin I feel by far the most at home on earth…,” he wrote, calling Sils his “true homeland and cradle”.
Here, Friedrich experienced his most creative period. He noted:
“On my horizon thoughts have arisen such as I have never seen before… The intensities of my feeling make me shudder and laugh – more than once I could not leave my room for the rather ridiculous reason that my eyes were inflamed – from what? Each time it was because the day before, on my wanderings, I had wept too much, and not sentimental tears, but tears of jubilation… filled with a new vision that I possess ahead of all others.”
For six summers, I followed in his footsteps in the Engadin, repeatedly visiting the Nietzsche House and spending much time on the Chasté Peninsula at his monument, greeting Friedrich each time with “Hello, my great treasure“. Sils truly is a magical place, and it is beautiful to see how he is still honored there today: every summer with the Nietzsche Workshop, every September with the Nietzsche Colloquium.
In the preface to The Antichrist he wrote: “Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.” He would never have admitted it openly, but I am sure this late recognition would have pleased him.
I thought long about which of his quotations I might include here on this day of remembrance. But to me, Friedrich’s thoughts are too precious to be torn out of their context.
Instead, I would like to share passages from the preface written by Rüdiger Görner for his book Nietzsches Kunst (2000), because he so aptly captures what defines Nietzsche’s thinking. I tried to translate these passages into English:
“Nietzsche” is still the name for an intellectual temptation to think the unheard-of. “Nietzsche” means to stake existence intellectually. “Nietzsche” stands for acrobatics of thought without a net, without hidden safeguards – and at the same time for subterranean labor in the abyssal shafts of existence, in the ore-rich tunnels of life; what has been brought to light there, generation after generation since that mental death in Turin, both gleams and weighs heavily, shames in its radical substance, often alienates, and at times makes us shiver.
Nietzsche had turned thinking into a volcanic event whose aftershocks continue to unsettle us, move us, repel us, but at the very least, they do not leave us indifferent. In Nietzsche we encounter an artist of language unparalleled in philosophical writing, an artist intoxicated by intellectuality, an intellectual who composed with thoughts. Whatever he found in his time as “established” he “de-established,” meaning: through his way of thinking he exposed the premises and components of our world-understanding to an unimagined freedom.
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Perhaps, alongside all our psychological-voyeuristic findings, we should place the simple insight that Nietzsche possessed an insatiable urge toward living intellectualization; that the essence of his life was intellectualism; that his hunger for life was always also a construct of thought, in which he assigned, and this is the decisive point, a preeminent role to “art.” But perhaps the depth of intellectual love does indeed surpass the imaginative capacity of a civilization that has grown accustomed to gratification through video and the internet.
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No, with a touch of compensation theory here and a dose of narcissism analysis there, we come only partially close to Nietzsche. That is to say, such approaches tend rather to evade the true challenge posed by his work – his sheer intellectuality, his will to penetrate, in thought, what was, what is, and what may be. Already in Nietzsche we find – and here the main thesis of this book is stated – the intellectuality of modernity driven to its extreme, in all its contradictions, yet not as a mere exercise in thought but as a lived artwork of thinking. This is the enormity of his philosophizing. Nietzsche was an analyst with creative intent. He dissected, segmented, in order to reassemble. In doing so, he shattered less than he meticulously tapped and tested in whatever cultural “substance” presented itself to him.
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It may be, as Thomas Mann suggested, that whoever follows Nietzsche is lost. Yet whoever does not engage with him, who does not sense that Nietzsche marked the boundaries of critical reason, who does not feel how this thinking – born of ecstasy and suffering – still cuts beneath the skin, forfeits an unparalleled experience of thought and language. To forgo it is a luxury only for those who can.
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We, the postmodern pleasure-seekers, who like to pride ourselves on cheerfully deconstructing Being and Meaning with Nietzsche – placing him in the very midst of the fairground of arbitrariness. Whoever thinks this way equally lacks “measure.” For such a judgment completely overlooks that this thinker suffered from the emptiness of truth, from the intrusion of irony into deep feeling; that he experienced the dissolution of the True into the free play of metaphors (with himself and with thought) as both delight and torment. Nietzsche’s diagnoses hurt; his art of thought and language did not transmute this pain – it rendered it almost polyphonic, yet also shrill and dissonant. Through it we feel the vibrations and the impact of those arrows he knew how to hurl with such verbal force – often enough against himself. With each book he seemed to multiply, becoming Dionysus, Zarathustra and Sebastian. To become many and yet remain unmistakable – this too was an essential side of Nietzsche’s “art.”
Source: Nietzsches Kunst: Annäherung an einen Denkartisten, Rüdiger Görner, Insel Taschenbuch, 2000
Translated by me