German · 1844–1900
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher and classical philologist. Born in 1844 in Röcken, Prussian Saxony, he became professor of classical philology at the University of Basel at 24. Poor health forced him to resign in 1879, and he spent the next decade writing in Swiss, Italian and French lodgings. His books include The Birth of Tragedy, Human, All Too Human, The Gay Science, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals and Twilight of the Idols. He wrote mostly in aphorisms and short essays, attacking Christian morality, German nationalism and the belief in fixed truths. He announced that God is dead, described the Superman, the will to power and eternal recurrence, and asked how people could live without inherited meaning. In January 1889 he collapsed in Turin and never recovered his mind. He died in Weimar in 1900, cared for by his mother and sister. His work shaped existentialism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology and postmodern thought.