1033Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in Röcken, Prussia, in 1844. He was
named in honor of the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, whose birthday,
October 15, he shared. Nietzsche’s father, Ludwig Nietzsche, was a Lutheran
minister and his mother, Franziska Oehler Nietzsche, was the daughter of a
Lutheran minister. When Nietzsche was only 5 years old, his father died from
what was called “softening of the brain,” after a year of mental instability. The
rest of Nietzsche’s childhood was spent in a household of women, including his
widowed mother, his sister, his anxiety-prone paternal grandmother, and two
maiden aunts.
Following grade school, Nietzsche attended a famous boarding school at
Pforta, where he did outstanding work. However, while there, Nietzsche suffered
migraine headaches, which continued to afflict him until he experienced a mental
breakdown in 1889. The medicine he took to relieve the headaches upset his
stomach and left him nauseous. For much of his adult life, he alternated between
the extremes of headaches and nausea with only short periods of health in
between.
In 1864, he enrolled at the University of Bonn to study theology and classical
philology (linguistics), but he left within a year. By this time, he had given up
whatever religious faith he had and was no longer interested in theology. He then
moved to the University of Leipzig to continue his studies in philology. His pro-
fessor at Leipzig, Friedrich Ritschl, was so impressed with Nietzsche’s work that
he published some of his papers and later recommended him for a chair of classi-
cal philology at the University of Basel. In 1869, at the unusual age of only 24,
Nietzsche was given the chair as an associate professor. He had produced neither
a doctoral dissertation nor the additional book normally required of an associateFRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
1844–1900