246 Nietzsche
With a flaming spear you crushed
All its ice until my soul
Roaring toward the ocean rushed
Of its highest hope and goal.
Ever healthier it swells,
Lovingly compelled but free:
Thus it lauds your miracles,
Fairest month of January!
(3,521; GS Book 4)^1When Nietzsche asked his friend Gersdorff to read book 4, which
was dedicated to the androgynous martyr, he declared that his books
revealed "so much about me, which a hundred letters of friendship
would not be able to match. Read the Sanctus Januarius in particular
with this idea in mind" (B 6,248; late Aug. 1882). Some interpreters have
viewed this statement as an indirect confession of Nietzsche's homo-
erotic tendencies, and assert that it provides a key to his life and works.
Speculations abound. The boy grew up without a father, surrounded
by women. There are alleged indications of sibling incest in the early
years. Did litde "Fritz" perhaps even pull Elisabeth into his bed and
wind up plagued by a bad conscience? Some researchers have traced
Nietzsche's sexual secrets all the way back to his years in boarding
school, citing the story of the decadent vagabond poet Ernst Ordepp,
who was famous and infamous around Naumburg. The students idol-
ized Ordepp, a shabbily clad genius who roved through the forests,
nearly always inebriated, and on summer days recited and sang his
poems under classroom windows. This unnerving man was notorious
for his attacks on Christianity. He disturbed church services with loud
interjections. His poem "The Lord's Prayer of the Nineteenth Century,"
which closes with the lines "Old time religion / Despised by the new
(^1) Translation by Walter Kaufmann, in Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
(New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. 221.