Lou Salomé and the Quest for intimacy 247era's son, / And comes the call throughout the earth: / Your name will
have no holy worth'" (Schulte 33), was widely discussed. Nietzsche's
poetry album from his years in Pforta featured several poems by the
ostracized Ordepp, who was suspected of pederasty. In early July 1864,
Ordepp was discovered dead in a ditch, and Nietzsche and his friends
collected money for a tombstone.
In a poem called "Before the Crucifix," the eighteen-year-old
Nietzsche portrayed this bizarre man as an intoxicated blasphemer who
calls out to the man on the cross: "Come down! Are you just deaf? /
You can have my botde! (/2,187). According to a biographical recon-
struction by H. J. Schmidt, Ordepp may have been the first Dionysian
seducer in Nietzsche's life, engaging not only his imagination but also
his sexuality. Nietzsche, who was both traumatized and exhilarated by
this experience, as some surmise, never, in their estimation, got over
this first molestation by Dionysus incarnate. They claim that this inci-
dent set the stage for his Dionysian experience, which he later alluded
to, covertly and guilt-ridden, in Ecce Homo: "the absolute certainty as to
what I am was projected onto some coincidental reality or other—the
truth about me spoke out of a dreadful depth" (6,314£; EH "Birth of
Tragedy" § 4).
If we are prepared to relate Nietzsche's alleged sexual seduction (per-
haps even rape) by Ordepp and the homosexual inclinations that were
awakened (or intensified) in the process to these "dreadful depths," we
will uncover further references to this experience throughout his
works—masked by encoded images and recollections. But if we were to
do so, we would be reducing the immense range of life that inspired
Nietzsche's thought to the secret history of his sexuality and making it
the privileged focal point of truth. These days, sexuality is equated with
the truth of the individual, which is arguably our era's most prominent
fiction regarding the nature of truth. This fiction, however, was already
being circulated back in the nineteenth century.
Nietzsche suffered from the brutality and veiled aggression of the
sort of will to truth that judges people on the basis of their sexual his-