318 Epilogue
had called anyone who denied God a "madman" (3,481; GS § 125)—
now he was himself mad. Since these circumstances were certain to fire
up readers' imaginations, his last publisher, C. G. Naumann, sensed the
potential for big profits, and by 1890 he had published new editions of
Nietzsche's works. Finally, the books flew off the shelves. When
Nietzsche's sister returned from Paraguay in 1893, she defdy and
unscrupulously took all further marketing of her brother's writings into
her own hands. Even before his death, she set up archives in Weimar and
arranged for the first complete editions of his works, amply demon-
strating her own will to power by attempting to establish a particular
public image of her brother, even when it involved forgeries. All of this
is now common knowledge. She hoped to mold Nietzsche into a
German chauvinist, racist, and militarist, and was successful in convey-
ing this image to a substantial cross section of the public
She knew how to respond to the more sophisticated needs of the era
as well. In the Villa Silberblick, in Weimar, which housed the Nietzsche
archives after 1897, Nietzsche's sister set up a podium for the semicon-
scious Nietzsche to be presented to the public as a martyr of the mind.
A good Wagnerian, Elisabeth was able to turn her brother's condition to
sublime and chilling advantage. A metaphysical endgame was being
enacted before "Europe's top putrescence" in the Villa Silberblick. Half
a century earlier, Thomas Carlyle, who was esteemed in these circles
(although Nietzsche did not think very highly of him), had described
what was at stake in endgames of this sort: "[Man] enlarges somewhat,
by fresh discovery, his view of the Universe, and consequendy his
Theorem of the Universe,—which is an infinite Universe, and can never
be embraced wholly or finally by any view or Theorem, in any conceiv-
able enlargement" (Cadyle 101 f.). Carlyle warned against attempting to
embrace the universe. Any individual who employed the powers of logic
in this quest would be devoured in the process. Nietzsche dared to con-
ceive of the inconceivable, and was ultimately undone by his efforts to
do so. He fell victim to the colossal dimensions of life.
Nietzsche, more than virtually any other philosopher of his era, gave