Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche was raised having five women around him - his mother, grandmother, two aunts and a sister, all living together. His father, a Lutheran pastor, died when Nietzsche was 5 years old. After a Catholic school he studied music and Greco-Roman culture at the famous Schulpfora from 1858-1864, continued at the universities of Bonn, Leipzig and Basel, where he was a professor of classic philology for 12 years. His influences were: classic history, Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and Jesus Christ, whom he called "Superman". His main books are "The Gay Science", "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", "Beyond Good and Evil", "Twilight of the Idols" and the radical "Antichrist". Nietzsche analyzed foundations of values and morality through transformations of human nature and society. His contention that traditional values, religion and God, are not working in the modernized world, led to his conceptual statement: "God is dead. " In replacement of God comes his concept of a superman - a rational, secure and highly independent individual. He lists Jesus, Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, Goethe and Napoleon as models or prototypes of a superman. His idealistic superman was often misinterpreted as a role for a dictator in a totalitarian society. Nitzsche's goal for this concept was mainly individualistic because of his despise of any crowd and attention to him. He considered any crowd as a main source of lies and manipulations. According to Nietzsche it is the independence that allows a superman to be truly original and creative. His sarcastic humor and contradictory ideas, often misunderstood in metaphysical context, caused misinterpretations of his personality and his works. His nihilism resulted from frustrations in search of meaning. For self-liberation Nietzsche terminated his German citizenship and remained a stateless person for the rest of his life. He distanced himself from Richard Wagner being repelled by the banality of the Bayreuth shows and the baseness of the crowd. He suffered from migraine headaches and from shortsightedness to the degree of blindness that caused his retirement from University of Basel. After he saw a brutal beating of a horse on a street, Nitzsche had a mental breakdown at age 44, and he retreated into solitude as a self-defense from crowds and manipulations.

Nietzsche was a lifelong but unwilling bachelor. In 1876, he proposed to Mathilde Trampedach. She turned him down, partly because she had only known him a few days, but mostly because he had sent his proposal in the form of a letter that was delivered by her boyfriend (and later husband) conductor Hugo von Senger. Six years later Nietzsche repeated the experiment with German-Russian author Lou Salome, once again sending his proposal through her then-lover, philosopher Paul Ree. Lou also rejected both Nietzsche's and Ree's proposals, and instead fell in love with poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

Nietzsche's idea of a day in a life repeating itself again, and again, and again was written at the end of the Book IV of "The Gay Science" (1887).

He coined the word "Super Man" in 1888. Fifty years later Jerry Siegle and Joe Shuster would use to the word in creating Superman.

He lived with his mother and sister until his death of pneumonia in 1900. Most researchers regard his breakdown as irrelevant to his works. He received postmortem recognition by existentialists and by 20th century postmodern philosophers.

Inducted into the International Mustache Hall of Fame in 2017 in the category Historical Figure.