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I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche review

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https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books...-1.3675846

EXCERPT: In her wonderfully gripping new biography of Nietzsche – the type you stay in bed all Sunday just to finish – Sue Prideaux casts doubt on [...the horse story...].

[...] Prideaux casts even more doubt on the cause usually attributed to this insanity: syphilis. Popularised by Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, which has a Nietzsche-like character contract syphilis in a brothel, the evidence simply doesn’t stack up. Although diagnosed as such when admitted to the asylum in Basle, Nietzsche showed none of symptoms now associated with it: no tremor, faceless expression or slurred speech. If he was at an advanced stage of dementia caused by syphilis, Nietzsche should have died within the next two years; five max. He lived for another 11. The two infections he told the doctors about were for gonorrhoea, contracted when he was a medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian War.

Instead Prideaux puts forward the – correct – view that Nietzsche probably died of a brain tumour, the same “softening of the brain” that had taken away his father, a rural pastor, when Nietzsche was a boy. [...]

At stake is whether Nietzsche’s writings, and especially his theory of the Übermensch, should just be dismissed as the ravings of a madman [...] Nietzsche’s infamous line concerning women is of course “You go to women? do not forget the whip!” Yet in the photo that immortalised that phrase it is Lou Andreas-Salomé, the Russia psychoanalyst and muse of Freud, who is holding the whip, with both Nietzsche and his friend Paul Rée pulling the cart. As Prideaux shows, Nietzsche entertained relations with, and was appreciated by, the leading women – sometimes feminist women – of his day.

[...] Prideaux’s Nietzsche is one who is invested with all the hopes and aspirations of a family that has lost a father at a young age, and who is perceived, within that intimate circle, as something approaching a god. He more than fulfilled that destiny...

MORE: https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books...-1.3675846
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