"Zarathustrastein," Sils Maria, Switzerland

                         

                              Sils Maria (Switzerland): Nietzsche's "Zarathustrastein"

   Over the years, I’ve tried to retrace important steps in Nietzsche’s life. He’s been my philosophical hero, and I’ve eaten up the details of his very unusual life. We headed to Switzerland after attending the wedding of the daughter of Manfred and Barbara, our close German friends.

   My present topic is a small village in the Swiss mountains, and its connection to the so-called “doctrine of the eternal recurrence [die ewige wiederkehr des gleichen],” one of the most intriguing ideas of the 19th-century German philosopher F.W. Nietzsche (1844-1900).

   Sils Maria is nestled in a long valley, in the Upper Engadin region of Switzerland. At the one end of the valley is St. Moritz, while at the other is the Maloja Pass leading to the Ticino and on to Italy. The emerald Lakes Silvaplana and Sils lie in the middle. The picturesque Chaste Pinninsula juts out into Lake Sils. The valley is surrounded by snow capped peaks, the highest being Mt. Corvatsch. It is about as prototypically Swiss as one can imagine. In the summer morning, there is a snap in the air, and there is always snow upon the mountain peaks.

   On the northern side of the Lake Silvaplana, there is a large rock. And it was in just this spot that Nietzsche claims to have had a momentous philosophical epiphany. He describes it in Ecce Homo (Z.1), his somewhat zany “autobiography,” whose subsections are “Why I am so Wise,” “Why I am so clever,” etc.

"Now I shall relate the history of ZARATHUSTRA. The fundamental conception of this work, the idea of the eternal recurrence, this highest formula of affirmation that is at all attainable, belongs in August 1881: it was penned on a sheet with the notation underneath, '6000 feet beyond man and time.' That day I was walking through the woods along the lake of Silvaplana; at a powerful pyramidal rock not far from Surlei I stopped. It was then that this idea came to me."

   Born to Ludwig and Franziska Nietzsche in 1844, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche early distinguished himself as an unusually preconscious child: introspective, morose, and musically talented. After going through prep school at the prestigious Schulpforta (until 1863), he went on to the Universities of Bonn (for 1 year) and Leipzig, where he proceeded to exchange the study of theology—he was expected to follow in his pastor father’s footsteps—for philology. So brilliant was his career at Leipzig, that his teacher, Friedrich Ritschel, successfully proposed him as a candidate for the chair of philosophy at the Unvisersity of Basle in Switzerland. Thus, at 24 years old, Nietzsche was a professor.

   Nietzsche stayed 10 years at Basle. During this period he discovered the philosopher Schopenhauer and the mercurial Richard Wagner, with whom he was to have a tempestuous relationship. He composed a number of remarkable books, starting with The Birth of Tragedy and culminating with the aphoristic books Human All Too Human, The Gay Science.

    Nietzsche’s health, even as a boy, had never been good. And after many periods of intense suffering from headaches, fits of vomiting, and general exhaustion, Nietzsche resigned his teaching post and began a decade of drifting throughout Switzerland and Italy. N. was a “health nut,” and he was convinced that his living conditions—sun, light, metrological conditions, etc.—were of the highest importance. It is for this reason that Nietzsche was to spend the last ten years of his sane life wandering about from place to place, looking for relief and conditions under which he could bring to light the world shaking philosophical ideas that he felt were within him and which it was his destiny to bequeath to humanity.

   In 1889, he collapsed on a street in Turin. He was to spend the last ten years of his life as a pathetic invalid, cared for, first, my his mother, and then, after her death, by his diabolical sister Elizabeth. He died in 1900. Probably the cause was syphilis.

   In 1881, Nietzsche spent his first summer in Sils, in the house of one Gian Durisch. His writes to his sister Elizabeth, July 7, 1881 (B 6, 98-9):

“Of all the places on Earth, I feel best here in the Engadine. To be sure, the attacks come to me here as they do everywhere else; yet they are milder by far, much more humane. I am continuously calmed here, none of the pressure that I feel everywhere else. Here all excessive stimulation ceases for me. I would beg of mankind, ‘Preserve for me but three or four months of summer in the Engadine, otherwise really I cannot bear life any longer’ . . . Yet the Engadine summer is so short, and by September’s end I will return to Genoa. I have never had such tranquility, and the paths, woods, lakes, and meadows are as though made for me; the prices are not altogether beyond my means . . . The place is called Sils-Maria. Please keep the name a secret from my friends; I don’t want any visitors” (Krell, p.128).

   We had a very pleasant visit to the "Nietzsche Haus," which belonged to one Gian Durisch, who was Nietzsche's landlord during the summers he visited Sils. The house, which used to serve also as a grocery store) is now called the Nietzsche Haus, and is a museum dedidcated to the philosopher.

   It was here, in Sils Maria, at a mounmental rock, that Nietzsche claims—probably mistakenly—to have come upon the idea of the “eternal recurrence” : the the claim that everything has occured, and will occur again, an infinite number of times. Nietzsche wants us to live in such a way as to be able to accept such an idea with equanimity.