Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born in the small Prussian village of Röcken, the son of a Lutheran pastor. He would grow up to challenge the moral and religious foundations of European civilization, producing works like Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil that questioned truth, morality, and meaning itself, influencing philosophy, literature, and politics for generations after his death.
Nietzsche was born on the birthday of the reigning Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and his father, a village pastor, named him in the monarch's honor. It was an oddly conventional start for a thinker who would spend his adult life attacking convention, religion, and inherited morality with unmatched ferocity and style.
His father died when Nietzsche was only four, and he grew up in a household of women — his mother, sister, grandmother, and aunts — an environment biographers have long puzzled over given his later, often venomous writings about women. He became a professor of classical philology at Bonn and Basel by his mid-twenties, a prodigy whose academic career collapsed under chronic illness before he turned thirty-five.
What followed was a decade of extraordinary productivity: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals — books written in a kind of philosophical fever, often self-published because publishers wouldn't touch him. He collapsed into madness in 1889 and never wrote again, dying in 1900, unaware his ideas were about to reshape the twentieth century, for better and — through Nazi misappropriation — for very much worse.
Key people: Friedrich Nietzsche