It is reported that the 14-year-old Nietzsche was known as “The Little Pastor” at the Schulpforta school, for his resemblance to a country parson in seriousness and other-worldliness. In fact he was sometimes called    “The Little Groover” for his wild harmonica playing and hipness, and the whole received biography of him is open to deconstruction. Indeed we shall see that in his moments of greatest lucidity, often spent trying to contract syphilis, and in his hours of greatest madness, frequently spent trying to read the labels on Italian sport shirts as God would read them, he was not the superman we thought we knew.

It is known that, at the University of Bonn, Nietzsche preferred cream cakes to beer and was admitted to the prestigious Franconia fraternity only because he could sing the falsetto parts to the then current doo-wop songs. The story of his visiting a house of prostitution and, upon seeing the women, seizing upon the piano as the “only living thing in the room” is legendary but probably untrue. According to Hegel (Bill Hegel, not the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich), who was also a visitor to the establishment that evening, Nietzsche exclaimed, “Now you womens listen here,” took out his pocket harmonica, and bent blue notes all night long. By morning he had surpassed W.C. Handy and Jellyroll Morton in the development of the 12-bar blues, had transformed the Hohner harp from an instrument used by the Germans only to play the song “Sweet Edelweiss” and “The Beer Barrel Polka” into an instrument beloved of the swinging, lowdown masses, and had grown an enormous mustache that women referred to as “the little beaver.”

Nietzsche’s musical innovations did not stop there. While he continued to take courses in Aryan appreciation and world domination at the university, he got a job as a volksinger or “volkie” in a local coffeehouse, one of the first of its kind. Here he tried holding the harmonica in his mouth vertically, so that it resembled a small ladder running from his chin to his nose, and sometimes strummed a guitar while he played it. Other times he blew on the guitar while strumming the harp, but this didn’t work out so well. But his creativity was not to be stopped, and one evening when the great bluesman Wagner stopped in for a large house blend with half-and-half to go, he and Nietzsche got in to a cutting session, Nietzsche on harp and Wagner on the Bonn Philharmonic Orchestra. Nietzsche was sharp, but he was outgunned.

Nietzsche’s meeting with Wagner was a turning point in his life. Nietzsche revered the older man, who had already composed the operas Big Leg Woman and Smokestack Lightning and was hard at work completing the libretto for his magnum opus, Has You Ever Seen a One-Eyed Fraulein Cry?, soon hailed as the beginning of opera for Nordic blondes. The maestro was also occupied in opening a chain of musical instrument discount stores and tanning spas in Bayreuth. Nietzsche quickly became the disciple of the great man, took a job as assistant manager in a Wagnerian boutique and allowed himself to be reduced to the role of household servant and babysitter. Nietzsche did Wagner’s Christmas shopping for him, and bought his and Cosima’s children some toy Jews to shoot with their BB guns. Wagner and the kids were delighted, but Nietzsche had second thoughts. By the new year he saw he had to break with Wagner, not just over Jew-baiting but because he had a jones for Cosima that was bringing him down, and the erstwhile disciple sealed his fate by leaving the sheet music to “Havah Nagilah” on Wagner’s piano. The great composer was incensed and banished the younger man from Triebschen forever, or at least until he stopped eating matzo.

Nietzsche’s settled life was now over. He resigned his professorship at the University of Basel, where he had transferred from Bonn under the mistaken impression that the chicks were wilder here and sunglasses cheaper, and where he taught Blues Harp 101, Working with Mojos 101-2, Beginning Hand Jive for Teutons, and Introduction to Saluting and Heel-Clicking. The official reason he gave for his resignation was that he had no clean laundry. Also, his first book, Wagner Is De Hoodoo Man, had earned him the opprobrium of the conservative academic community, since he wrote it as a comic strip. He tried a career in the cavalry, but was thrown from his horse so often that it was more convenient to just let the animal drag him places by his heel caught in the stirrup. There was now nothing for him to do but wander over Europe as a vagabond thinker, a job that paid only minimum wage.

Now begin the years of Nietzsche’s greatest writings, but it was a race against time since staying in cheap hotels that smelled of unwashed tourists and trying to read foreign, handwritten menus with his failing eyesight would soon drive him mad. At Steinabad in the Black Forest, 1875, he wrote the first of his immortal aphorisms:

1. You can’t pooh-pooh Purdue.

This was followed the next year, in Naumburg, by the stunningly original:

2. I like Ike.

And then in Klingenbrunn came the farsighted:

3. Nixon’s the one.

Even Rohde, Nietzsche’s best friend at Leipzig, did not fathom these insights, whose future-directed import was only detected by Lou Salome, the brilliant and beautiful Russian discotheque dancer whom Nietzsche had befriended. It was she who was the inspiration for his next famous barb, composed at Tautenburger:

4.What is woman? A flat-foot floozy with a floy-floy.

Lou refused to marry Nietzsche, who proposed to her within five minutes of their first meeting, since his schedule allowed no time for foreplay. The two parted in bitterness, Nietzsche writing:

5. Hot sted ralston on the rilla rah.

This seemed to skirt the real issue, and Ritschl at Bonn was openly skeptical. But then, at Sorrento in 1882, came the final breakthrough and cry of independence:

6. It’s my way or the autobahn.

It was a virtual hermit who completed what is assuredly his most famous work, Zarathustra Does Dallas, in a tiny apartment in Turin that did not have running water, heat, a roof, or a floor. The work was made even harder by his always being behind in his rent, but whenever the landlord demanded payment, Nietzsche produced an a priori proof that the landlord didn’t exist. That bought him valuable time.

Soon the philosopher began to have dizzy spells. Once he excitedly asked the landlord, whom at last he had ingratiated by agreeing to stay away from the paying guests, who found him repulsive, if he would like to see Zarathustra’s Stone, the natural monument that had inspired him to write of good and evil. He dragged the protesting landlord into the nearby forest and there showed him a rock the size of a walnut, exclaiming, “There you see it! The magnificent stone that has inspired the greatest of all books!” Only after much heated debate did the landlord persuade the thinker to call a much larger stone in the vicinity Zarathustra’s Stone, so as not to make a laughingstock of himself and his work.

The end was now near. The first of every month, when his pension of three deutsche marks, a booklet of discount coupons, and a complimentary sausage arrived from Basel, Nietzsche, sick to death of sausage, which he called “the curse of the Germans, unless I mean lite beer,” rang up Pasquale’s Pizza in downtown Turin and ordered a delivery. In the words of Tony, the usual delivery person, “Nietzsche’s toppings grew wilder and madder each month. One time it would be olives and figs with mutton, then jalapenos and cotton candy with hemlock and bean sprouts, and crazier and crazier after that. His tiny room was full of empty and half-empty pizza boxes. And he didn’t tip, or maybe he’d just hand me an aphorism written on a napkin. Tragic, I call it!”

Nietzsche had just received a sub with pizza sauce and extra cheese when the final breakdown occurred. They had forgotten the pickle spear! It was too much and his great mind turned inward. He accosted strangers on the streets and introduced himself as “the god of pepperoni.” He threw his arms around the neck of a street cleaner’s horse and cried, “Manny, do you remember those nights we spent with Alma in the back room at Arnold’s?”

Within a few weeks his sister Elizabeth arrived to become the insane man’s business manager and barber. She allowed his mustache to grow to a weight of fifty pounds and billed him as a rock act called The Teutonic Bopper. He died five years later, like many central Europeans of the era from a combination of primary, secondary, and tertiary syphilis, migraine, plaque build-up, existential angst and nonstop touring, and also because his guitarist quit. By then he was world famous with ten platinum albums to his credit.

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Mike Fowler has contributed so many times to this magazine that he might as well live here.