Lost History – Nietzsche’s strange funeral

Nietzsche’s life story is one of the most recounted biographies of any philosopher in history. A decade of summers spent in the rarified atmosphere of Sils-Maria, followed by lonely winter months enduring agonising health issues in bleak French and Italian towns, all while furiously writing some of the most radical moral tracts ever conceived, culminated in a memorable episode.

It was one where a crazed Nietzsche rushed out onto the streets of Turin and embraced a flailing horse that was being flogged by its unforgiving master. Here is where the telling of Nietzsche’s life story often abruptly concludes.

His dramatic descent into insanity has transfixed scholars and casual readers alike for almost a hundred years. Still, despite claims that his breakdown was caused by a case of untreated syphilis, the German moralist lived on, albeit vegetatively, for an astonishing eleven years.

After the sudden demise of his extraordinary mind, Nietzsche’s ill-educated sister sought to reconcile her brother’s ambitious philosophy to emerging nationalistic tendencies. Her efforts blemished his reputation for generations and belied the true aims of his intellectual quest. For the rest of his inactive life, Elisabeth Nietzsche would present her mad brother to giddy admirers of his increasingly celebrated work as if he were a mythical animal on display.

The nascent cult that grew around the endlessly rocking, straight-jacket-wearing philosopher helped to promote him as a legend of the modern age, but every human story ends in death, and the strange details around Nietzche’s long-awaited end and awkward burial remain curiously forgotten.

Years earlier, during an illness that almost ended his life (he was persistently plagued by intense illness), Nietzsche wrote to his sister, detailing his prefered funeral: “Promise me that when I die only my friends shall stand about my coffin, and no inquisitive crowd. See that no priest or anyone else utter falsehoods at my graveside, when I can no longer protect myself; and let me descend into my tomb as an honest pagan.”

Like so many of the wishes Nietzsche entrusted to his family and friends, this request was unheeded. On August 25 1900, he suffered the last in a series of serious strokes and quietly died as the clock chimed midday.

His sister wrote letters to his devoted fans, and many quickly embarked on the journey to Rocken, Nietzsche’s hometown, to pay their respects to the revered thinker. One attendee, a man called Kessler, who had been employed by Elisabeth to help edit her brother’s papers, arrived at the Nietzsche Archive (an institute established by his apostles to collect and promote his work), in time to witness the proceedings.

He noted the inelegant unorthodoxies of the philosopher’s funeral. Nietzsche’s body was placed in a coffin hemmed with linen and white damask. His half-closed eyes apparently gave mourners the impression that he was merely sleeping.

As Kessler describes: “His last sickness gave him a pitifully drawn and emaciated expression, but the large, puffy, frost-gray moustache hides the pain of the mouth, and this splendid form appears everywhere through the emaciation: the wide, arched forehead, the robust, powerful jaw and cheekbone appear still more sharply under the skin than when he was alive. The total impression is one of strength despite the pain.”

Before the ceremony began and the large throng of grievers crowded around the open casket, two death masks were hastily arranged within half an hour by a local doctor. Tall cathedral candles glowed over the ceremony and a woman’s choir “magnificently” sang Brahms’s tragic motet.

A long and unedifying eulogy was delivered by a boring art historian called Kurt Breysig, in which he expatiated his own analysis of Nietzsche’s cultural criticisms. One participant wrote days later, “Seldom have I experienced a grimmer moment. Scholarship pursued this man to the grave. If he had been revived he would have thrown the speaker out of the window and chased us out of the temple.”

The next day, Nietzsche’s coffin was carried to the graveyard where his parents were interred. His father was a respected local priest and preacher, whom Nietzsche saw as “the perfect picture of a country parson, embodying all the Christian virtues”.

He favoured a grave on the Chaste Peninsula in Sils-Maria, where he had been so productive and, at times, even happy, but it was beside his devout and pious parents that the author who called himself “the antichrist” was laid to rest.

Those standing aside as the coffin was lowered into the earth must have imagined his vehement protestations. Anyone who knew him would have found the sight very unsettling. It was ultimately a Christian funeral, adorned by silver crosses, with pre-pubescent choristers melodiously singing spirituals and the brown belfry of the church clanging a solemn din overhead.

However, Kessler did concede that there was something atmospherically appropriate about the event: “What was Nietzschean in the service was the sunny stillness of this natural solitude: the light playing through the plum trees on the church wall and even in the grave; a large spider spinning her web over the grave from branch to branch in a sunbeam.”.

The “sunny stillness” and “natural solitude” that Kessler calls “Nietzschean” does sum up the state of mind that a perusal of Nietzsche’s philosophy can inculcate.

His life was an explosion of ideas, an eruption of terrifying realisations. Still, the end of the inner journey he espoused is often characterized by calm acceptance and sustained serenity. In the eyes of many, he prophesied the advent of a new spiritual era, our era, and to others, he was no more than an eloquent dissenter or confused genius.

Whether you agree with Nietzsche or not, it seems a shame that his funeral was conducted under the rites of a philosophy he so ardently disdained.