When Nietzsche Wept

by Irvin D. Yalom

  “We both know that some of the services men provide are not necessarily good for women’s health!”

  “Your future husband will need extensive retraining. The habits of a lifetime are not easily extinguished.”

  “Marriage? No, not for me! I have told you. Oh, perhaps a part-time marriage—that might suit me, but nothing more binding.”

  Looking at his bold, beautiful visitor, Breuer could see much appeal in the idea of a part-time marriage. It was hard to keep in mind that she was only half his age. She wore a simple, long black dress buttoned high up to her neck, and a fur pelt with tiny fox face and feet was wrapped around her shoulders. Strange, Breuer thought, in cold Venice she discards her fur, yet clings to it in my overheated office. Still, it was time to get down to business.

  “Now, Fräulein,” he said, “let us take up the matter of your friend’s illness.”

  “Despair—not illness. I have several recommendations. May I share them with you?”

  Is there no limit to her presumption? he wondered indignantly. She speaks as though she were my confrère—the head of a clinic, a physician with thirty years of experience—not an inexperienced schoolgirl.

  Calm down, Josef! he admonished himself. She is very young, she doesn’t worship the Viennese god, Decorum. Besides, she knows this Professor Nietzsche better than I do. She’s remarkably intelligent and may have something important to say. God knows I have no idea about curing despair: I can’t cure my own.

  He answered calmly, “Indeed, Fraulein. Please proceed.”

  “My brother, Jenia, whom I saw this morning, mentioned that you used mesmerism to help Anna O. recall the original psychological source of each of her symptoms. I remember your telling me in Venice that this uncovering of the origin of each symptom somehow dissolved it. The how of this ‘somehow’ intrigues me. Some day when we have more time, I hope that you will enlighten me about the precise mechanism through which arriving at the knowledge of the source eliminates the symptom.”

  Breuer shook his head and waved his hands, palms toward Lou Salomé. “It’s an empirical observation. Even had we all the time in the world to talk, I’m afraid I could not provide you with the precision you seek. But your recommendations, Fräulein?”

  “My first recommendation is: do not attempt this mesmerism method with Nietzsche. It would not be successful with him! His mind, his intellect, is a miracle—one of the wonders of the world, as you will see for yourself. But he is, to borrow one of his favorite phrases, only human, all too human, and he has his own blind spots.”

  Lou Salomé now removed her fur, rose slowly, and walked across the office to place it on Breuer’s sofa. She glanced for a moment at the framed diplomas hanging on the wall, adjusted one that hung slightly askew, and then sat down again and crossed her legs before going on.

  “Nietzsche is extraordinarily sensitive to issues of power. He would refuse to engage in any process that he perceives as surrendering his power to another. He is attracted in his philosophy to the pre-Socratic Greeks, especially to their concept of Agonis—the belief that one develops one’s natural gifts only through contest—and he is deeply distrustful of the motives of anyone who forgoes contest and claims to be altruistic. His mentor in these matters was Schopenhauer. No one desires, he believes, to help another: instead, people wish only to dominate and increase their own power. The few times when he surrendered his power to another, he’s ended up feeling devastated and enraged. It happened with Richard Wagner. I believe it is happening now with me.”

  “What do you mean, it’s happening with you? Is it true that you are, in some way, personally responsible for Professor Nietzsche’s great despair?”

  “He believes I am. That is why my second recommendation is: do not ally yourself with me. You look puzzled—for you to understand, I must tell you everything about my relationship to Nietzsche. I shall omit nothing and answer your every question with candor. This will not be easy. I place myself in your hands, but my words must remain our secret.”

  “Of course, you may count on that, Fräulein,” he replied, marveling at her directness, at how refreshing it was to converse with someone so open.

  “Well, then. . . I first met Nietzsche approximately eight months ago, in April.”

  Frau Becker knocked and entered with coffee. If she was surprised to see Breuer seated next to Lou Salomé rather than in his customary place behind the desk, she gave no evidence of it. Without a word, she deposited a tray containing china, spoons, and a gleaming silver pot of coffee and quickly left. Breuer poured the coffee as Lou Salomé continued.

  “I left Russia last year because of my health—a respiratory condition which is now much improved. I first lived in Zurich and studied theology with Biederman and also worked with the poet Gottfried Kinkel—I don’t think I’ve mentioned that I’m an aspiring poet. When my mother and I moved to Rome early this year, Kinkel provided a letter of introduction to Malwida von Meysenburg. You know her—she wrote Memoirs of an Idealist.”

  Breuer nodded. He was familiar with Malwida von Meysenbug’s work, especially with her crusades for women’s rights, radical political reform, and diverse transformations in the educational process. He was less comfortable with her recent antimaterialistic tracts, which he thought based on pseudoscientific claims.

  Lou Salomé continued, “So I went to Malwida’s literary salon and there met a charming and brilliant philosopher, Paul Rée, with whom I became quite friendly. Herr Rée had attended Nietzsche’s classes at Basel many years before, and thereafter the two had maintained a close friendship. I could see that Herr Rée admired Nietzsche over all other men. Soon he developed the notion that, if he and I were friends, then Nietzsche and I must also become friends. Paul—Herr Rée—but, Doctor”—she flushed for only an instant, but long enough for Breuer to notice, and for her to notice him noticing—“allow me to call him Paul, since that is how I address him, and today we have no time for social niceties. I’m very close to Paul, though I’ll never immolate myself in marriage to him or to anyone!

  “But,” she went on impatiently, “I have spent enough time explaining a brief involuntary flushing of my face. Aren’t we the only animals that blush?”

  At a loss for words, Breuer could muster only a nod. For a while, surrounded by his medical paraphernalia, he had felt more powerful than during their last talk. But now, exposed to the power of her charm, he felt his strength slipping away. Her comment about her blush was remarkable: never in his life had he heard a woman, or anyone else for that matter, speak of social intercourse with such directness. And she was only twenty-one years old!

  “Paul was convinced that Nietzsche and I would become fast friends,” Lou Salomé continued, “that we were perfect for one another. He wanted me to become Nietzsche’s student, protégée, and counterfoil. He wanted Nietzsche to be my teacher, my secular priest.”

  They were interrupted by a light knock on the door. Breuer rose to open it, and Frau Becker whispered loudly that a new patient had entered. Breuer sat down again and reassured Lou Salomé that they had ample time, for unannounced patients expect long delays, and urged her to go on.

  “Well,” she continued, “Paul arranged a meeting at Saint Peter’s Basilica, the most unlikely place for the rendezvous of our unholy Trinity—the name we later adopted for ourselves, though Nietzsche often referred to it as a ‘Pythagorean relationship.’ ”

  Breuer caught himself gazing at his visitor’s bosom rather than at her face. How long, he wondered, have I been doing that? Has she noticed? Have other women noticed me doing that? In his imagination, he grabbed a broom and swept away all sexual thoughts. He concentrated harder on her eyes and her words.

  “I was immediately attracted to Nietzsche. He’s not an imposing man physically—medium height, with a gentle voice and unblinking eyes that look inward rather than out, as if he were protecting some inner treasure. I didn’t know then that he is three-quarters blind. Still, there was something extraordinarily com
pelling about him. The first words he spoke to me were: ‘From what stars have we dropped down to each other here?’

  “Then the three of us started to talk. And what talk! For a time, it appeared that Paul’s hopes for a friendship or mentorship between Nietzsche and me would be realized. Intellectually, we were a perfect fit. We folded into each other’s minds—he said we had twin brother-sister brains. Ah, he read aloud the jewels of his last book, he set my poems to music, he told me what he was going to offer the world during the next ten years—he believed that his health would grant him no more than a decade.

  “Soon Paul, Nietzsche, and I decided we should live together in a ménage à trois. We began to make plans to spend this winter in Vienna or possibly Paris.”

  A ménage à trois! Breuer cleared his throat and shifted uneasily in his chair. He saw her smiling at his discomfiture. Is there nothing she misses? What a diagnostician this woman would make! Has she ever considered a career in medicine? Might she, as my student? My protégée? My colleague, working by my side in the consulting room, the laboratory? This fantasy had power, real power—but her words shook Breuer out of it.

  “Yes, I know the world doesn’t smile upon two men and a woman living chastely together.” She accented “chastely” superbly—hard enough to set matters right, yet soft enough to avoid rebuke. “But we are free-thinking idealists who reject socially imposed restrictions. We believe in our capability to create our own moral structure.”

  As Breuer did not respond, his visitor appeared, for the first time, uncertain how to proceed.

  “Shall I continue? Do we have time? Am I offending you?”

  “Continue, please, gnädiges Fraulein. First, I have set aside the time for you.” He reached across his desk, held up his calender, and pointed to the large L.S. scrawled across Wednesday, 22 November 1882. “You see I have nothing else scheduled this afternoon. And secondly, you are not offending me. On the contrary, I admire your candor, your forthrightness. Would that all friends spoke so honestly! Life would be richer and more genuine.”

  Accepting his praise without comment, Lou Salomé poured herself more coffee and continued with her story. “First, I should make clear that my relationship with Nietzsche, though intense, was brief. We met only four times, and were almost always chaperoned by my mother, by Paul’s mother, or by Nietzsche’s sister. In fact, Nietzsche and I were seldom alone for walks or conversations.

  “The intellectual honeymoon of our unholy Trinity was also brief. Fissures appeared. Then romantic and lustful feelings. Perhaps they were present from the very beginning. Perhaps I should take responsibility for failing to recognize them.” She shook herself as if to doff that responsibility, and went on to recount a crucial sequence of events.

  “Toward the end of our first meeting, Nietzsche grew concerned about my plan for a chaste ménage à trois, thinking the world not ready for it, and asked me to keep our plan secret. He was especially concerned about his family: under no circumstances must his mother or his sister learn about us. Such conventionality! I was surprised and disappointed, and wondered if I’d been misled by his courageous language and his free-thinking proclamations.

  “Shortly afterward, Nietzsche arrived at an even stronger position—that such a living arrangement would be socially dangerous for me, perhaps even ruinous. And, in order to protect me, he said he had decided to propose marriage, and asked Paul to convey his offer to me. Can you imagine the position that put Paul in? But Paul, out of loyalty to his friend—dutifully, though a bit phlegmatically—told me of Nietzsche’s proposal.”

  “Did it surprise you?” Breuer asked.

  “Very much—especially coming after our very first visit. It also unsettled me. Nietzsche is a great man and has a gentleness, a power, an extraordinary presence; I don’t deny, Doctor Breuer, that I was strongly attracted to him—but not romantically. Perhaps he sensed my attraction to him and did not believe my assertion that marriage was as far from my mind as romance.”

  A sudden gust of wind rattling the windows distracted Breuer for a moment. He suddenly felt stiff in neck and shoulders. He had been listening so intently that for several minutes he had not moved a muscle. Occasionally patients had talked to him of personal issues, but never like this. Never face to face, never so unblinkingly. Bertha had revealed a great deal, but always in an “absent” state of mind. Lou Salomé was “present” and, even when describing remote events, created such moments of intimacy that Breuer felt they were lovers talking. He had no trouble understanding why Nietzsche would propose marriage to her after only a single meeting.

  “And then, Fräulein?”

  “Then I resolved to be more frank when we next met. But it turned out to be unnecessary. Nietzsche quickly realized that he was as frightened by the prospect of marriage as I was repelled by it. When I next saw him, two weeks later in Orta, his first words to me were that I must disregard his proposal. He urged me instead to join him in pursuit of the ideal relationship—passionate, chaste, intellectual, and nonmarital.

  “The three of us reconciled. Nietzsche was in such high spirits about our ménage à trois that he insisted, one afternoon in Lucerne, that we pose for this—the only picture of our unholy Trinity.”

  In the photograph she handed Breuer, two men were standing before a cart; she was kneeling inside it, brandishing a small whip. “The man in the front, with the mustache, gazing upward—that’s Nietzsche,” she said warmly. “The other one is Paul.”

  Breuer inspected the photograph carefully. It disturbed him to see these two men—pathetic, shackled giants—harnessed by this beautiful young woman and her tiny whip.

  “What do you think of my stable, Doctor Breuer?”

  For the first time, one of her gay comments missed its mark, and Breuer was reminded suddenly that she was only a twenty-one-year-old girl. He felt uncomfortable—he did not like to see seams in this polished creature. His heart went out to the two men in bondage—his brothers. Surely he could have been one of them.

  His visitor must have sensed her misstep, Breuer thought, noticing how she rushed to continue her narrative.

  “We met twice more, in Tautenberg, about three months ago, with Nietzsche’s sister and then in Leipzig with Paul’s mother. But Nietzsche wrote me continually. Here’s a letter, in which he responded to my telling him how moved I was by his book Dawn.”

  Breuer quickly read the short letter she handed him.

  My dear Lou,

  I, too, have dawns about me, and not painted ones! Something I no longer believed possible, to find a friend for my ultimate happiness and suffering, now seems to me possible—the golden possibility on the horizon of my whole future life. I am moved whenever I so much as think of the bold and rich soul of my dear Lou.

  F.N.

  Breuer kept silent. Now he felt an even greater bond of empathy with Nietzsche. To find dawns and golden possibilities, to love a rich, bold soul: everyone needs that, he thought, at least once in a lifetime.

  “During this same time,” Lou continued, “Paul began to write equally ardent letters. And despite my best mediating efforts, the tension within our Trinity increased alarmingly. The friendship between Paul and Nietzsche was disintegrating quickly. Ultimately they began to disparage each other in their letters to me.”

  “But surely,” Breuer interjected, “this comes as no surprise to you? Two ardent men in an intimate relation with the same woman?”

  “Perhaps I was naïve. I believed that we three could share a life of the mind, that we could do serious philosophical work together.”

  Apparently unsettled by Breuer’s question, she rose, stretched slightly, and sauntered to the window, stopping on the way to inspect some of the objects on his desk—a Renaissance bronze mortar and pestle, a small Egyptian funerary figure, an intricate wooden model of the semicircular canals of the inner ear.

  “Perhaps I’m obstinate,” she said, looking out the window, “but I am still not convinced that our ménage à trois wa
s impossible! It might have worked had it not been for the interference of Nietzsche’s odious sister. Nietzsche invited me to spend the summer with him and Elisabeth in Tautenberg, a small village in Thüringen. She and I met at Bayreuth, where we met Wagner and attended a performance of Parsifal. Then together we journeyed to Tautenberg.”

  “Why do you call her odious, Fräulein?”

  “Elisabeth is a divisive, mean-spirited, dishonest, anti-Semitic goose. When I made the mistake of telling her Paul is Jewish, she took pains to make this known to Wagner’s entire circle in order to ensure that Paul would never be welcome in Bayreuth.”

  Breuer put down his coffee cup. While at first Lou Salomé had lulled him into the sweet safe realm of love, art, and philosophy, now her words jarred him back to reality, to the ugly world of anti-Semitism. That very morning he had read in the Neue Freie Presse a story about fraternities of youths roaming the university, entering the classrooms, shouting “Juden hinaus!” (Jews get out) and forcing all Jews out of the lecture halls—physically pulling anyone who resisted.

  “Fräulein, I, too, am Jewish, and must inquire whether Professor Nietzsche shares his sister’s anti-Jewish views?”

  “I know you’re Jewish. Jenia told me. It’s important that you know Nietzsche cares only about truth. He hates the lie of prejudice—all prejudice. He hates his sister’s anti-Semitism. He is appalled and disgusted that Bernard Förster, one of Germany’s most outspoken and virulent anti-Semites, often visits her. His sister, Elisabeth. . . ”

  Now her words came faster, the pitch of her voice rising an octave. Breuer could tell that she knew she was straying from her prepared narrative, but could not stop herself.

  “Elisabeth, Doctor Breuer, is a horror. She called me a prostitute. She lied to Nietzsche and told him that I showed everyone that photo and bragged about how he loves the taste of my whip. She always lies! She is a dangerous woman. Some day, mark my words, she will do Nietzsche great damage!”