Eigenhändiger "Wahnsinnszettel" von Friedrich Nietzsche an Cosima Wagner

Richard-Wagner-Museum Bayreuth

Description

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) meets Cosima (1837-1913), at that time still von Bülow, the future wife of Richard Wagner (1813-1883) for the first time in 1869. Less than 20 years later, on 3 January 1889, Nietzsche collapsed on the street in Turin and lived in mental derangement until his death in 1900. Shortly before his collapse, he writes several letters to Cosima, among others, the disparate content of which already points to a severe dissociative state and which are known today as the "letters of insanity".

These messages are not only the closing words on Nietzsche’s difficult relationship to Richard Wagner, which oscillates between "fervent admirer" and arch enemy, and the complex relationship to Cosima, whom he adored, but are also among his last written testimonies at all. In his autobiographical text Ecce homo, completed shortly before, Nietzsche transfigures Cosima into "Ariadne", the woman whom Theseus (Hans von Bülow) left for Dionysus (Richard Wagner), after the latter had turned from the "Divine Hanswurst" in "Der Fall Wagner" (The Case of Wagner) into the Minotaur. He, Nietzsche, however, now comes as the true Dionysus to "Princess Ariadne, my beloved", the salutation on one of the slips of paper, after he had previously "perhaps been Richard Wagner too". In Ecce homo, Nietzsche disguises such clear allusions with the sentence that forms, as it were, the motto for the last decade of his life: "The rest is silence".