[Binion is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt from his highly praised biography of Andreas-Salomé, he discusses her 1894 study of Friedrich Nietzsche's life and work.]

[After Nietzsche's breakdown in 1889] Lou could develop no farther as authoress, feminist, or female except as Nietzsche's ex-disciple. In "Der Realismus in der Religion" of late 1891, she implicitly declared herself loyal to Nietzsche's sometime Réealism. Her professed purpose was to pin down "the religious affect," as Nietzsche had prompted her to—and she did identify its two edifying components quite nicely: a feeling of deepest personal insufficiency and the very opposite. Her final purpose was what she took Nietzsche's to have been: religious prophecy. She contended that the "science of religion" must henceforth attend to the religious affect, presumably an all-human affect given a huge recent crop of books arguing from man's "inner need" for religion to its "pragmatic value." And she went on to present worship as the supreme manifestation of man, which rises with him from crude wishing through god-making to a longing for holy communion. She saw nothing to hamper piety in the recognition that gods are man-made; on the contrary, she declared that the only true gods were those knowingly devised by a worshipper to suit himself. Her hints at how gods are devised were strictly rhetorical: once the religious affect is self-avowed, "human strength and majesty … create a god owing to no inconsequence of thought, but to the religious productivity of the entire self aspiring aloft"; religious mystification will soonest cease "if modern man gains the force not only to turn away from whatever his reason exposes as deception, but also to turn toward whatever conduces to his uninhibited inner development"; to become religiously productive as of old despite the new "frightful unbridgeable gap" between "thinking and believing," we must face up to "our need and loneliness in our god-abandonment" and not "try to fool our-selves with any philosophical sham-god"; the "one thing needful" is the courage to look within ourselves to where "the saving god has every time emerged." These prescriptions resemble nothing so much as Lou's Tautenburg formula for Nietzsche's idealizing, the more since now as then she treated ideals as equivalent to gods for devotional purposes. Thus she set up as Nietzschean god-maker—while tacitly asserting that she had created her childhood god knowingly and that he had been true nonetheless.

Following Nietzsche's breakdown, Lou filled in her old sketch of him and brought it up-to-date as she pored over his life's work. The result was the first significant treatment of him in print: ten precursory articles of 1891-1893, elaborated into Friedricb Metzscbe in seimen Werken of 1894. This final product was intended as a case study of a freethinker religiously creating and miscreating ideals and as an object lesson in reducing a philosophy to a personal dossier on its author. Nietzsche's writings emerged as symptomatic expressions of a self-induced nervous derangement at distinct stages of its development toward insanity. This thesis, startling for its time, was damning for Nietzsche in effect and in aftereffect, confused as were Lou's intent and argument respectively.

According to Friedricb Metzscbe in seinen Werken, Nietzsche's life was dominated successively by his boyhood religious faith, his philological studies, his devotion to Schopenhauer and Wagner, his positivism, and finally a prophetic-mystical exaltation of the will. The transitions, abrupt, were marked by acute pathological crises. Each was a deliberate 'falling ill through thoughts and getting well through thoughts. "For "whenever he began to feel at ease within one outlook" he would repudiate it, unloosing instinctual turmoil within himself; then he would engage in a new intellectual enterprise entailing a new instinctual harmony. This "psychic process … is his ever-recurrent typical experience, through which he ever again straightened himself out, raised himself up over himself—and finally fell head over heels to his ruin." He took his power of recovery for a sign of health; just as surely as he ever cured himself, however, "just as necessarily did he, after long convalescence, require suffering and struggle, fever and wounds" again. "Over every goal reached, every convalescence completed, stand the same words: 'He who attains his ideal thereby goes beyond it.'"

This pattern was possible because of what Nietzsche himself called his "decadent" emotional constitution. Even just before a crisis, when he was at his healthiest, his drives were at variance, only directed to a common goal—as if vying for honors in the same heroic campaign. And yet even then his drive to knowledge actually lorded it over the others, since it was as knower that he set his drives their new goal of knowledge in the first place, then watched them rally. The "power of knowledge" was in fact so "divisive" as to "make it look" as though the goal lay "outside" of the drives, which consequently only pressed the harder toward it "as if to elude themselves and their conflict." Nietzsche could draw bliss "from such a transparent self-deception" through all his suffering because his religious affect, stirred by this sacrifice of one part of himself to another, fixed upon his own person for want of a more credible object—wherewith the "cleavage" turned into a "dividuum." [Binion adds in a footnote: "Choice rhetoric follows: 'Health was attained, to be sure, but by means of illness; real worship, but by means of self-deception; real self-affirmation and self-elevation, but by means of self-injury. Whence in the potent religious affect, from which alone in Nietzsche's case all knowledge proceeds, lie inextricably interwined: self-sacrifice and self-apotheosis, cruel self-destruction and voluptuous self-divinization, woeful languishing and triumphant convalescing, glowing ecstasy and cool self-awareness,' each 'ceaselessly' conditioning its opposite—'a chaos that would, that must bear a god.' "]

Indeed, his mental peregrinations began when in his boy-hood he forsook the paternal faith, dear as it was to his heart, because "his mind needed emotional battles, pains, and convulsions so as to attain to itself in potent development." Thereafter he "longed for the lost paradise, while his mental development compelled him to depart from it in a straight line," so that he sought God "in the most diverse forms of self-divinization: that is the story of his mind, his works, his illness." In his positivist period, he exalted rationality over against affectivity as if to spite himself. The result was "that religiously motivated self-split required by Nietzsche by dint of which the knower can look down upon his own being with its stirrings and drives as upon a second being"; thereby "he so to say sacrificed himself to the truth as to an ideal power" in "an attempt to intoxicate himself through this self-coercion," even while regarding his new ideal as cool balm for his overheated soul. Even at that the new unity set in, where-upon he sang and sighed again with his whole heart. Only the next time round did he (with "secret ruse") "finally solve the tragic conflict of his life—the conflict of needing God and yet having to deny him. First, drunk with longing, he fashioned the mystical overman-ideal in dreams and raptures, seer-like; then, to escape from himself, he strove to identify himself with his creature by a frightful leap. Thus at the last he turned into a double personage: half sick, suffering man and half redeemed, laughing overman." This was madness already—and through his mind's "highest sacrifice, the sacrifice of itself," he had come full circle, "like a weary child returning to its first home."

In point of fact Nietzsche's insanity was due to a brain ailment of physical origin, hence was not mentally selfinduced, and there is no correlation whatever between the onsets of his malady, his intellectual self-renewals, and his alternations between felt instinctual harmony and felt instinctual chaos. He does seem to have induced and relished many a crisis, only not knowingly. Lou, however, lacked a conception of unconscious purpose, for all her strong sense of it: thus she was attempting a psychoanalysis without the theoretic means. Nietzsche did somehow, from childhood on, prepare for a psychic split "into sacrificial god and sacrificial animal." Lou, though, despite her reductive intent, respected his own intellectualizations of his instinctual trouble—beginning with the "religious affect" and the "knowledge-drive." Besides, if his knowledge-drive did set the direction for all his other drives, there was no "inner cleavage." And anyhow, this whole problematical scheme loosely adapted from Nietzsche cannot accommodate his transition of 1882 from exalting the dispassionate quest for knowledge to denigrating it on the instincts' behalf. As to the why of his successive self-renewals, her referring them back to an original repudiation of Christianity merely displaced the question. What "drove him" from his "warm 'home'" in the first place (along that straight circular course)? A "dark instinct."

Were his new departures so very abrupt? The one treated as prototypical—his abandonment of Christianity—appears to have been gradual, and Lou's own detailed account gradualized those to and away from positivism. Again, were they so very radical? Possibly he said so in Tautenburg. But later he boasted lifelong philosophic constancy for all his Wagnerite and positivist posturing—and, at the other extreme, perpetual philosophic experimentation. There was certainly more continuity, even fixity, to his constructions and valuations than Lou's thesis allowed. His self-imposed orientations remain: philologic scholarship, discipleship to Schopenhauer and Wagner, positivism. But after 1882 did he not simply come into his own? And was his output all of a piece from the visionary Zarathustra through the reflective, argumentative Beyond Good and Evil and The Genealogy of Morals to the frantic Nietzscheana of 1888? Her characterization of his final personality split, lurid as it may be, is quite apposite to these last (except for the laughing) and premonitorily to Zarathustra—only in that case he took his "frightful leap" right over those two sturdy, searching works in between.

Actually Lou had more than she could do to schematize Nietzsche's last six years' work, let alone schematize it under the sign of self-imposition, especially as she rightly denied that it came to any "system." On one of her pages Nietzsche, dreading a final solution to his beloved problems, "plunges definitively into the eternal riddles of mysticism"—which just won't do. On another he is a "Columbus in reverse" in that, striking out from positivism, he alights unknowingly on his prepositivist shores of "meta-physics"—only these same old shores turn antipodal when the late as against the early "metaphysics" is called an affirmation as against a negation of life: "sansara" as against "nirvana." Into her extensive definition of "Nietzsche's final philosophy" went a "repudiation of his former purely logical ideal of knowledge" together with a "displacement of the foundation for truth into the world of emotional impulses, source for a new appraisal of all things," a "mystical philosophy of the will" informed by a conception of "everything highest" as "a kind of atavism," a preoccupation with dreams and madness, a "glorification of artistry" as alone imparting final meaning to existence, and, over-riding even this last, a cult of genius amounting to "the mystery of a prodigious self-apotheosis" and issuing in "a religious mysticism in which God, world, and man fuse into a single prodigious superbeing."

Lou's aptest point was of no real use to her argument: that then as before, only more so, Nietzsche "generalized his soul into a world soul" and voiced his "inner inspiration" as "a commandment for all mankind." Accordingly, his own instincts being anarchic, he called all mankind decadent, and hailed the overman for the sake of his own self-redemption. Only she added that his late hypotheses—and "most particularly" those about Jesus as "bait"—were consequently not to be taken seriously "on their scientific side," for "exact scientific inquiry now played no further role with him": that he was merely "out to elicit from and project into human history something the significance of which lay for him within a hidden emotional problem.… The basic question for him was not what the emotional history of mankind had been, but how to construe his own emotional history as that of all mankind." This is inexact and unjust enough for Lou to have "most particularly" sensed what "hidden emotional problem" he was construing. For, properly stated, his purpose was to study his own moral prehistory introspectively while knowing the external facts of it. And the resultant hypotheses were scientific inasmuch as they cut straight through a whole mass of historical data, cutting out none. Hypotheses drawn from introspection are, if anything, less liable to be vitiated by unwitting projection than others. The "slave nature," Lou contended, was Nietzsche's own ego, the "master nature" his self-ideal, "whence his conception of the historical battle between the two is in its entire import nothing but a coarsened illustration of what goes on in the highest human individual." But of course! Except for that sly "entire," Lou's reduction was here no less valid than Nietzsche's introspection—only to reduce is still not to refute. At the same time, it was her good right—and better—to reject his oracular valuation of historic values. For whereas it took introspective genius to date the human soul from when bullied weaklings first made a virtue of bullying themselves in retaliation, and even granted that self-bullying is self-defeating in the long run, Nietzsche's prescription for speeding delivery of the overman (through intensifying humanity's nihilistic birthpangs) was no more binding on others than were his incessant dictates concerning good taste. Yet again, through nothing did he show up our ethic as ascetical and other-worldly (hence superannuated) so neatly as through the demonic question of whether, if we knew that we should be bound to relive our lives ad infinitum, we would not live them differently. Lou, however, saw in this "eternal repetition of that which is of itself senseless" only a fearsome id&e fixe of his late period from which he looked to himself as philosopher-savior for deliverance.

Lou's animus against Nietzsche's postpositivism is plain—and was plainly affectionate at the source, for the sense of it is that Nietzsche had taken a bad turn in quitting the Trinity. Yet she was also insisting that, as his disinherited daughter-bride, she had missed out on only desultory ravings. Through her thesis about his self-induced transitional crises, meanwhile, she was declaring herself the merest innocent occasion for his pain and fury after Leipzig. Representing his ailments as psychogenic, she was returning the compliment of his last letters to her. Representing his madness as psychogenic, she was denying the hereditary factor—anxiously, given her felt kinship with him. For all that, she did not vent her spleen on post-Leipzig Nietzsche alone. His religious genius, which had enticed her in Tautenburg, was morbific in her book. Further, her drift was that his philosophizing was false from the first inasmuch as it was from the first directed and redirected according to his neuropathic needs, with his impulse to know straining over against his other impulses as he investigated these on the wild assumption that his was the European psyche. She refuted him piecemeal here and there besides, begging off for the rest on the ground that what mattered to him was not whether his ideas were right or wrong, but only what it felt like to have them. And not even his ideas at that, for, she affirmed, he took up others' continually. He was fertilized intellectually the way women were physically, she added: thus she claimed masculinity for herself. The "original form" of his positivism, she maintained in particular, was Réealism. He made a passionate experience out of Rée's radical segregation of thought from sentiment, she pursued; over all their years of "constant association and intellectual exchange" Rée, "the sharper mind," had the theoretic initiative, while Nietzsche "drew the practical consequences from the theories and sought out their inner significance for culture and life"; Rée, "acutely onesided," despised himself as a sentient being, his cold head taking no hint from his warm heart, so that Nietzsche, being prone to the opposite excess, "valued and overvalued in Rée what came hardest to him himself "; and so on—from one plausible misrepresentation to the next.

But Lou's anti-Nietzschean drift was stemmed all along the surface of her book. What with his "genial manysidedness," ran her text on his Réealism, Nietzsche filled in the gaps left by Rée's logic and made Rée's very mistakes exciting, so that Rée "saw with astonishment how his tight and clean-spun threads of thought were transformed into living, fresh-blooming tendrils at Nietzsche's magic hands." Again, that Nietzsche "trimmed others' theories" was "a fact absolutely immaterial to Nietzsche's true significance," which lay not in any "theoretic originality, not in what can be substantiated or refuted by argument, but in the intimate power with which a personality here speaks to the personality." A supreme master of language, "he so to say created a new style in philosophy," one "which expresses the thought not only as such, but along with the entire tonal wealth of its emotive resonance and with all its subtle, secret connotations," and which exceeds the confines of language "in enunciating through the mood what otherwise remains mute in the word. But in no other mind could mere thinking turn so completely into true experiencing, for no other life was ever so completely devoted to turning the whole inner man to account in thinking. His thoughts did not arise out of real life and its happenings [!] as thoughts ordinarily do; rather, they constituted the only real happening of that solitary life." Here was mere considerate compensation. There was also discrepancy, however, as again and again Lou lauded Nietzsche's strict, methodical thinking along with its ever so novel and significant results. But even short of such discrepancy, ambivalence sounded through every tribute that rang true in that depreciative context. And Lou conveyed true admiration through her words on "his talent for subtleties, his genius in the handling of finest things," and the like—indeed, true awe through her depiction of his self-renewals themselves as a "heroism of readiness to sacrifice convictions." As in Tautenburg, she still deemed him most heroic in his "apotheosis of life," since it only intensified his misery; once she called "this emotional struggle" in its turn "the true [!] source of his whole final philosophy" and final ruination—perhaps, though, only as pretext for an apocryphal anecdote about his interrupting musical labors on her "Hymn to Life" in Tautenburg to pen the message: "I despise life." No one has more movingly evoked his need for masks (masks of formality and of foolishness, of cruelty and of godly laughter) or the impress of suffering and solitude on his works. Her descriptions of his person, finally, were loving and lovely both, as well as scrupulously exact—which last entitled her to fable about her relations with him.

Nearly all of Lou's fables in Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken come under a double head: heiress pose and Nietzsche romance. She later claimed to have authored the work "exclusively" out of "a sort of obligation toward Nietzsche" to set his philosophic purposes straight. It does manifest a will to expound along with the will to reduce, refute, reject. For the bulk of it she sorted out Nietzschean thematic threads and tied them together expertly—authoritatively. At the very start she claimed special investiture in that she quoted his letter hailing both her "thought from the 'sister brain'" and her prospective sketch of his character. Similarly, she told of his initiating her into the "eternal recurrence" as if into a holy mystery, citing an imaginary "series of letters on the subject" for good measure. By sleight of hand, meanwhile, she contrived to imply a lifelong intimacy about which she was seemingly being discreet for reasons easy to supply. She told of his youth as if from direct personal acquaintance, then drew on his old letters to Rée as if they were to herself. From his actual letters to herself she quite gratuitously quoted insinuative-tender passages followed up by suggestive suspension dots which in fact suspended only innocuous matter. In contrast to her fanciful retrospect of New Year's Day 1883, she now presented her trip northward from Rome as an idyll with Nietzsche alone. Or rather, she did this only by deftest intimation: "… as he visited the Tribschen estate near Lucerne with me during a trip together from Italy …" Indeed, she registered all her encounters with Nietzsche only incidentally and as if ever so sparingly, on the order of "… while he was staying with me in Thuringia, near Dornburg, in the summer of 1882." She reduced the Trinitarian study plan to a lone resolve of Nietzsche's to which she was privy—one abandoned because of "his headache," or again for "inner and outer reasons." This last was her closest allusion to the aftermath of Leipzig. For the rest her Nietzsche, on closing accounts with positivism, took his leave of Rée through "the beautiful words" in The Gay Science about friends whose ways part—his relations with her persisting uncontradicted. Beyond the material particulars, the mood of these relations was transformed: what had been tempestuous emerged as serene. It was probably during this emergence that she removed all traces of his nastiness toward her from the papers in her possession. Her first large-scale autobiographic hoax was, then, an approximation to that great coveted but forbidden spiritual and carnal union between them, rendered celestial and eternal by being depicted only dimly and solemnly and without temporal beginning or end.

Lou romanced the more intensely with Nietzsche throughout in that she was concurrently identifying him with herself following the precedent of her novel. Her explanation for his going mad—that he had created a deity, then taken its place—was doubly autobiographic. In the first place, she had once done just that herself. Indeed, his "tragic conflict" commenced, by her account, with his mind's declaration of war upon a beloved childhood god—a traditional god, to be sure, but one to whom, she insisted, his divine creature of the final hour threw back. Thus his starting point was identified with hers, as it had been in Im Kampf um Gott. Only what in her case had been a progression toward sanity came out the reverse in his: evidently she was homesick for Kuno's childhood god. According to her Tautenburg diary, moreover, she had driven her childhood faith from her heart on her mind's account, whereas Nietzsche's heart had felt nothing more for his childhood faith one day and his mind had followed suit; now according to her Nietzsche book, Nietzsche (as he "again and again emphasized," she having "discussed the matter with him in especial detail") did just as, by the earlier account, she had done in pointed contrast to him. "With Nietzsche," she had noted further in Tautenburg, "pain has always been the cause of a new development; with me it was always a calculated means to grasp at my new goal looming higher"—as now it became for Nietzsche instead. Again, she had taken Nietzsche at his word in Tautenburg that his goals were external as hers were not, whereas now she exposed the difference as a fatal self-deception on his part. And again, her Tautenburg Nietzsche had felt himself to be passively bearing up under his goals, whereas the Nietzsche of her Nietzsche book felt his goals to be invigorating as he robustly struggled toward them—just like her Tautenburg Lou. Thus her self-version as of Tautenburg supplied the mental mechanism now ascribed to Nietzsche to explain away his post-Leipzig crisis. Besides, Tautenburg apart, whose psyche was she probing when she discovered a regressive aspiration toward God at the pit of his? And if now she called him "the philosopher of our times" because he suffered "in his flesh the whole frightful fire and fury of a religiously inclined freethinker," just what was she calling herself? But her chronicle of his folly was autobiographic in the second place in that she had identified herself unawares with an exalted Nietzsche by fits and starts beginning in 1882, then in late 1891 through a leap back to her childhood religion, the ground for her parallel identification of Nietzsche with herself—through her "Gottesschopfung" (God-Creation), which, published along with her first articles on Nietzsche, told of how already in earliest chi!dhood she on her side had divinized herself unawares in a prototypical "fusion and confusion of what is most intimate, most personal, with what is highest." By her telling, her "fusion and confusion" was of course so neat and naive and wholesome that it put any more rationalized religious construction to shame. But the payoff was that, blissfully unsophisticated, it had yielded altogether to her very first rational doubt, with no struggle of mind against heart—and accordingly "no secret hope of reconstructing along the path of knowledge what has been lost to religious ardor." This "no secret hope" was illicit gain from the pious exchange with Nietzsche. She overcompensated the loser: in "Gottesschopfung" she designated the earliest religious experiences the healthiest upon backdating her loss of faith, whereupon she issued Nietzsche a tacit bill of health in her Nietzsche book by backdating his correspondingly. Moreover, if her reduction of his high mental purposes was perhaps only retaliatory, she was surely identifying herself with him when, at the very start of her book, she reclaimed the "thought from the 'sister brain'" only to adopt the thought from the brother brain in turn and insist that, though his philosophy could be refuted, he could not—or when she asserted in the same context that his three philosophical periods, which he had delineated for her in 1882 as of that date, "were distinguished and distinctly characterized for the first time" in one of her articles. There was room in her book for no further self-identification with him than this. And there was need for none: after her "Gottesschopfung" leap of 1891, her need was rather for her diabolization of him to catch up, proceeding as it did haltingly from article to article to book. It proceeded autonomously too: at the time of her book she was still devoted to him in her uppermost as well as her innermost thoughts—in rating him as well as in romancing and identifying with him—despite her reductive thesis in between. Her readers were bound to notice the conflict at the surface and sense the one in the depths. And of Nietzsche's intimates, one at all odds, galled by her thesis, was bound to attack her on it ad feminam, exposing the romance as fraud while dismissing the eulogies as deceit. This she expected: it was the built-in penalty.

The book was grandly launched by Lou's literary set, which took her to have surmounted Nietzsche's influence by refuting his philosophy after having been his confidante and disciple until his breakdown. Most neutral reviewers "were quick to hail it as a psychological masterpiece," noted one big exception, Josef Hofmiller. Within Nietzsche's old circle Erwin Rohde, after deeming Lou's first articles on Nietzsche incomparably fine and deep, now told Overbeck that she was "above all a literary parasite who would just like to live off Nietzsche a while as off a suitable substratum while also putting her own person to advantage, and this not so tactfully or nicely." Overbeck in 1894 called Lou's "the best and most qualified word ever publicly sounded on Nietzsche"; subsequently, though, he shook his head at her fakery and pronounced her "reflexions and constructions" about Nietzsche's illness "sufficient in themselves to rule out any really intimate association or communication." In July 1893 Peter Gast, in his introduction to a reedition of Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human, upbraided Lou for her latest articles: he threw back her charge against Nietzsche of mystical madness, refuted her on point after point beginning with Nietzsche's having come to positivism through Rée, and denounced her trickery about how long she knew Nietzsche—all this too late, however, to affect her book. In July 1894 Gast discerned in the book itself "only rejection: Nietzsche rejected by the ink-stained hand of a Russian general's daughter: so long as there are such spectacles, life is a heartening thing." Two months later Gast nonetheless considered that "Lou's culture is simply too extraordinary; she may even be 'right' about much, as abnormal high tension in feeling and thinking is nothing for the masses, who dismiss it as 'pathological,' 'crazy,' and the like, then go about their business. It was clever of Lou to prove the point with great psychological to-do and win the assent of all the 'healthy.' Yet for all that, her book remains an astonishing achievement. I know of no woman's work that could come near hers (for intellectual schooling)." Gast eventually wrote off these concessions to Lou on "my animosity toward Mrs. Förster [Nietzsche's sister] at the time."

Mr. and Mrs. Förster had founded their colony—"New Germania"—in Paraguay early in 1886. In 1889, facing financial ruin, Bernhard took his life; Lisbeth carried on alone, slowly retrieving the deficit. She returned to Germany in the fall of 1890 for eighteen months to boost subscriptions, then definitively in September 1893 to cash in on her brother's growing fame. She wrested his literary estate from Gast's hands, then from her mother's proprietorship. In February 1894 she founded the Nietzsche Archiv in Naumburg with Gast's help—only to turn Gast out that very spring. For she intended using the Archiv to represent Nietzsche's life and thought in the way of her neo-Germanic propaganda, anti-Semitism and all. Her very own first project was known in Archiv parlance as "the biography."

Lou's quasi-biography incensed her for every reason beginning with its success—and perhaps most for its allusion, however skeptical, to the paternal brain ailment. Of her old motives for rancor toward Lou, one was more valid than ever: Lou was the cause of her latterly warped relations with her brother, which she now had to smooth out for the record. The scholar's fee for the use of Archiv material was set at a poke or two at Lou in a preface.…

In 1904 the volume of the Archiv biography covering 1882 appeared. By this account, Lou approached Nietzsche as a would-be disciple, but fast showed herself to be intellectually unfit and only out for an amour, so Nietzsche, who really just wanted a secretary anyhow, sent her packing. Lou's book, "utterly false and untrue," contained "conversations never held, excerpts from imaginary letters, and events that never took place." It was "an act of revenge upon sick Nietzsche due to wounded feminine vanity"—and was "perhaps meant to win back Paul Rée's alienated affections" to boot.…

Due largely to the Archiv forgeries, Nietzsche's memory grew offensive to Lou over the years—although she was always pleased to be known socially as his sometime girl friend. For the rest, her diverse motives toward him persisted. She paid him occasional huge tributes, more often than not in a negative context. She decried his late philosophizing in new terms: in 1900 she noted that "sick Nietzsche fashioned the vision of a super-Nietzsche only so as to make the lack of a healthy, normal Nietzsche bearable to himself," and again in 1911 that "he foundered on a certain philosophic-theoretical shallowness" when instead of inverting his positivist maxim, "Even the though-drive is a life-drive," he exalted its second term at the expense of the first. She romanced with him with the full latent force of her pseudoreminiscences about propositions and proposals. She heaped scorn upon her "sort of memoirs and seminovel," Im Kampf um Gott. Indeed, only insofar as her Nietzsche experience was repetitive did it show on the surface of her later fiction—though one reader caught it anyway in the recurrent theme of a young girl's free discipleship to a self-willed master turning of a sudden into a frenzied temptation to mental and erotic thralldom defended against "with a sure instinct."

Meanwhile Nietzsche grew on her. She contracted personal habits of his, such as alternately working long weeks or months in solitude, then living socially awhile. She took up physical attitudes of his once lovingly noted by her, such as his cautious, pensive gait and his air of "hearkening to all things"; likewise, her voice softened to a hush, and stopped for any but intimate company, even as her youthful forwardness gave way to a discretion and reserve far too marked to have been a mere matter of age or marriage. She also drew a dispensation from "second-rank scruples," meaning all scruples, from Nietzsche's "sacred self-seeking, or instinctive obedience to what is highest"—to which Nietzsche had denied her title. But what she took from Nietzsche was chiefly intellectual, from pet expressions (such as going out "among men" and returning "to myself") to historical theses (about justice, Christianity, and the like), by way of his new psychological approach according to which the psyche is an archive, culture denotes inhibition, memory is weaker than forgetfulness, perception works to prevent seeing too much and intellection to prevent understanding too much, a manifest virtue is the obverse of a latent vice, and one's sexuality informs the highest reaches of one's mind. She was to work through many a Tautenburg topic—including notably woman as such—on these terms to his own conclusions and beyond, even as in her expository prose the sentence gradually yielded to the paragraph, didactics to imagery and incantation: Lou as positivist to Lou as Nietzsche. And in her case in turn, the ideal of cold-blooded cognition yielded to awe before the instincts. In fact she filled her own bill for Nietzsche's late thought in due course—all the way from a "repudiation of [her] former purely logical ideal of knowledge" to "a religious mysticism in which God, world, and man fuse into a single prodigious superbeing." Thus she took up his succession after all—which shows that she had never really said no to it in her heart. Just so, she now denied the postpositivist Nietzsche in terms pointedly (and poorly) calculated to dissociate her own postpositivist course from his.…

In one vital respect Lou's postpositivism did differ from Nietzsche's—the one to be expected from her having had not only an enforced asceticism of the spirit to surmount, but also an inveterate asceticism of the flesh.