Nietzsche, the Prostitutes and the Piano September 6, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
A WIBT moment from the first age of mighty Fred Nietzsche. As a student, aged 21, in February 1865, the moustached one visited Cologne and there he was left, according to his then good friend, and generally reliable witness, Paul Deussen (obit 1919), by a coachman at a brothel. Fred, who claimed that he had asked for a restaurant, got all will-to-powerful and stormed in regardless, but mighty Goliath had met his Davids and they flocked to him.
I suddenly saw myself surrounded by half-a-dozen apparitions in tinsel and gauze who looked at me expectantly. I stood for a moment speechless. Then I made instinctively for a piano in the room as to the only living thing (seelenhafte, soulful) in that company and struck several chords. They broke the spell and I hurried away.
Ich sah mich umgeben von einem halben Dutzend Erscheinungen in Flitter und Gaze. Sprachlos stand ich eine Weile. Dann ging ich instinktmäßig auf ein Klavier als auf das einzige seelenhafte Wesen in der Gesellschaft los und schlug einige Akkorde an. Sie lösten meine Erstarrung, und ich gewann das Freie.
A young and almost certainly vestal Nietzsche, surrounded by these magical automatons (as he seemed to have imagined them), looks around the room to find something familiar. He fixes on a piano walks over to it and plays, then, having finished his chords, walks out of the room returning to his private, permanent dreamlife. Deussen, as noted above, is a credible witness and this story has a slight echo in an independently attested account relating to 1876. Nietzsche went to say goodbye to the wonderfully named Mathilde Trampedach (who he was planning to ask to marry). He entered the room, bowed to her and her sister and then walked over to the piano and played stormily until then, finally, he let the music fade away to nothing and walked out on the good ladies (free?). The philosopher vanished and within 48 hours had sent one of the strangest marriage proposals ever written. In both the brothel and in the Trampedachs’ room Nietzsche saw the piano as an ally and an escape. In one the piano woke him back up, in the other the piano said the things that our Swiss misanthrope could never actually say. Pity poor old Fred. Pity us all.
There is a great and rather silly literature on Nietzsche’s sexuality claiming against all the odds that he was gay: there is one sliver of gossip from a Freudian (who are never reliable in this field) and perhaps a submerged desire to make Fred into one of the Village People. Imagine Nietzsche bopping. Even the argument that FN was disinterested in sex does not hold much water. Certainly, though, his sexual life remains hidden from us behind that bushy moustache. Freud, that insufferable know it all, who obsessed over Nietzsch, wrote that Fred’s sexual leanings were an ‘enigma’ as they shall doubtless remain. The closest we come to his bedroom door shutting is this magical account from Cologne, which was later to be stolen away by Thomas Mann and, such is the curiosity of the relation between life and fiction, inserted into Doctor Faustus.
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