Born 1844, professor of philology at Basel at 24, retired on a pension at 34 from ruined health, then a decade of wandering and the books: Zarathustra (1883-85), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), the Genealogy (1887). Collapsed in Turin in January 1889, insane for his last 11 years, his papers managed by his sister Elisabeth, who edited him toward the Nazis he despised.
The popular stain: Nietzsche as proto-fascist, the blonde beast as a racial program. Elisabeth married a leading anti-Semite, presented the archive to Hitler, and the smear stuck for fifty years. The texts themselves sneer at German nationalism and anti-Semites by name.
The reading his defenders prefer: he diagnosed nihilism so intimately because he suffered it, and the final silence was not madness external to the work but the work arriving at its own limit, the last man of the spirit experimenting on himself until the experiment ended the experimenter.
Did the philosophy break him, or was the philosophy the sound of the break?