📍Nietzsche-Haus, Weingarten 18, 06618 Naumburg (Saale), Germany
1858 – 1864“My father, a Lutheran pastor, died when I was four, and my mother took my sister Elisabeth and me to Naumburg, a cathedral town on the Saale, where we lived in a household of women: my mother, Franziska, my grandmother and my father's two sisters. In the summer of 1858 my mother moved us to a house at Weingarten 18, by the old town walls, and it remained her home, and my refuge, for the rest of her life. I was a serious, pious child, nicknamed the little pastor at school, because I could recite Bible verses and hymns so movingly. Naumburg gave me two close friends, Wilhelm Pinder and Gustav Krug, from cultured families, and with them I founded a little society for literature and music, where we presented poems, compositions and essays to each other. Music mattered enormously to me; I improvised at the piano for hours and composed songs and pieces of my own. From 1858 I boarded at Schulpforta, the strict and famous school nearby, where I was drilled in Greek and Latin, and came home to Weingarten for holidays. The classical training of those years made me a philologist, and at twenty-four I became a professor in Basel. Later I wrote books that questioned everything that pious Naumburg household had believed. When my health failed in 1889, my mother brought me home to Weingarten 18 and cared for me there until she could no longer do so. The house is now the Nietzsche-Haus museum, telling the story of a boy who grew up among the hymns and books of a small cathedral town.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today