August 26, 1883: Friedrich Nietzsche publishes his novel Also Sprach Zarathustra: Ein Buch für Alle und Keinen -- Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None.
Born on October 15, 1844 in native of Röcken, in Saxony, in what would be part of East Germany after World War II, Nietzsche became the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland in 1869, when he was only 24 years old. Unfortunately, other things happened to him early: He resigned in 1879, due to health issues.
This allowed him to do the writing that became Also Sprach Zarathustra. Despite purporting to be the words of Zarathustra, usually known to the modern world by his Greek name Zoroaster -- more so even than Judaism, truly an "old-time religion" -- the book is best known for Nietzsche's statement that "God is dead."
In fact, Nietzsche's text goes further than that. He said, "Dead are all the gods: Now do we desire the overman to live." He describes an Übermensch, which was originally translated as "overman" but came to be thought of as "superman" after his death, as someone "beyond good and evil," beyond any definition of morality, not bound by any religious commandments, a man with "the will to power."
As an example, Zarathustra sees a shepherd choking on a black serpent, which has crept into his throat. At Zarathustra's urging, the shepherd bites the serpent's head off and spits it out. In that moment, the shepherd is transformed into "a laughing, radiant being, something greater than human."
In 1889, only 45 years old, Nietzsche suffered a stroke, which led to vascular dementia. For the rest of his life, until August 25, 1900, just 56, he was in the care of his family.
Just as the deaths of Abner Doubleday and William Webb Ellis left them unable to publicly deny that they had, as was later alleged, invented baseball and rugby, respectively, Nietzsche's intellectual death in 1889, well before his actual death in 1900, left him unable to say, "What I really meant was... "
In particular, his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who became first his medical and then his literary caretaker, misinterpreted much of what he wrote to fit her anti-Semitic views. His surviving letters show that he thought anti-Semitism was stupid, and he ridiculed its practitioners.
But Elisabeth lived long enough to promote her brother's works with the Nazis, who were all too happy to bring them into their mythology. When she died in 1935, Adolf Hitler himself attended her funeral. And so Nietzsche's writing, especially Also Sprach Zarathustra, became associated with the Fascism and bigotry of Nazi Germany, something Nietzsche, based on his own letters, would have deplored.
Others got that, but still used it to spread their belief in what would now be called "toxic masculinity." Jim Morrison, lead singer of the rock band The Doors, thought of the Übermensch as someone who faced his fears and overcame them, quoting Nietzsche's line, written in Twilight of the Idols in 1888: "That which does not kill me makes me stronger." Nietzsche was not the first, nor the last, person to suggest suffering builds character. But Morrison's belief that he was not bound by society's conventions made him unreliable and misogynistic.
Certainly, novelist and journalist Ernest Hemingway thought of himself as an Übermensch: In his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms, he wrote, "We are all broken people, but some of us are stronger at the broken places." But then, he was mentally ill, treated many people (especially his wives) like garbage, and eventually killed himself.
On January 12, 2012, I developed the hardest cold I'd ever had. It left me coughing so hard, it would, on some occasions, leave me dizzy, and force me to remain still for about 30 seconds; and, on others, give me a headache that left me scared that I might have a stroke. I thought of the line, "That which does not kill me makes me stronger." Personally, I've often found that some things that hurt me without killing me have made me stronger, but some of them just tick me off.
In 1896, German composer Richard Strauss composed the tone poem Also Sprach Zarathustra. Its opening fanfare, titled "Sunrise," was used by director Stanley Kubrick as the theme song for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
That use led Elvis Presley to use it as the opening theme for his concerts from the start of his Las Vegas run in 1969 until his death in 1977. Elvis, too, often operated as if he were an "overman," beyond society's definitions of morality. And, as with Hemingway and Morrison, sometimes this worked to help people, and sometimes it didn't.
Morrison, surely, knew that Nietzsche had said that God was dead. I'm guessing Elvis wasn't aware of it, or else he never would have used the fanfare.
By the time Strauss' composition premiered, Nietzsche was too ill to attend, and it is unlikely he ever heard a recording of it. So it is likely that he never expressed an opinion on it.
In 2000, Britney Spears had a hit single titled "Stronger." In 2002, Christina Aguilera had a song titled "Fighter," sung to an ex-boyfriend whose mistreatment made her stronger. And in 2011, Kelly Clarkson released an album titled Stronger. It included a song titled "Stronger (What Doesn't Kill You). It did revive her career after her previous 2 albums didn't do well. It's interesting that all 3 women expressed Nietzsche's idea better than the hyper-masculine Morrison did.
A 2015 episode of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History was titled "Eastern Philosophers vs. Western Philosophers." "Nice" Peter Shukoff played Nietzsche, easily the most recent figure among those involved, alongside "Epic" Lloyd Ahlquist as Greek philosopher Socrates (470-399 BC) and Zach Sherwin as French philosopher François-Marie Arouet, a.k.a. Voltaire (1694-1778). The Eastern philosophers were all Chinese: Confucius (551-479 BC) played by Jin Au-Yeung, a.k.a. MC Jin; Sun Tzu (544-496 BC), played by Tim Chantarangsu, a.k.a. Timothy DeLaGhetto; and Laozi, a.k.a. Lao Tzu (life dates unknown, but may also have been a contemporary of the other two), played by Terry Im, a.k.a. KRNFX.
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August 26, 1883 was a Sunday. At the time, the only real team sports in America were baseball and college football, and college football, then as now, resisted playing on Sundays. In many States, the playing of professional sports on Sunday was banned by law. In baseball, the National League chose not to challenge this, and refused to schedule games on Sundays.
Founded in 1882, the American Association did not. And when, after its folding following the 1891 season, 4 of its teams were brought into the NL, the NL began playing Sunday games. However, on this particular Sunday, the AA played no games. So there were no scores on this historic day.
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