Genius of the Modern World

In 1934, a photograph was taken here

which epitomised the extraordinary influence

of one of the most provocative and uncompromising thinkers

of the 19th century.

It's an image of Adolf Hitler

standing next to the bust of Nietzsche here

in Weimar where the philosopher lived.

- With chilling eloquence, this tells us what many Nazis believed - -

that Nietzsche was the brilliant mind, the inspiration,

behind the terrifying ideologies of the Third Reich.

Yet if Nietzsche had been alive to see it, he would have been appalled.

His philosophies were being distorted by a regime

that stood for so much that he'd have loathed.

Nietzsche was one of the most dangerous minds of the 19th century.

Nietzsche thinks we have blood on our hands.

Because we haven't just killed God -

we've killed that which gave our lives meaning.

Nietzsche lived in a century in which Europe

was witnessing unprecedented change.

Where the authority of Christianity was being challenged.

Radical breakthroughs in science were redefining belief.

And thinkers like Freud, Marx,

and Nietzsche were suddenly free to unleash ideas that

in previous centuries would have seen them burnt at the stake.

Yet they heralded nothing less than the modern world.

In 1882, one of the greatest minds of the 19th century

predicted a crisis.

One that he believed would be without equal on Earth,

and which would be triggered by nothing less than the murder of God.

"God is dead, and God remains dead, because we have killed him.

"What was holiest and most powerful

"of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our eyes.

"Who will wipe the blood from our hands?"

These are the visceral, challenging words of Friedrich Nietzsche.

The crisis that he proclaimed was a wave of disbelief in Christianity

that he predicted would crash through Europe.

And the raw,

brutal language that he chose to describe this death of God

is a measure of just how terrifying he thought the consequence would be.

For what Nietzsche saw, with disturbing, prophetic clarity,

was that without a belief in God,

there was no authority for the moral values

that had underpinned European society across 2,000 years.

He was declaring our freedom from God, our mastery of our own fates.

No longer controlled by divine laws,

we were now liberated, or condemned, to create our own values.

But what haunted and tormented Nietzsche was his realisation that

this was a freedom that came at a terrible price.

The loss of religious belief would bring with it nothing less than

a vacuum of meaning in human existence.

It was a crisis that Nietzsche would wrestle with

for the rest of his life.

BELL RINGS

Messiah by Handel

The childhood of the man who would come to call himself the Antichrist

was, with no little irony,

one infused with the joy of Christianity.

When Nietzsche was just nine years old,

he heard Handel's Messiah for the first time.

And he said he felt he had to join in the joyful singing of the angels

on whose billows of sound Jesus ascended to heaven.

The man who would spend his life as an adult with a mission to attack

everything that Christianity stood for

started off in life as the son of a Lutheran pastor,

here in the very cradle of Protestant Christianity.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche grew up in the village of Rocken in Prussia,

now northern Germany.

And as a boy, he was passionately pious.

This is the parsonage where Nietzsche was born.

His father, Carl Ludwig, had a very simple faith,

and the household lived and breathed Christianity.

Nietzsche's early years were settled and sheltered.

His parents had two other children.

When he was two, his sister Elisabeth was born,

followed a year later by a brother, Joseph.

But in the autumn of 1848, when Friedrich was only four years old,

his childhood was ripped apart.

His father became mentally ill,

and was diagnosed with a terminal brain disease.

It was a torturous decline.

He went blind and eventually was bedridden.

One year later, he was dead.

An autopsy revealed that a quarter of his brain was missing.

This must have been a truly horrific end.

The suffering of his beloved father marked Friedrich for life.

As a teenager, he wrote about his father's funeral

in this church where he had once preached.

"Oh, never will the deep-throated sound of those bells quit my ear.

"The organ resounded through the empty spaces of the church."

For Nietzsche, the death of his father posed a profound question.

Why had this God,

whom his father had so loved and to whom he dedicated his life,

punished a good man with such torment?

It was the start of a journey into doubt that would come to define

Nietzsche's life.

Despite the loss of his father, in 1864, at the age of 20,

Nietzsche arrived in Bonn to study theology at the university,

contemplating a future as a Lutheran pastor.

But it was during his time here that he came under the influence of

a controversial new method of studying the Bible,

known as Biblical criticism.

And it scandalously suggested that this sacred text wasn't a credible

historical work, but largely myth.

It was radically undermining the authenticity of the scriptures.

And for Nietzsche, it had a dramatic impact.

If his father's death and suffering had made him question

the idea of God emotionally,

then this gave him the intellectual grounds on which to

construct his doubt.

Nietzsche's loss of belief caused an immediate rift with his family.

At Easter, he refused to attend church,

crushing his mother's dreams

that he would follow his father to the pulpit.

And his sister, who had always hero-worshipped her brother,

found her own faith thrown into chaos.

But for Nietzsche, his journey into doubt wasn't just a source of hurt

for those close to him.

It was the start of an all-consuming dissection

of the moral and religious beliefs with which he had grown up.

He began to regard Christianity not just as a faith regretfully lost,

but as a pernicious influence that encouraged

an unhealthy disengagement from the world.

Christian teaching, he argued, focused on the next life,

with disastrous consequences.

Earth became a place of bleak exile from God.

Life was a thing of pain and suffering to be endured,

not celebrated.

And this emphasis on the life to come robbed the here and now of its

sublime meaning.

This was a conviction that would dominate his life and his work

for the next two decades.

Rejecting Christianity forced Nietzsche

to flee his theological studies,

and to seek out a new direction.

Right from the start,

Nietzsche realised that his loss of faith wasn't the path to

a life of contentment.

In 1865, Nietzsche wrote to his sister, and said,

"If you wish to seek peace of mind and happiness, then believe.

"If you wish to be a disciple of truth, then investigate."

Nietzsche was living in an age dominated by the rise of science,

where the search for objective truth was all-consuming.

But what Nietzsche saw with searing clarity was that the triumph of

objectivity deprived humanity of something fundamental.

Without Christianity,

there was no set of binding moral rules by which we could all live.

There was no solution to man's fear of death.

And perhaps most importantly,

with eternal salvation no longer mankind's prime goal,

life itself didn't have a higher spiritual purpose.

It was to finding new meaning in a godless universe that Nietzsche now

dedicated himself.

And his first glimpse at an answer came at the age of 21.

He decided to become a student of philology,

the study of the ancient civilisations and the philosophies of Greece and Rome.

And he was in a book shop when he came across a work that would

influence the way he thought and acted for the next decade.

It was called The World As Will and Idea,

and it was written by a German philosopher called Schopenhauer.

As he read it, Nietzsche was transfixed.

Schopenhauer was an atheist,

who had also grappled with the purpose of life.

But his conclusions were beyond pessimistic.

Faced with the problem of life's endless sufferings,

Schopenhauer's bleak conclusion

was that it was best never to be born at all.

He argued that human beings were in a state of constant desire.

If we didn't achieve these desires, then there was discontent,

and even if we did, then discontent would set in anyway.

His solution was to face up to the fact that fulfilment is impossible.

He encouraged us not to strive for happiness

in order to avoid the anxiety and trouble in trying to achieve it.

The happiest man, he said,

is the one who gets through life with the minimum of pain.

Nietzsche said it was like looking into a mirror

that reflected the world, life,

and his own mind with hideous magnificence.

But whilst he accepted Schopenhauer's diagnosis

that life was just a cycle of suffering,

he passionately disagreed with his life-denying,

nihilistic conclusions,

the idea of giving up on life and the pursuit of one's desires.

Instead, he was determined to find a way of affirming existence

in spite of its pain.

In 1869,

the brilliant Friedrich became a professor of philology

here at Basel University at the age of only 24,

the youngest in its history.

With his first book, which he wrote while he was here,

he began to gain a reputation as a radical and subversive thinker.

In his work, which he called The Birth of Tragedy,

he started to grapple with the issue of how to deal with suffering

in a world devoid of God.

And for inspiration, he turned to the ideas of the Greeks,

and a new focus of his devotions - the German composer Richard Wagner.

On the 22nd of May 1872,

the foundation stone was laid for Wagner's Festival Theatre.

One of the guests at the ceremony was Nietzsche.

The two men had met six years before when Nietzsche was just a student,

and immediately he was smitten.