What Was Nietzsche's Nationality?

I

Readers of his later work are familiar with the cosmopolitan Nietzsche, the restless traveler who liked to summer in Switzerland and winter on the Riviera. They may be less aware that he surrendered his Prussian citizenship at the age of twenty-four, in order to teach at the University of Basel, and that he lived stateless for the rest of his life. It is understandable, then, that he should construe himself as a "Good European" and occasionally indulge in the fantasy that he might be Polish.

Even the most blasé of cosmopolites, however, must begin their lives locally. Whatever his later pretensions, the official documents record that Nietzsche was born Prussian, spent his childhood and adolescence in Prussian schools, was drafted by the Prussian military while still a university undergraduate, and served with its forces during the Franco-Prussian War.¹ More to the point, he considered himself Prussian throughout his youth and, as will be seen, enthusiastically embraced that nationality during a time of crisis.

Legally, then, and in virtue of the formal institutions in which he participated, Nietzsche was unquestionably Prussian, at least before he went to Basel. Yet none of Nietzsche's grandparents were from that nation. Three (his paternal grandmother and both grandparents on his mother's side) were from the Electorate of Saxony, and the fourth was from the Saxon offshoot of Sachsen-Meiningen in Thuringia.² Beyond this, as will be seen, Nietzsche grew up in a region that had been Saxon for hundreds of years and Prussian for a mere thirty. Being Prussian was new to that community and not always an easy fit.

Nietzsche was thus exposed to two different and in some ways opposed cultural influences throughout his youth. We cannot be sure how this affected him, for his inner life is lit only intermittently by journals and letters. Nonetheless, the double heritage may have helped him to cast a quizzical eye on national cultures and to question nationalism in general. At a minimum, it seems wise to investigate the actual political and cultural dynamics of his youth and to qualify the usual identification of him as simply Prussian.

In the following I will show how Prussia assumed control of the regions where Nietzsche spent his childhood and how an uneasy modus vivendi developed between the new government and its wary citizens. I will then examine ways in which Nietzsche himself responded to this double heritage and his rather fraught relationship to Prussia as a young man. The piece will close with an overview on the ways Nietzsche later elided the provincialism of his upbringing to talk about "Germany" instead of particular regions. Meanwhile, because the situation was historically generated, it calls for historical investigation. To understand the cultural complexities among which Nietzsche moved, we need to look at events that took place thirty years before he was born.

II

During the Napoleonic period, the map of Europe was largely redrawn, and even those princes who retained their crowns found their powers curtailed. When Napoleon invaded the eastern German principalities, for example (most decisively in 1806), he seized control of both Prussia and Saxony and made those countries his subjects. The two states reacted differently, with the more accommodating Saxons accepting the situation and trying to turn it to their advantage. The Prussians, by contrast, were more humiliated and, in the end, more resistant, turning on Napoleon in the aftermath of his Moscow retreat and helping to trounce him at the Battle of Leipzig. Because the Saxons did not repudiate Napoleon, they were construed as collaborators and paid the price in the peace talks, being forced to yield over two-thirds of their land and half their population to the newly triumphant Prussia.³ Among these forfeited territories were those occupied by the Nietzsches and the Oehlers, Friedrich's forbearers on his mother's side. It is important to note that all the localities associated with Nietzsche's boyhood—Röcken, Naumburg, Pobles, and Schulpforta—were Saxon until 1815, a mere three decades before his birth in 1844.⁴ Their inhabitants were therefore thrust into the role of first-generation...