The leading philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in Röcken, Saxony, near Leipzig. At the age of 25 he was appointed professor of classical philology at the University of Basel—renouncing his Prussian citizenship in the same year and remaining officially stateless for the rest of his life—from which he resigned for health reasons ten years later, in 1879.
He wrote the main body of his philosophical work during the following decade, before his health finally collapsed in 1889 (he died insane and almost paralyzed in 1900). Rejecting religion, dismissing “objectivity,” and condemning morality, he revolutionary foreshadowed existentialism and postmodernism; however, it may be argued that aspects of his ideas, such as his “creative” nihilism, have still not been fully understood.
