Olivia: Alright Jackson, quick. When I say 'Friedrich Nietzsche,' what's the first image that pops into your head? Jackson: Oh, easy. A terrifying moustache attached to a man who probably hated puppies, fun, and everything joyful in the world. Basically, the ultimate philosophical supervillain. Olivia: Perfect. Because today, we're going to blow that image to smithereens. And our guide on this myth-busting journey is Sue Prideaux's incredible biography, I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche. Jackson: I love the title. It already sounds more exciting than I expected. "I Am Dynamite!" feels less like a philosophy lecture and more like an action movie tagline. Olivia: It’s a quote from Nietzsche himself, and it perfectly captures the book's spirit. What's so brilliant about this biography—and it won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for it—is that Prideaux isn't a philosopher by trade. She's an art historian and an award-winning biographer of other intense figures like the painter Edvard Munch. Jackson: The guy who painted The Scream? Okay, that makes sense. She has a type. Olivia: She does! And because of that background, she comes at Nietzsche not as a disembodied set of ideas, but as a living, breathing, and, as we'll see, an often profoundly suffering human being. Jackson: So we get the man, not just the manifesto. I like that. Where do we even start with a life that big? With the famous moustache? Olivia: We start even before the moustache became legendary. We start with a 24-year-old university student who is about to meet his god... if he can just get his new suit from the tailor in time.

Jackson: Hold on. The author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra was having a wardrobe malfunction? That's amazing. Olivia: It’s the most wonderful, humanizing story. Prideaux opens the book with it. It’s 1868 in Leipzig. Nietzsche is a brilliant young philology student, and he has just received a surprise invitation to a private evening with the one and only Richard Wagner, the composer who was, for Nietzsche, a living deity. Jackson: Okay, so the stakes are high. This is like a garage band musician getting a call from The Beatles. Olivia: Exactly. And Nietzsche is ecstatic. He writes to his friend Erwin Rohde that he’s buzzing with excitement. He’s planned everything, including a brand new, respectable suit for the occasion. But on the day of the meeting, the tailor fails to deliver it. Jackson: No! This is a nightmare. Olivia: It gets worse. He sends his landlord’s maid to fetch it, she comes back empty-handed. He goes himself, the tailor isn't there. Finally, the tailor's assistant shows up at Nietzsche's apartment with the suit, but demands cash on delivery. Nietzsche doesn't have enough money on him. Jackson: This is getting more and more relatable. This is every "I forgot my wallet" anxiety dream I've ever had. Olivia: He literally has to wrestle the suit away from the assistant, promising to pay later, and then sprints through the streets of Leipzig, arriving flustered and breathless at the home of Wagner's sister. And Prideaux uses this moment to show us the essential Nietzsche: this incredible, almost comical tension between the sublime and the ridiculous that defined his entire life. Here he is, about to have one of the most profound intellectual encounters of the 19th century, and he's just been in a slapstick comedy scene over a piece of clothing. Jackson: That completely changes how I picture him. But what was the big deal about Wagner? Why was he such a hero to Nietzsche? Was it just the music? Olivia: It was the music, but it was music filtered through a powerful philosophical lens. A few years earlier, when Nietzsche was a student feeling lost and directionless, he stumbled upon a book in a second-hand shop: Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation. Jackson: I’ve heard of Schopenhauer. Wasn't he the pinnacle of pessimism? The original Eeyore of philosophy? Olivia: The absolute king. Schopenhauer’s big idea was that beneath the world of appearances—the world we see and interact with—there is a single, blind, striving, irrational force called the 'Will'. It's this chaotic, meaningless energy that drives everything, and because it's always striving and never satisfied, life is fundamentally suffering. Jackson: Cheery stuff. So why did that appeal to a young Nietzsche? Olivia: Because it felt true. He wrote that a demon whispered to him to buy the book, and when he read it, he felt like it was looking directly into the terrifying, chaotic heart of existence. It gave him a framework for all the pain and meaninglessness he felt. And then, he heard Wagner's music, particularly the prelude to Tristan und Isolde. He said it was like laying his ear "against the heart of the universal will." He believed Wagner's music wasn't just about emotion; it was the raw, Dionysian, Schopenhauerian Will made audible. Jackson: Wow, okay. So Wagner's music was the soundtrack to the scariest, truest philosophy he'd ever found. No wonder he was nervous for their meeting. Did the suit-mishap ruin the evening? Olivia: Not at all. He gets there, Wagner is incredibly charming, plays parts of his new opera, and the two of them immediately bond over their shared love for Schopenhauer. Wagner is thrilled to find a young, brilliant academic who gets it. For Nietzsche, it was a dream come true. His hero saw him as an equal. This meeting kicks off one ofthe most intense, productive, and ultimately tragic friendships in intellectual history. Jackson: It sounds like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. I have a very bad feeling it doesn't end that way.

Olivia: You have a very good feeling. For a few years, it was an intellectual paradise. Nietzsche was a frequent guest at Tribschen, the Wagners' idyllic home in Switzerland. He was like an adopted son. Cosima Wagner, Richard's wife, adored him. He’d run errands for them, debate philosophy, listen to Wagner compose. It was the intellectual family he’d always craved. Jackson: So what went wrong? If they were so in sync, what could possibly drive them apart? Olivia: The world intervened. Specifically, German nationalism. In 1870, the Franco-Prussian War breaks out, and Germany is swept up in a wave of triumphant patriotism. Wagner, who had always had a revolutionary streak, dives in headfirst. He composes a bombastic, nationalistic piece called the Kaisermarsch to celebrate the new German Empire. Jackson: And Nietzsche wasn't a fan of this new direction? Olivia: He was horrified. While Wagner was celebrating Prussian military victories and gloating over the brutal siege of Paris, Nietzsche felt profound pity for the Parisians. He saw the rise of the German Reich not as a cultural rebirth, as Wagner did, but as the triumph of a brutish, "beery materialism" that was extinguishing the true German spirit—the spirit of Goethe and Beethoven. Jackson: So it was a political disagreement? Olivia: It started that way, but for Nietzsche, it became a deep philosophical betrayal. He had hailed Wagner in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy, as the artist who would resurrect the spirit of Greek tragedy, balancing the chaotic, ecstatic force of Dionysus with the ordered, rational force of Apollo. He thought Wagner's art would save European culture. Jackson: But instead, Wagner was using his art to write jingoistic anthems for the new German state. Olivia: Exactly. And it got worse. The final nail in the coffin was Wagner's last opera, Parsifal. Nietzsche saw it as a complete surrender to the very thing he was beginning to despise: Christianity. He felt Wagner had knelt before the cross, embracing a morality of pity and self-denial. For Nietzsche, who was moving towards a philosophy of life-affirmation and strength, this was the ultimate betrayal. The hero had become a symbol of everything sick and decadent in Europe. Jackson: That’s a huge break. It’s not just disagreeing with your friend's new album; it’s a fundamental divorce of worldviews. Olivia: It was devastating. He had to kill his own idol to save his own intellectual soul. He later wrote that his break with Wagner was a form of self-overcoming, a necessary act of violence against a part of himself. He had to escape the "poison cottage," as he called the Wagnerian influence, to find his own voice. Jackson: This is why some of those reader reviews you mentioned make sense. The ones that say the book is more biography than philosophy. You can't possibly understand Nietzsche's later ideas, like the 'death of God,' without understanding this deeply personal, painful story of his break with Wagner. Olivia: Precisely. The death of his god, Wagner, paved the way for him to announce the death of God himself. And once that idol was dead, Nietzsche was truly, terrifyingly alone. And that's when the real dynamite was forged—in a crucible of incredible suffering.

Jackson: Okay, so he's cut ties with his biggest inspiration, he's isolated... and his health was never great to begin with, right? Prideaux talks a lot about his physical ailments. Olivia: His health was abysmal. From his time at the Pforta boarding school, he suffered from debilitating migraines, vomiting fits, and failing eyesight that often left him half-blind for days on end. There's a heartbreaking story about him struggling with acrobatics at school, turning red and breathless on the parallel bars while his classmates mocked him. He was intellectually a giant but physically so fragile. Jackson: So after the break with Wagner, he has this physical pain and now this profound emotional and intellectual isolation. That sounds like a recipe for despair. Olivia: It was. And it was in that despair that he created his most enduring concepts. He resigns from his professorship at Basel due to his health and begins a decade of wandering, moving from cheap boarding house to cheap boarding house in Italy, Switzerland, and France, chasing the good weather that might offer a few days of relief. He called himself "the empty occupant of furnished rooms." Jackson: Wow. And this is when he's writing his most famous works? Olivia: This is when he writes Thus Spoke Zarathustra. This is when he formulates the ideas of the Übermensch—the 'Overman' or 'Superman'—and the Eternal Recurrence. These weren't abstract thought experiments. They were weapons he forged to fight his own nihilism. The 'death of God' wasn't a triumphant declaration for him; it was a terrifying reality. If there's no God, no objective truth, no inherent meaning, how do you avoid falling into a bottomless abyss of despair? Jackson: And the Übermensch is the answer? Olivia: It's his proposed answer. The Übermensch is the human being who can face the death of God and not crumble. This person doesn't need external rules or a divine purpose because they create their own values. They affirm life, in all its pain and joy, and say 'Yes' to it. And the ultimate test for this Übermensch is the idea of Eternal Recurrence. Jackson: Ah, the big one. The idea that you have to live your life over and over again, forever. Olivia: Exactly. As Prideaux recounts, the thought came to him during a walk by a lake in Sils-Maria, a place that became his spiritual home. He described it as the most terrifying and powerful thought. Could you live your life, this exact life, with every mistake, every pain, every moment of boredom, an infinite number of times, and still joyfully say 'Yes! Again!'? Jackson: That's an intense question. So, was his philosophy just a product of his sickness? Is this just 'sick-man's thinking' trying to justify his own suffering? Olivia: That's the million-dollar question, and it's what makes Prideaux's biography so compelling. She doesn't give a simple answer. Nietzsche himself was obsessed with this. He worried his ideas were just symptoms of his degenerating health. But the book suggests something more profound. He didn't just suffer; he analyzed his suffering with a terrifyingly sharp intellect. He used his own physical and psychological pain as a laboratory to diagnose the sickness of an entire culture—a culture that he felt was hiding from reality with comforting lies about religion and morality. Jackson: So he wasn't just describing his own pain; he was using it as a magnifying glass to see the world more clearly. Olivia: Yes. He turned his personal hell into a universal philosophy. He took the lead, the muck of his own life, and tried to perform an alchemical trick to turn it into gold. He didn't always succeed, and the effort eventually destroyed him, but the attempt itself is what makes him so enduringly powerful.

Jackson: So the terrifying supervillain with the moustache was actually a deeply sensitive, often clumsy, and chronically ill man who had his heart broken by his hero and turned that pain into a philosophy that challenges us to live more bravely. Olivia: Exactly. Prideaux's book dismantles the caricature and replaces it with a portrait of a man who was, in his own words, 'human, all too human.' He was a man of profound contradictions: fragile yet intellectually ferocious, lonely yet desperate for friendship, a critic of pity who was himself deeply compassionate. Jackson: And in the end, his ideas were so explosive that they were even co-opted by the Nazis, something Prideaux touches on, largely through the actions of his sister, Elisabeth. Olivia: Yes, and that's the tragic irony. His sister, who he called his 'llama' and who embraced the very German nationalism and anti-Semitism he despised, became the gatekeeper of his legacy. She twisted his work to fit her own vile ideology. But Prideaux helps us see that Nietzsche's philosophy, at its core, is about individual self-creation, not racial purity. It's about overcoming the 'slave morality' of resentment, not imposing it on others. Jackson: It really feels like the central message of the book is that you can't separate the ideas from the life. The philosophy is the scar tissue from the wounds he endured. Olivia: That's a perfect way to put it. Prideaux leaves us with this powerful image of a man who refused to be a victim of his circumstances. He chose to be dynamite instead. And it makes you wonder, what do we do with our own suffering? Do we let it crush us, or do we try to turn it into gold? Jackson: That's a question that will stick with me. We'd love to hear your thoughts. What's one idea about Nietzsche that this conversation changed for you? Find us on our socials and let us know. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.