30/07/2026
A decade ago I learned that Nietzsche was deeply interested in dance. This drew my curiosity prompting me not only to explore the topic further but also to visit the Nietzsche Archive in Germany, a villa where the philosopher spent his last days.
I ended up creating a work on Nietzsche and dance titled 'Afterword' (2015). However, another thread emerged along the way: the story of how the Stasi, the secret police, later erased the philosopher's bedroom from the house without removing the door leading into the now-vanished room.
A staff member at the Archive kindly unlocked it for me. Nietzsche's door leads nowhere.
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I wrote a small essay about it:
The story of Friedrich Nietzsche is deeply intertwined with that of his sister, Elisabeth. There was a time, indeed, near the end of his life, when she became the interpreter of his departed reason.
In 1893, the failure of Nueva Germania, a “racially clean” A***n settlement founded by Elisabeth and her husband in the Paraguayan countryside, led her to return to Germany and take care of Friedrich, who had already fallen into total catatonia. From that moment on, Elisabeth assumed control of his legacy, shaping his remaining writings to fit her own ideological views.
The siblings moved together to Weimar. The sometimes silent, sometimes delirious Friedrich was theatrically dressed in white robes to receive visitors. In January 1889, he wrote his last letters, all of these hallucinatory writings were signed under the name of “Dionysus” (...)
In different moments of the 20th century, the Weimar house would fall into the hands of rival strands of self-described socialists. Originally a residence of sober protestant restraint, Elisabeth transformed it after her brother’s death to a more optimistic style. In 1903, she hired the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde to remodel the entire interior in the Art Nouveau fashion. Yet amid this total aesthetic transformation, a few structural elements were left untouched, including the original wooden doors on the second floor.
(...)
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