The inside of this card reads:
Sobald ein Mensch auf die Welt kommt, ist er schon alt genug zu sterben ... [1]
Tout ce qui existe naît sans raison, se prolonge par faiblesse et meurt par hasard ... [2]
This Wednesday, lest we forget, is Nietzsche's birthday: he was born in Röcken, Germany, on 15 October 1844 [3].
And whilst the village he was born in has now been absorbed into the expanding town of Lützen, a few miles southwest of Leipzig, the actual house he was born in still stands, next to the church where his father was a pastor, and is now part of a memorial site that includes his grave [4].
Not that Nietzsche was one to make a huge fuss over his birthday; indeed, in 1880, he even forgot it entirely, explaining to his friend Franz Overbeck in a letter that his head was too full of other thoughts (thoughts that made him wonder why anything should matter to him).
Having said that, however, there are Nietzsche scholars who argue that Nietzsche did very much like birthdays; not least because it was a time of gifts and of cake, but also because they signified the beginning of another year and the opportunity to make a fresh start.
After his own mother apparently forgot his 44th birthday in 1888 - his last before his mental breakdown in January 1889 - he sent her a postcard humorously reprimanding her: The old mother has forgotten the old creature's birthday!
This was that perfect day on which everything ripened and he told himself the story of his life ... [5]
Notes
[1] Heidegger doesn't do birthday greetings, but if he did, I'm sure he'd say something like this; it's a line from the late medieval text Der Ackermann aus Böhmen (c. 1400), by Johannes von Tepl, quoted in Sein und Zeit (1927).
[2] And this equally amusing existential birthday greeting is by Jean-Paul Sartre, taken from his 1938 novel La Nausée.
[3] The same date as King Friedrich Wilhelm IV was born in 1795; a Prussian monarch very much admired by Nietzsche's father and after whom he was named. As Nietzsche would later write in Ecce Homo, this had one main advantage; throughout his childhood it was a day of public rejoicing. See section 3 of Ecce Homo, 'Why I Am So Wise'.
Lest we forget, Michel Foucault, was also born on 15 October (1926); a philosopher who, by his own admission, tried "as far as possible, on a certain number of issues, to see with the help of Nietzsche's texts ..."
See Michel Foucault, 'The Return of Morality', trans John Johnston in Foucault Live (Interviews, 1961-1984), ed. by Sylvère Lotringer (Semiotext(e), 1996), pp. 465-73. The line quoted from is on p. 471.
And see also my post on being simply a Nietzschean à la
Foucault, published on 14 August 2020: click here.
[4] The Nietzsche-Gedenkstätte: click here for details (in English).
This should not be confused with the Nietzsche-Haus in Sils Maria, Switzerland, where Nietzsche spent seven summers in the 1880s, and which is also now a museum (opened in 1960 and overseen by the Nietzsche House Sils-Maria Foundation): click here.
[5] Ecce Homo is the last original book written by Nietzsche before his death in 1900. It was written in late 1888, but not published until 1908. The book offers Nietzsche's own (self-mocking) interpretation of his work and his significance as a thinker.
