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from Section 5 - German Classicism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
Ihr edeln Brüder droben, unsterbliches Gestirn …
You brothers, always noble, immortal now Among the stars…
In true Romantic fashion the friendship of Friedrich Nietzsche and Erwin Rohde was mythologized. Fellow students of philology at Leipzig in the mid 1860s, sharing the same passion for Greece, for Wagner and for Schopenhauer, the two were inseparable. Their teacher, Professor Friedrich Ritschl, called them “the Dioscuri.” In a letter to Rohde from Basel in November 1872 Nietzsche suggests that Ritschl, Burckhardt, Immermann, and even some “Florentine ladies” have noted the pair's “Orestes and Pylades relationship ϰαλεποĩσριν ἐνὶ Ξείνοισι (among the forbidding foreigners) and they rejoice over it” (KSB 4, 86). In the same letter Nietzsche praises Rohde's essay in defense of The Birth of Tragedy—and Nietzsche reports that Immermann has always considered Rohde's stuff (deine Sachen) to be as good as Nietzsche's own. In a letter one year later Nietzsche, sick after a journey and filled with resentment against life, consoled himself with their friendship:
Really, if I had not my friends, I wonder whether I should not myself begin to believe that I am demented. As it is, however, by my adherence to you I adhere to myself, and if we stand security for each other, something must ultimately result from our way of thinking-a possibility that the whole world had doubted. […] Truth to tell I live through you, I advance by leaning on your shoulders.
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