Queer Places:
Villa Silberblick (the Nietzsche-Archiv), Humboldtstraße 36, 99425 Weimar, Germany
Röcken Churchyard, Röcken, 06686 Lützen

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (15 October 1844 – 25 August 1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest ever to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24. Nietzsche resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade.

Barbara Margaretha "Meta" von Salis-Marschlins was a pioneering Swiss historian, feminist, and suffragette. She was the first Swiss woman to earn a PhD (from the University of Zurich in 1887) and spent her life advocating for women's civic and social rights. She was also a devoted admirer and regular correspondent of Friedrich Nietzsche.

In 1889 at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties. In 1897, Meta von Salis provided the financial backing to purchase the Villa Silberblick in Weimar. This house served as both the final home for the incapacitated Friedrich Nietzsche and his sister Elisabeth and the permanent headquarters of the Nietzsche-Archiv. Shortly after moving into Villa Silberblick, Elisabeth took unauthorized liberties with home renovations and sent the bill directly to Meta. Outraged by Elisabeth's arrogance, financial exploitation, and overbearing behavior, Meta abruptly cut off all personal contact with her, writing scathing letters detailing Elisabeth's toxic character. Meta thereafter refused to deal with Elisabeth directly, forcing all subsequent property transfers to go through legal intermediaries. Nietzsche died in 1900.

Nietzsche scholar Joachim Köhler has attempted to explain Nietzsche's life history and philosophy by claiming that Nietzsche was homosexual. Köhler argues that Nietzsche's syphilis, which is "... usually considered to be the product of his encounter with a prostitute in a brothel in Cologne or Leipzig, is equally likely, it is now held, to have been contracted in a male brothel in Genoa." The acquisition of the infection from a homosexual brothel was confirmed by Sigmund Freud, who cited Otto Binswanger as his source. Köhler also suggests Nietzsche may have had a romantic relationship as well as a friendship with Paul Rée. There is the claim that Nietzsche's homosexuality is widely known in the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, with Nietzsche's friend Paul Deussen claiming that the philosopher never "touched a woman".

Köhler's views have not found wide acceptance among Nietzsche scholars and commentators. Allan Megill argues that, while Köhler's claim that Nietzsche was in a confrontation with his homosexual desire cannot simply be dismissed, "the evidence is very weak," and Köhler may be projecting twentieth-century understandings of sexuality on nineteenth-century notions of friendship. It is also known that Nietzsche frequented heterosexual brothels. Some like Nigel Rodgers and Mel Thompson have argued that continuous sickness and headaches hindered Nietzsche from engaging much with women. Yet, they bring other examples in which Nietzsche expressed his affections to other women, including Wagner's wife Cosima Wagner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche

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