[Friedrich Nietzsche: life and work in the struggle against his suffering]

This paper examines the connection between the life, sense of mission and suffering in the work of Friedrich Nietzsche. It shows that, as early as his Basel years, he wanted to become a philosopher who was willing to transmit without fear what he considered to be true to everybody, even if he would have to suffer and remain unappreciated. He was afflicted with increasing numbers of headaches and bouts of nausea from the mid-1870s and was further handicapped by constantly deteriorating vision. The ten years before his breakdown were spent as a traveller searching for a place where his suffering could be eased. The isolation imposed on him by the illness gave him the inner freedom to break the old certainties and to offer a new myth as an alternative. His failure as a writer was compensated by an intensified and, finally, gross sense of mission which ended in mental derangement in early January 1889.