Sunday, October 17, 2021
Small Towns
Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 13 (note omitted, brackets in original):
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At least until the beginning of his nomadic mode of life at the end of the 1870s, Nietzsche hated large cities. But small towns where one was protected from the dangers of the wide world by a wall, where one came to know one's neighbours and remained in contact with the countryside, he came to love, particularly Germany's old medieval towns. In 1874, for instance, he wrote to his friend Edwin Rohde that he planned to leave the city of Basel and move to the walled (to this very day) medieval town of Rotenburg-ob-der-Tauber in Franconia since, unlike the cities of modernity, it was still 'altdeutsch' [German in the old-fashioned way] and 'whole'.
