I Tragedy without a Cast To profit most from existence, man must live dangerously. The tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche is a monodrama: no other figure is present on the brief lived stage of his existence. Across the acts of this tragedy, which crash down and surge on like an avalanche, the isolated combatant stands alone beneath the stormy sky of his own destiny; nobody is alongside him, nobody is opposing him and no woman is there to momentarily relax the overstrung atmosphere with her presence. Every movement issues from him alone and he is its sole witness: the few figures who at the outset linger in his shadow can only accompany his heroic enterprise with gestures of dumb astonishment and alarm and little by little distance themselves from him as if from some danger. Not a single being dare properly enter the inner sanctum of that destiny; always Nietzsche speaks, struggles, suffers for himself alone. He addresses no one and no one responds. Worst of all: no one is even listening. There are no other people, no fellows, no listeners in this unique tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche, but neither is there a stage, scenery or costume, for it plays out, so to speak, only in the airless space of the idea.

Basel, Naumburg, Nice, Sorrento, Sils-Maria, Genoa, these names were not those of Nietzsche''s homes, but merely a series of milestones along a road travelled in a burning flight, the cold colourless wings of the theatre. In truth the scene of this tragedy always remains the same: isolation, solitude, that cruelly wordless responseless solitude that his thought carries within and around itself like an opaque bell-jar, a solitude without flowers or colours, without sounds, animals or people, a solitude deprived even of God, the extinct and stony solitude of some primeval world existing before or beyond time. What makes this desolation so harrowing and ghastly, so truly grotesque, is that this glacier, this desert of solitude occurred at the heart of an Americanized Germany of some seventy million inhabitants, in the rattling and whirring of telegraphs and trains, of cries and tumult, at the centre of a morbidly prurient culture which every year launches forty thousand volumes into the world, that every day searches around a thousand different problems in a hundred universities, that every day stages tragedies in hundreds of theatres, and yet knows nothing, divines nothing and senses nothing of the great drama of the spirit unfolding right in their midst. For it was precisely at its most sublime moments that the tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche failed to find spectator, listener, or sole witness in the German world. At the beginning when he is in a position to proclaim from the lofty heights of his professorial lectern and the spotlight of Wagner finds him, his discourse secures a measure of regard. But the deeper he descends inside himself, the more he plunges into the far reaches of time, the less any response is detected. One after another, friends, strangers, stand up shocked, in the course of his heroic monologues, alarmed by the ever more wild transformations, the ever more heated frenzies of horrifying solitude, and abandon him on the stage of his destiny. Little by little the tragic actor becomes agitated at declaiming into a void, so he begins to raise his voice, to shout and gesticulate more wildly to create an echo or at least a contradiction.

To harmonise with his words, he invents a surging, intoxicating, Dionysian music - but now no one is listening. He tries a harlequinesque turn, ascribes to a forced gaiety, strident and piercing; he builds into his phrases all manner of twists and turns (mimicking comic improvisations), just to attract through artificial amusements, listeners to his deadly earnest evangel, but no hand is moved to applaud. Finally he invents a dance, a dance of swords and, butchered, torn, bloodied, he performs his new deadly art to the public, but no one guesses the significance of these shrill jokes, nor the passion wounded to death that exists in this affected lightheartedness. Without listeners or echo, the most extraordinary drama of the spirit ever granted to our troubled century is played out to its bitter end before an empty house. No one turns their glance even cursorily towards him, when the whirligig of his thoughts spinning on a steel point leaps exuberantly for the last time and finally falls, exhausted on the ground - ''Dead by immortality''. This aloneness with the self, this solitary state of being face to face with the self, is in the deepest sense the exceptional sacred affliction of that tragedy which was Friedrich Nietzsche''s existence. Never was such an imposing consummation of the spirit, such an extreme bacchanal of feeling placed before such a colossal void of the world, in the face of such a metallically inviolable silence. Nietzsche never even had the fortune to find worthy adversaries; so the most powerful will of thought, ''closed in on itself and burrowing deep into itself'', was obliged to seek out a response and a resistance in his own breast, in his own tragic soul.

It wasn''t the world, but the bleeding strips of his own skin that this spirit raging with destiny tore away, like Heracles, his Nessus shirt, with that burning desire to be bared before ultimate truth, to confront himself. But what glacial chill accompanies this nakedness, what silence around this cry of the spirit without precedent, what terrible sky crossed by storm clouds and lightning, above this ''God murderer'', who now having encountered no adversary turns on his own being, ''Knower of himself, torturer of himself, merciless one''. Hounded by his demon beyond time and the world, beyond even the furthest limits of his being. Shaken alas! by unknown fevers, Trembling before airborne icy shafts, Hunted down by you, oh thought! Inexpressible! Sinister! Horrifying! Sometimes he recoils quivering, with a nameless look of terror, when he recognises to what extent his life has rushed beyond all that was living and all that had been. But an impulse so powerful can no longer be restrained: with surging confidence and hugely intoxicated with his own self, he accomplishes the destiny that his beloved Hölderlin had prefigured for him - that of Empedocles. Heroic landscape devoid of sky, sublime performance without an audience and silence, a silence growing ever more intense around the unbearable cry of this lonely spirit, that is the tragedy of Friedrich Nietzsche. We should abhor them, as the numberless insensate cruelties of nature were it not for the fact that he himself selected and embraced them ecstatically, adoring them for their unique harshness and solely because of that uniqueness. For voluntarily, in all lucidity, renouncing a secure existence, he constructs this ''unconventional life'' with the most profound tragic instinct, defying the gods with unrivalled courage, to ''experience himself the highest degree of danger in which a man can live''.

''Χαιρετε δαιυονε_! Hail, demons!'' It was with this jocular cry of hubris, that once, one evening, in the light hearted manner of students, Nietzsche and his philosopher friends summon up supernatural powers: at the hour when the spirits are abroad, they pour through the open window the red wine from their brimful glasses into the sleepy Basel street as a libation to the unseen, an imaginative jape, but one which harbours a more serious presentiment nonetheless: for the demons hearken to this call and pursue the one who defied them, turning an evening lark into the monumental tragedy of a destiny. And yet, Nietzsche never shrinks from the colossal demands by which he feels irresistibly seized and drawn: the harder the hammer strikes, the clearer the tone from the bronze anvil of his will. And on this anvil, made red hot from the mighty flame, is forged, ever more powerfully and reinforced with each blow, the watchword which would armour his mind in bronze; ''the greatness of man'' amor fati : never seeking to change the past, the future, eternity; not to just bear necessity, much less to conceal it, but to love it. This ardent song of love addressed to the spirits, covers like a dithyramb the cry of his own pain: bent to the ground, crushed by the world''s silence, eaten up by himself, seared by the bitterness of suffering, never once does he raise his hands to ask of fate to finally forsake him. On the contrary, he demands still greater adversity, deeper solitude, a larger capacity for suffering. Not in defence does he raise his hands, but to launch the glorious prayer of heroes: ''Oh will of my soul, that I call fate, you within me! You above me! Enshrine me and preserve me for a great destiny.'' Whosoever offers up such grandiose prayers must surely be heard.