First exhibition space

1844 – 1879: This first room is dedicated to Nietzsche’s childhood and youth, his university studies and the time as a professor in Basel.

Second exhibition space

1879-1900: The second room is devoted to the years Nietzsche spent as a independent author and philosopher, as well as his last phase of life after the mental breakdown.

Third exhibition space

This exhibition space documents the critical impact of Nietzsche’s works.

The Basel Furniture

This exhibition space houses some of the furniture Nietzsche owned during his years in Basel.

 

Nietzsche’s room

The upstairs room in the Durisch house, which Nietzsche rented for seven summers (1881 and 1883-1888), has been kept in its original condition.

 

Seven Sils Summers

Documents and photos in the corridor of the upper floor provide information about Nietzsche’s seven summer stays in Sils Maria.

Current special exhibit

16.12.2023 – 13.4.2024: Joint exhibition “Gerhard Richter. Engadin” at the Nietzsche House, the Segantini Museum and the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in St. Moritz.

Archive of special exhibits

Since 1978, the Nietzsche House Foundation in Sils Maria has offered artists whose work is related to the region or to Nietzsche’s thinking an opportunity to realize exhibits at the House.

First exhibition space

The information panels and display cases show photographs and manuscripts from Nietzsche’s childhood and youth. Documents and photos from his university years up until he was named a professor in Basel are also on display. During Nietzsche’s time in Basel, he met Richard Wagner, to whom he dedicated his first book, “The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music”. Their friendship was essentially ended with publication of Nietzsche’s “Human, All Too Human”.

While working as a professor in Basel, he also wrote several books. This period ended in 1879, when he was forced to resign due to health issues.

Second exhibition space

Nietzsche’s life as an independent author and philosopher began with a trip to the Graubünden Alps. Despite his ill health, Nietzsche led an intense life, moving frequently yet with important encounters, such as with the young Lou von Salomé. During this decade, Nietzsche wrote and published his major works. Forty exhibition items illuminate this eventful period.

The second exhibition space also documents Nietzsche’s collapse in the first days of January 1889, and the last years of his life, when he suffered from mental illness, until his death in 1900.

Third exhibition space

Documents and books by two key Nietzsche researchers are on display, illustrating the phenomenal impact of Nietzsche’s works on the 20th century. Oscar Levy was the editor of the first English edition of Nietzsche’s works, and the Italian German scholar Mazzino Montinari was the first editor of what is today considered the standard critical Nietzsche edition.

Both Nietzsche researchers had strong ties to the Nietzsche House in Sils Maria. Levy through the Rosenthal-Levy family, who made many gifts to the house. Montinari was a regular guest in Sils Maria and at the Nietzsche House.

The third exhibition space contains Oscar Levy’s library, though the library itself is not open to the public. One display case holds Nietzsche’s original manuscripts and first editions. The displayed items will be regularly replaced by other museum holdings and are part of the comprehensive Rosenthal collection, which the family donated to the Nietzsche House.

The Basel Furniture

In 1991, the Foundation was able to acquire the furniture that the young philology professor had ordered for his first own household in Basel at Spalenthorweg 48 in Naumburg and that he kept through several changes of residence until the end of his university career in Basel (May 1879). In its bourgeois solidity, this furniture forms a stark contrast to the great simplicity of Nietzsche’s room, which lies directly opposite it. The contrast of the two interiors reflects Nietzsche’s journey from respectable university professor to “hermit” and “fugitivus errans” (as he saw himself). Among the items to be admired in this room is the original armchair that Nietzsche purchased for his Basel household and gave to his doctor, Professor Rudolf Massini, in 1879, when he resigned from his professorship.

Nietzsche’s room

The upstairs room in the Durisch house, which Nietzsche rented for seven summers (1881 and 1883-1888), has been kept in its original, simple condition. The furnishings are from Sils’ oldest hotel ‘Alpenrose’, where the philosopher often had lunch.
To the left of the window, you can see a piece of wallpaper with a pattern that Nietzsche selected and paid for himself in the summer of 1883. It is no coincidence that both the tablecloth and the wallpaper are in shades of green. In this case, too, the philosopher himself chose the fabric. Nietzsche devoted much attention to the “things that surround us” which determine our day-to-day life, as he knew how they directly affected body and spirit.
The philosophy professor Paul Deussen, who visited Nietzsche in Sils Maria in September 1887, described his friend’s room in his memoirs: “The next day, he led me to his lodgings, or, as he said, into his cave. It was a simple room in a farmhouse, three minutes from the road: Nietzsche rented it during the season for one franc per day. The décor was as simple as one could imagine. On the side stood his books which I mostly still remembered from earlier times; then came a peasant-style table with a coffee cup, eggshells, manuscripts and toilet requisites in a colorful jumble extending to the unmade bed, via a boot j-jack with a boot jammed on it.”

Seven Sils Summers

A facsimile of Nietzsche’s “Sils-Maria” poem hangs above the staircase leading to the first floor. Translations of the poem can be found on the left-hand wall of the staircase.

A display case provides information about the seven summers Nietzsche spent in Sils Maria and his encounters with contemporaries in the Engadine. The focus is on two representatives of his many contacts and relationships during his stay here: the writer Mathilda von Meysenbug and scholar and philosopher Heinrich von Stein.

A stained glass window by Gerhard Richter and a small reading area for visitors are located at the end of the corridor.

Current special exhibit

Gerhard Richter, "22.9.94", 1994, Oil on colour photograph, 17.9 x 12.7 cm / 7 x 5 in, © Gerhard Richter 2023, Olbricht Collection, Photo: Tino Kukulies, Düsseldorf

Videoclip

16 December 2023 to 13 April 2024: The Nietzsche House, the Segantini Museum and the Hauser & Wirth Gallery in St. Moritz organise a joint exhibition entitled “Gerhard Richter: Engadin“, curated by Dieter Schwarz.

Gerhard Richter, born in 1932, is one of the most important and celebrated artists of our time. His works can be found in international collections and have been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries in Europe and the United States. Richter first vacationed in Sils in the Upper Engadin in 1989 and has regularly visited the location during both summer and winter holidays for over 25 years. Presented across three venues in the Upper Engadin – Nietzsche-Haus, the Segantini Museum and Hauser & Wirth in St. Moritz – ‘Gerhard Richter: Engadin’ is the first exhibition to explore Richter’s deep connection with the Alpine valley landscape. More than seventy works from museums and private collections – including paintings, overpainted photographs, drawings and objects – are testament to the artist’s fascination with the Upper Engadin valley.

On view at the Segantini Museum and Hauser & Wirth are paintings that Richter created from photographs taken during his hikes in the Upper Engadin. These works mark a new chapter in his landscape painting – a genre that had always appealed to him for its supposed untimeliness. Richter’s Engadin landscapes are exemplary of the ambiguity in his painting, oscillating between a seductive transfiguration of nature and a reflection of its alienness.

The photographs Richter brought back from the Upper Engadin not only served as templates for his paintings, but also became canvases for his experiments with oil and lacquer paint. Richter enjoyed accentuating the photographic images with delicate traces of colour, disrupting them with stains and splatters, or using paint and a squeegee to cover them almost entirely. This process allowed him to establish contact between the image and the paint, bringing them closer together or even allowing them to collide. More than fifty of these alluring small-scale works can be seen at the two exhibition venues in St. Moritz. Richter first introduced this new chapter in his oeuvre at Nietzsche-Haus in 1992, in an exhibition curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, which essentially served as a trial run. Some of the first overpainted photographs appear in the artist’s book ‘Sils’ (1992) that was published on the occasion of the show. The maquette for this publication, designed by Richter himself, is on view at Hauser & Wirth.

For security reasons, neither paintings nor overpainted photographs can be exhibited in the Nietzsche House. Here you can see the 41 photos that Richter took in Sils for the book “December”, a book he collaborated on with the writer and filmmaker Alexander Kluge and published with Suhrkamp in 2010. Richter’s photographs of snow-covered fir trees serve as silent companions to Kluge’s texts, which focus on significant historical events.

The show is accompanied by a catalogue published by Hauser & Wirth Publishers, with images of the works on display and an essay by Dieter Schwarz. It has been produced in collaboration with the Segantini Museum and Nietzsche-Haus.

Archive of special exhibits

Virtually no other philosopher has so strongly influenced the visual arts – both modern and post-modern – as Friedrich Nietzsche. His exceptional popularity in the European art scene comes as no surprise if we think of the high importance this philosopher again and again accorded to art. In a fragment from the summer of 1885 (posthumous fragments), Nietzsche wrote:
“ In the main, I think artists know more than all of the philosophers up to now: they never lose sight of the main track on which life runs, they love the things of ‘this world’ – they love their own senses.[…]”

Since 1978, the Nietzsche House Foundation in Sils-Maria has offered artists whose work is related to the region or to Nietzsche’s thinking an opportunity to realize small exhibits at the Nietzsche House, generally they last for one year, from summer to summer (see also “Archive of past special exhibits”).