The following summers: 1884-1888
Although Nietzsche found “the evenings, when I sit all alone in the narrow, low little room (…) tough going”, starting in 1884, his lunches at the Alpenrose Hotel opened up some social contacts to a group of refined ladies which continued into the following summers and remained very welcome “as an antidote and sometimes cure” for the “hermit of Sils Maria” “to escape from myself for a few hours”. Nietzsche’s contact with the “excellent inhabitant(s) of Sils” was largely limited to the his landlord, the pastor and the village teacher.
On September 20, 1888, Nietzsche left Sils Maria for the last time, the place – as he wrote in “Ecce homo” – where “my gratitude would like to immortalize its name”.
Sils, a place of creative productivity
A significant part of Nietzsche’s work was created in Sils Maria: the 2nd and the draft for the 3rd book of “Thus spoke Zarathustra” in the summer of 1883, the treatise “Beyond Good and Evil” (notes for the text in the summer of 1885), the important prefaces to earlier works (summer 1886), the pamphlet “On the Genealogy of Morals” (drafted in July 1887), finally “Twilight of the Idols” and “The Antichrist” (both in the summer of 1888).