These details are not in the autobiography but may be found in Dr. Mügge's excellent study just published, Nietzsche, His Life and Work. Overbeck started for Turin and there found his poor old companion giving away his money, dancing, singing, declaiming verse, and playing snatches of crazy music on the pianoforte. He was taken back to Basel and was gentle on the trip except that in the Saint-Gothard tunnel he sang a poem of his, "An der Brücke," which appears in the autobiography. His mother brought him from Switzerland to Naumburg; thence to Dr. Binswanger's establishment at Jena. Later he lived in his sister's home at Upper Weimar, and from the balcony, where he spent his days, he could see a beautiful landscape. He was melancholy rather than mad, never violent--this his sister has personally assured me--and occasionally surprised those about him by flashes of memory; but full consciousness was not to be again enjoyed by him. Overwork, chloral, and despair at the "conspiracy of silence" caused his brain to crumble. He had attained his "Great Noon," Zarathustra's Noon, during the closing days of 1888. In August, 1900, came the euthanasia for which he had longed.
There is internal evidence that the autobiography was written under exalted nervous conditions. The aura of insanity hovers about its pages. Yet Nietzsche has seldom said so many brilliant, ironical, and savage things. He melts over memories of Wagner, the one friendship of a life crowded with friends and cursed by solitude. He sets out to smash Christianity, but he expressed the hope that the book would fall into the hands of the intellectual élite. He divides his theme into the following heads: Why I Am So Clever: Why I Am So Sage: Why I Write Such Good Books: Why I Am a Fatality. (You recall here the letter to Brandes.) He ranges from the abuse of bad German cookery to Kantian metaphysics. He calls Ibsen the typical old maid and denounces him as the creator of the "Emancipated Woman." Yes, he does insult Germany and the Germans, but no worse than in earlier books; and certainly not so effectively as did Goethe, Heine, and Schopenhauer. In calling the Germans the "Chinese of Europe" he but repeated the words of Goncourt in Charles Demailly. He speaks of Liszt as one "who surpasses all musicians by the noble accents of his orchestration" (vague phrase); and depreciates Schumann's "Manfred." He, Nietzsche, had composed a counter overture which Von Bülow declared extraordinary. True, Von Bülow did call it something of the sort, with the advice to throw it into the dust-bin as being an insult to good music. He analyses his recent readings of Baudelaire--whose diary touched him deeply--of Stendhal, Bourget, Maupassant, Anatole France, and others. Best of all, he minutely analyses the mental processes of his books from The Birth of Tragedy to The Wagner Case. He declares Zarathustra a dithyramb of solitude and purity, and proudly boasts that the Superman builds his nest in the trees of the future.