Walking – A philosophical adventure

new photo, not sharp

The 20th of September at 16:00: An adventurous group gathered in the west wing of the central Basel station, not to take a train ride but to practice one of Nietzsche’s passionate convictions: “Thought has to be generated by walking and not by sitting on the bottom”.

In keeping with this principle, the Centrepoint delegation faced the stresses and strains that a modern city walk offers – erratic car drivers, construction work and a climate-change induced temperature of 29°C. “What does not kill you makes you stronger”, Nietzsche said. Two hours and 8,732 paces later, aching but still alive, our group reached the Münsterplatz, where Nietzsche once taught at (grammar) school. 

What had happened in the meantime? The group heard a summary of Basel as it looked when Nietzsche arrived in April 1869. Most of the city gates and walls had been destroyed 10 years earlier, and the moats had been filled in, transforming the medieval and humanist city of Basel into a centre of industry, with broad streets and the construction of the central train station.

Starting at the Spalentorweg, we passed by the Nietzsche Brunnen, a well that offers refreshing drinking water, and saw three of the five flats where Nietzsche lived.  With income from two jobs at the university and (grammar school), he was able to afford a comparatively luxurious apartment at Spalentorweg 48, where he lived with his sister Elizabeth.

Nietzsche was busy 13 hours a day: lecturing, teaching, preparing, correcting, examining, composing music, accepting or rejecting invitations, not to mention producing 9 to 10 thousand pages and more than 2,800 letters during the twenty years of his literary life. Written in an unacademic, appealing style, his works are unmatched in German. During much of this time, he was afflicted by migraines, vomiting attacks, hypersensitivity and failing vision.

Friends helped him to read books and to write his texts properly for the editor. The musician Heinrich Köselitz (alias Peter Gast), Nietzsche’s devoted disciple, was the only person who could decipher Friedrich’s handwriting for posterity.

If you want to know more about this subject, the following sources may help you:

–  YouTube: piano compositions by Nietzsche 

– The Basel University Library Nietzsche Archive, which became part of UNESCO’s Memory of the World collection in April 2025

– Wikipedia: Read the fascinating story of the Nietzsche archive and counterarchive in Weimar

– The biography by Paul Janz (three volumes) or Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (an unreliable source)

– Or simply buy the complete edition of Nietzsche’s work!

Written By Florian Pätzold