Nietzsche passed through the Pforta gateway, for the last time as a pupil, on September 7, 1864. Surrounded by a crowd of schoolboys, assembled to give the school-leavers a ceremonial send-off, he and eight others mounted a garlanded carriage escorted on both sides by festively clad postillions. The future lay in Bonn, at whose famous university he had decided to enrol, mainly because of its distinguished philologists, Otto Jahn (en passant, a renowned Mozart biographer) and Friedrich Ritschl (see Plate 6), but also because he would have a friend there: born and brought up in the Rhineland, Paul Deussen (see Plate 7) planned to attend his home university. In the meantime, the two young men had five free weeks before the beginning of the university year.

Free at Last

The first two weeks were spent in Naumburg, where Deussen made a very good impression on the Nietzsche family. Then, on September 23, the two friends set off on a slow meander westwards towards Bonn.

‘One must’, Nietzsche wrote to a friend still at Pforta, ‘experience constraint in order to be able to savour freedom’. After six years of intense study, cooped up in a quasi-monastic institution which located the real world a couple of millennia in the past, Nietzsche, on his Rhineland trip, experienced the charms of first freedom to an intense degree.