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never met the residency requirements, he never received it. As a result, he was legally
stateless for the rest of his life. When, just over a year later (July, 1870) the Franco-
Prussian war broke out, Nietzsche was granted a leave of absence from the university to
participate in the war. However, because of his association with Switzerland, and his
lack of Prussian citizenship, he could only participate as a medical orderly. Nietzsche,
the stateless philologist, could only work as a stretcher bearer for just over two months,
until he fell ill with dysentery and diphtheria. Following this experience, his health
deteriorated forcing him to take medical leaves from the university until finally, in 1879,
he retired from the university and began what can best be described as his nomadic
period.
It is thus from this vantage that Nietzsche writes about friendship. About the time
that he discovers the eternal recurrence, he finds himself a stateless man wondering
Europe. His best friend is Paul Rée, a Jewish psychologist, he has twice proposed
marriage to the itinerant daughter of a Russian aristocrat of Huguenot descent, he has
been basically excommunicated by the scholarly world for his Birth of Tragedy, and his
former friend Richard Wagner has turned to Christianity and anti-Semitism. Prior to the
advent of the eternal recurrence, Nietzsche looked at Germany, German music and
German culture in general as nourishment for an elevated sort of friendship. After the
experience of the Franco-Prussian war, this all changed. Rather than looking at
“Germans” and Germany as the ground for friendships, he began to think of the nation-
state as a moribund entity breeding the wrong sort of relationships between people. The
new ground for friendship could not be limited by the artificial boundaries of the nation-
state and thus Nietzsche began referring to himself as a “good European.” As he puts it:
Convention