Turning Danger into Performance – Nietzsche’s “Sibling Mind”

“Was this the source of that strangely sisterly, sexless air she adopted—as if the world held nothing but brothers for her? Or was it not far more likely that this utterly unselfconscious manner served merely as a cloak for a life of complete freedom? After all, she must have known a great deal about the world and people—more than any of the sheltered young women of our social circles.”

„Kam daher dieser merkwürdig schwesterliche, geschlechtslose Anstrich, den sie sich gab, als gäbe es für sie auf der Welt nur lauter Brüder? Oder war es nicht viel wahrscheinlicher, daß dies unendlich unbefangene Betragen nur den äußeren Deckmantel abgab für ein ganz freies Leben? Sie mußte doch schon recht viel von der Welt und den Menschen kennen – mehr als eines der wohlbehüteten jungen Mädchen unsrer Kreise.“ Lou Andreas-Salomé, „Fenitschka“

Fenitschka embodies a psychological paradox of her time. She is intellectually brilliant, erotically present, and emotionally unavailable. Alongside „Eine Ausschweifung“ (published 1898), „Fenitschka“ is almost consistently classified in academic contexts as either a novella cycle or a psychoanalytic novella, even though Lou Andreas-Salomé herself chose the subtitle “A Summer Story.” As a writer, essayist, philosopher, and psychoanalyst, she moved at the intersections of literature, psychology, and cultural theory. Her life connects the intellectual currents of the Fin de Siècle with modernity; she was in close exchange with Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Sigmund Freud, while simultaneously developing her own literary voice.

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Dear J., forgive me for having gone so long without writing. I am currently separating from K., probably for reasons similar to those that once led Lou Andreas-Salomé to separate from Rainer Maria Rilke. He wanted fusion. She refused self-erasure. We all know this tension: the desire for closeness and the fear of being absorbed. The need for relationship alongside the insistence on autonomy. It is here that Fenitschka and her creator meet. This is not an autobiographical equation. Fenia is not Lou. And yet.

Lou remained connected to Rilke throughout her life. They corresponded and continued to meet socially. She remained an attentive reader and early “tester” of his poetry. I like to imagine that you position me similarly in your life—though I no longer address my stockings to you, and we may both be allowed to endure that lack. Happiness presupposes absence. Fulfilment intensifies desire. What, after all, have we not once needed, when today a skilled hand and a pleasant scent sometimes suffice?

I find you beautiful within your own cosmos. That a 19th-century narrative figure still causes you to search for your form makes me cheerful—and it might even excite me, if I allowed it. Do you know you can still seduce me, effortlessly, almost incidentally, as if it cost you nothing? Only a magician can produce such illusions. I realised this earlier while dusting.

You are right when you recognise in the disturbances of the psychologist Max Werner the explosive charges that make Fenitschka such a volatile novella. He never fully understands what he is dealing with in Fenia. This invites reading her as a riddle. But perhaps the more interesting question is: why does Max need a clear answer at all? Fenia does not contradict herself. She is not manipulative. She does not plot. She keeps her word. What unsettles Max is that her affection does not automatically convert into possession.

Here I see the connection to Rilke. He charged relationships with existential intensity. This was at once flattering and threatening for Salomé.

Fenia does not appear as someone who refuses attachment. She appears as someone who knows that attachment activates forces deeper than conscious decision-making. Love, in Salomé’s writing, is never a contract between rational subjects. It is a turbulent field of imprinting, desire, fear, and loss.

Does this explain why Salomé detached herself from Rilke without expelling him from her life? I hope you will accept, with a smile, that I am also questioning us in you and me.

Salomé’s sovereignty is a singularity. In her relationships with Nietzsche, Rilke, and Freud, she never fully adopts the role offered to her. She may be muse, lover, student, or disciple—but she always reinterprets these positions beyond their genre boundaries.

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“Benno was beautiful. Beautiful people have always been my utter delight…” --- „Benno war schön. Schöne Menschen sind immer mein ganzes Entzücken gewesen…“ Lou Andreas-Salomé, „Eine Ausschweifung“

Naturality promises innocence; a harmonious merging with instinct. Salomé shows how human sexuality is shaped in psychic acts. Imprinting overwrites nature. In „Eine Ausschweifung“, the Fenia-variant Adine reflects biographical moments from her creator’s life.

The story mirrors Salomé’s childhood. Her father, Gustav von Salomé, a Baltic-German general in Tsarist service, favored his only daughter over sons, shielding her from conventional maternal discipline and granting her a space of intellectual freedom. This became the foundation of her self-assured autonomy—her positive narcissism.

Adine learns, under her father’s protection, to understand herself as an independent, creative being. The father suspends her from traditional feminine socialization into submission. The tragedy of „Ausschweifung“ begins when this protective space reaches its limits. As a young bride, patriarchal reality breaks in unfiltered. The awakening of desire feels to her like a biological relapse into unfreedom—a betrayal of the free mind.

Friedrich Nietzsche believed he had found in Lou Andreas-Salomé the only person capable not merely of understanding his philosophy but of embodying it. He called her a “sibling mind” and saw in her a living promise of his “Übermensch”—a being freed from inherited morality and bourgeois constraint. Yet when Nietzsche attempted to translate this intellectual affinity into a sexual and marital relationship, he collided with Salomé’s uncompromising architecture of self-preservation.

Eine Ausschweifung thus becomes a story about the origin of desire. By tracing sexuality back to early affective inscriptions, Salomé approaches an insight later systematised by Freud: human beings orient themselves according to the often opaque imprints of early experience.