Lou Andreas Salomé (1861-1937) on Love, Philosophy, and Friendship

Discovering a turn of the century intellectual who was friends with Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Sigmund Freud in her lifetime was a very exciting moment for me as an undergraduate in philosophy. However, I only started reading about Lou Andreas Salomé in her own words this summer when I picked up her autobiography, “Looking Back”, which has some charming and fascinating details about her life. For example, when Salomé stopped hearing the voice of God as a child, she assumed “he was lost to the entire universe as well” and proceeded to mourn for her parents who had also lost God, but did not know it yet (a reaction reminiscent of Zarathustra’s shock of encountering believers when he descends from the mountain) (5; 11). Of Paris, Salome writes that the city’s “inexpressible charm of its seasoned maturity seemed to me that of a lovely woman who is constantly putting…