Nietzsche bio

R.J. Hollingdale's translator note, Twiglight of the Idols p. 25

Nietzsche was born in Rocken, a village in Prussian Saxony, in 1844.  His father and both grandfathers were Lutheran pastors and as a boy he was a pious believer.  He attended Pforta school, the Rugby of Prussia, from 1858 to 1864 and then went to Bonn and subsequently Leipzig University (1864-9).  At Bonn he studied theology but gave it up when he lost his religious faith; he continued as a student of philology and gained so great a reputation in it that he was appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basel University at the age of 24 before having obtained his doctorate, which was awarded him by Leipzig without examination.  He taught at Basel for ten years (1869-79), becoming a Swiss to do so, and published his earliest books: The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and the four Untimely Meditations (1873-6).  He also became a 'disciple' of Richard Wagner and devoted much time and energy to assisting in establishing the Bayreuth Festival, which was inaugurated in 1876.  But by that time Nietzsche had come to think he had been mistaken in seeing in Wagner the new savior of German art, and this disillusionment, combined with his sense that the newly established Reich was a victory for philistinianism, turned him against all things German and he became year by year more critical of the 'new Germany'