In July 1881, Friedrich Nietzsche visited Sils for the first time, staying at the home of the Durisch family (today’s Nietzsche Haus), where he rented a room on the first floor. From 1883 to 1888, he returned here every summer. He had found a place that gave him peace and enabled him to concentrate, a landscape which – as he said himself – was “blutsverwandt” (related by blood). Here, he worked on a number of books during his 7 summer stays (1881, 1883-88), e.g. Part 2 of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”, whose key idea of eternal recurrence came to him in a moment of inspiration on the shore of the Lake of Silvaplana, “Beyond Good and Evil”, “On the Genealogy of Morals”, “Twilight of the Idols” and “The Antichrist”. In August 1884, he wrote to Resa v. Schirnhofer: “Here one can live well, in this strong, bright atmosphere, here where nature is amazingly mild and solemn and mysterious all at once – in fact, there is no place that I like better than Sils-Maria”.
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