Introduction to Thus Spake Zarathustra

Förster-Nietzsche says that Zarathustra is her brother's most personal work, the history of his friendships, raptures and disappointments, and that the figure had haunted his dreams since childhood before he identified it with the Persian prophet, citing his note on the Persian idea of a prophet's thousand-year 'Hazar'.

Förster-Nietzsche argues that the Superman ideal was already present in Nietzsche's writings of 1873–75 as the hope of rearing great individuals, the youthful view that mankind's object lies in its highest specimens; in Zarathustra this ideal is placed in the future and veiled in becoming, beyond even the Saviour, since 'never yet hath there been a Superman'.

Förster-Nietzsche argues that 'rearing the Superman' means transforming man by new, higher values that must replace the Christian valuations born of the resentment of the weak; the Superman is not a remote fancy or a new Darwinian species but a possibility present men could realise by adopting the new values, just as Christianity once transvalued Graeco-Roman values within a short time.

Förster-Nietzsche reports that Nietzsche's notes use 'Superman' for the most thoroughly well-constituted type as opposed to modern man, that he treated Zarathustra himself as an example of it, and that in Ecce Homo he named 'great healthiness', described in Gay Science 382, as the physiological condition of this type.

Förster-Nietzsche says that the book came into being in August 1881 at Sils Maria, when the idea of eternal recurrence, which Nietzsche in Ecce Homo calls the fundamental idea of the work and the highest formula of Yea-saying, struck him beside a rock near Surlei, and that he then resolved to reveal it through Zarathustra; the first plan was headed 'Midday and Eternity'.

Förster-Nietzsche quotes Nietzsche saying that eternal recurrence, the highest formula of a Yea-saying philosophy, is the fundamental idea of Zarathustra and first occurred to him in August 1881.

Förster-Nietzsche says that just as Nietzsche's health recovered in 1881, bitter disappointments with friends made him feel the horror of loneliness, and finding no one who could follow him he created a perfect friend in the figure of a majestic philosopher and made him the preacher of his gospel.

Förster-Nietzsche records that Part One was written in about ten days at Rapallo in February 1883, finished in the hour of Wagner's death, that it was met with incomprehension, that the 'Night-Song' was composed in a gloomy, lonely spring in Rome, and that Part Two was written in ten days at Sils Maria in summer 1883.

Förster-Nietzsche quotes Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche describes writing Zarathustra as inspiration in the old sense: thoughts flashing up like lightning with necessity, ecstasy, and an involuntariness of images in which all things seem to come and want to become similes.

Förster-Nietzsche records that Part Three was written in Nice in winter 1883–84, 'Old and New Tables' composed on the climb to Eza amid bodily vigour and dancing, and that Part Four, written 1884–85 with interruptions, was meant 'only for my friends', printed in forty copies of which he gave away only seven, while he still planned a fifth and sixth part.

Förster-Nietzsche quotes Nietzsche explaining that he chose Zarathustra because the Persian prophet created the error of morality, making good and evil the wheel of things, and so must be the first to perceive it; being the most truthful thinker, his name stands for the self-overcoming of morality through truthfulness.