At ten o'clock in the morning on Tuesday, 15 October 1844, a child was born to Franziska Nietzsche, née Oehler, and Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, the pastor of the village of Röcken, near Lützen in the eastern part of Germany. On 24 October, the boy was christened Friedrich Wilhelm; his father, on the anniversary of whose own baptism the service had taken place, gave his son the following Taufspruch or baptismal motto: “What manner of child shall this be? And the hand of the Lord was with him” (Luke 1:66).

As Nietzsche was well aware, he was the descendant of a whole line of Christian ministers, and in an early autobiographical sketch he wrote: “As a plant I was born close to the churchyard, and as a human being in a vicarage” (Ich bin als Pflanze nahe dem Gottesacker, als Mensch in einem Pfarrhause geboren). In fact, long before he wrote Ecce Homo, Nietzsche was an insatiable writer of autobiographical sketches, quickly becoming aware of how, “if the basic characteristics of every individual are, as it were, innate, time and circumstance develop these simple seeds and leave their specific marks on them, which then over time become firm and ineradicable” (wenn auch die Grundzüge des Charakters jedem Menschen gleichsam angeboren sind, so bilden doch erst die Zeit und die Umstände diese rohen Keime aus und prägen ihnen bestimmte Formen auf, die dann durch die Dauer fest und unverlöschlich werden).