The Birth of Tragedy was written in (and, in a sense, against) a number of contexts: the military context of the Franco-Prussian War; the political context of the proclamation of the German Reich in Versailles on 18 January 1871, of the declaration of the Paris Commune on 18 March of the same year, and of the growing revolutionary movement in Europe; and the academic-political context of Basel, especially the philological circles in which Nietzsche had to operate. As early as on 20 November 1868, after his first meeting with Wagner in the Brockhaus household, Nietzsche wrote a letter to Rohde in which his dissatisfaction with scholars and with his academic colleagues was expressed with some force. Here he speaks of “the teeming broods of philologists of today, […] the entire molelike activity, with their full cheek-pouches and their blind eyes” (das wimmelnde Philologengezücht unserer Tage […], das ganze Maulwurfstreiben, die vollen Backentaschen und die blinden Augen), and what upset him was not just “their joy at the captured worm and their indifference to the real, indeed the insistent problems of life” (die Freude ob des erbeuteten Wurms und die Gleichgültigkeit gegen die wahren, ja aufdringlichen Probleme des Lebens; KSB 2, 344). This letter strikes one of the first notes in what will become a constant theme in Nietzsche's writings: the relationship between scholarly, academic activities and the tasks of the “real world”; ultimately, the relation of knowledge to life.