A letter sent by Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche (1846-1935) to the artist just 4 days after the cast was taken, records her wishes to see her brother’s mask in person: 

“it is quite impossible to determine anything, until I have seen the plaster cast in peace and have made my opinion.”

In reality her opinion was already settled, and in much the same way that Nietzsche’s works were altered to suit the political developments of the period, his death mask would spend the next decade passing through the studios of successive artists, all tasked with polishing out its many “flaws.” Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche’s attempts to distance herself from the mask and later to prevent its circulation might also be explained by her brother’s growing number of admirers, many of whom wished to see the philosophical strongman, rather than the frail man struggling with his sanity. 

In 1903 Max Klinger was tasked with correcting some of the technical flaws in Stoeving’s mask. The nose was straightened and the ailing eyebrow removed. These corrections were received unenthusiastically by Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche, whose idealised vision of her brother’s face found form in Rudolf Saudek’s death mask of 1910, where Nietzsche is portrayed with serene eyes and picturesque waves of hair.  This version of the mask would become the established one, having been produced and sold by Gebrüder Micheli of Berlin.

When compiling his 1926 book ‘Undying Faces’, the art historian Ernst Benkard would be refused access to Nietzsche’s original death mask, with the philosopher’s sister suggesting that he use the Saudek mask insteasd. His unwillingness to use an idealised version of Nietzsche’s face, saw him settle for the bronze casting in the Berlin National Gallery.

As the Berlin National Gallery fell into the Soviet sphere after the Second World War, it is hard to know what happened to this bronze casting. An inventory taken by the museum a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, lists the mask as having been the casualty of war.

A possible reason for this, was Nietzsche’s reputation in the USSR, where his contempt for equality and his belief in the ‘will to power’ put him at odds with the philosophy of the Communist Party. By this point he had also become closely associated with Nazism, having had the misfortune of being Adolf Hitler’s favourite philosopher, and of his works being the focus of prolonged and cynical alterations after his death.

The beauty of the original death mask lay in its depiction of human frailty - the very thing Nietzsche’s philosophy railed against:

“Pity preserves things that are ripe for decline, it defends things that have been disowned and condemned by life, and it gives a depressive and questionable character to life itself by keeping alive an abundance of failures of every type.”

Ultimately, if this was how it ended for the man that conceived the ‘will to power’, then how could his philosophy be sound? Especially a philosophy that delved deeply into beauty and spoke at length about what it implied for lineage and health. Here is the face of the thinker at the very end. Perhaps Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche was right to prevent its circulation; perhaps the most emphatic rebuttal of her brother’s works was his own face at the time of his death.

The mighty head rested, as if too heavy for his neck, sunk on his chest, hanging halfway to the right. The forehead is quite colossal, the mane of his hair still dark brown, and also the shaggy, swollen moustache. There are wide, black-brown shadows sunk deep under his eyes into his cheeks. In his flat, loose face deep furrows from thought and desire are engraved but gradually fading and becoming smooth again … He was exhausted by the muggy, thunderstorm atmosphere and would not awaken, despite his sister stroking him several times and calling to him, “Darling, darling” caressingly. Thus he resembles not someone sick or crazy but rather a dead man.

Harry Graf Kessler recalling his first meeting with Nietzsche in 1897