Nietzsche was born to a family of Lutheran clergyman in Rocken, Saxony and was raised mostly among women after the death of his father in 1848. He romanticized, probably without actual foundation, that his ancestors were Polish nobility. From an early age, Nietzsche was expected to follow the family vocation and take up the cloth, but at college, he discovered the writings of the philosopher Schopenhauer and eventually lost any pastoral ambitions. He was appointed professor of philology at Basle University in Switzerland and at the age of 27 the first of his books was published; The Birth of Tragedy, a virtual endorsement of his friend, the composer Richard Wagner. Nietzsche's early emulation of Wagner soon turned sour, due to his disenchantment with Wagner's increasing ego-mania, christian pretensions and anti-semitism. Nietzsche retired from his professorship with ill health, devoting his time to wandering Europe in a sort of nationless self-exile and writing a string of philosophical books which were neither understood nor much appreciated during his lifetime. With wild and entertaining language, he railed against the idols of his day, democracy, socialism and christianity, forces which he saw steering humanity to a nihilistic state of intellectual mediocrity. In 1889, he suffered a mental collapse and until his death in 1900, remained in a state of insanity and paralysis while his sister re-edited his work in her questionable way, allowing nazi propogandists to embrace and erroneously interpret many of his ideas. Today, he is thought of considerably better but still rarely understood.