BBC R4 - Lavinia Murray's 'Nietzsche's Horse'
Soundscape by Katherine Norman
Directed by Kate Rowland
Broadcast April 28, 1997
Coded from tape at 128/44.1

"This is the last testament of Grownie, thoroughbred Arabian
gelding standing eighteen hands high, and good with children
... now an old drayhorse who Friedrich Nietzche saved from a
lethal beating, but not from the inevitable knacker."

Cast
Paul Ray - Trevor Fox
Bernard Forster - Russell Dixon
Grownie the Horse - Trevor Peacock
Richard Wagner - Ralph Pickervance
Friedrich Nietzche - Sylvester McCoy
Elizabeth Nietzche - Nixie - Katherine Hunt
Cosima Wagner & Lou von Salomé - Nicola Reynolds
Young Fritz (Friedrich) - William Haig
Young Elizabeth - Holly Granger

Some background

On January 3, 1889 while in Turin, Friedrich Nietzche went mad.
The story is that he hugged a horse's neck to prevent it being
whipped. Had a fit. Collapsed to the ground. And never was sane
again. This wasn't his first bout of madness. But this one was
final. He spent the next fourteen years a prisoner in an asylum.

There is another possible interpretation of some of the events.

He certainly went mad that day. But the policemen who were on the
scene had already cautioned him for his manic behaviour. So even
if he did hug the horse, he was already near mad when it happened.
This might seem a small detail. But there's a big difference
between recurring bouts of 'catatonic trance' type madness, and
losing ones marbles all together.

The horse story was seen as proof that he'd lost his reason; that
misplaced sentiment for the horse was evidence for terminal madness ...

Clearly Nietzche's silence would suit the 'new' Germans.

Consider:

1 That within days of being locked up he wrote prophetic letters
to his friends in which he said that:
i Kaiser Wilhelm should be shot,
ii Chancellor Bismarck's position should be abolished,
iii German anti-semitism should be eliminated, and
iv The European powers should take immediate military action
against Germany to control its territorial ambitions.

2 The movement for German nationalism had shifted from Goethe and
Schiller's ideas that reason would inevitably unify Europe's Germans,
to Bismarck/Prussia's position that 'Blood and Iron' would force the
tide of history.

3 Neitzche's had already let his friends know that he was disgusted
that some of his concepts had been twisted to justify the cultural shift.

This illustration is  of Nietzsche & Paul Ree in traces. Lou von Salome holds the whip.
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After the play is a feature about a colony Nietzsche's followers founded in Paraguay