“Peace, grandeur, sunlight” – Friedrich Nietzsche’s discovery of the Engadine “upper earth” as a “heroic idyll”

Nietzsche spent seven "working summers" (1881, 1883-1888), totaling more than a year and a half, in Sils Maria, the place he praised in superlatives even during his first stay and which he soon considered "proven" to be beneficial to both his health and his intellectual productivity. Indeed, a large part of his work originated here.
This lecture examines how this place and its surroundings, intertwined with Nietzsche's diverse perspectives, selective perceptions, and performative demands, became a kind of philosophical landscape. It became a space whose formations (plain, path, forest, mountain, lake, glacier, peninsula) and changing lighting conditions acquired a mental and conceptual charge within Nietzsche's world of thought that continues to resonate today. Where and to what extent are construction and staging always already at work when he situates his thinking? This also requires examining the status of some role models – long since becoming clichés – for which the Upper Engadine offered the philosopher a scenic stage: high-mountain philosopher, intellectual summit climber and ridge walker, thinker in glacial zones, hermit and cave bear, etc. And finally: Nietzsche also had a special, Janus-faced view of the "metaphysical" aspect of this landscape, as a threshold between habitat and death zone.