The essay brings together the problems of writing, memory, and history in Nietzsche, from the perspective of his autobiographical reflections on the experience of the death of his father in Ecce homo and in the early autobiographical sketches from his youth. As someone who lived increasingly through his writing Nietzsche found himself posited in a strange in-between position, as both before and after having existed, as yet unborn and as destined for posterity. The experience of history, as the weight of a past on the present in the second Untimely Meditation, takes on a new and different significance when placed in the context of this ambiguous experience of anticipated survival beyond death through writing.