In retrospect, Nietzsche thought of his ten months at Bonn as time wasted. What they in fact represent is the period in his life in which he tried to live like any other young man and found he couldn't do it. The desire to be ‘different’ is common—and superficial; the man who actually is different very often doesn't want to be, because he has a premonition how much unhappiness his singularity is going to cost him. In the long run he cannot help himself; he must face the isolation and disappointment which life has in store for him as best he can; but at first he may resist his fate, or seek to deny it altogether, by involving himself with spurious enthusiasm in the pursuits which those around him appear to find normal. This is what Nietzsche tried to do at Bonn, and that is why he afterwards thought he had been squandering his time.

Initially he certainly experienced a sense of freedom at his liberation from Pforta, and he gave it rein on a holiday trip on the Rhein which he took with Deussen, who was also moving to Bonn, and a youth named Schnabel; the three indulged in a moderate amount of horse-play and wine-drinking, and Nietzsche enjoyed a brief flirtation with Deussen's sister. (Deussen's home was in the Rheinland.) Nietzsche and Deussen were enrolled at the university together on the 16th October 1864.

Bonn had an excellent reputation in the field of philology because of the presence there of Otto Jahn and Friedrich Ritschl, who were not only philologists of the front rank but men of wide culture and teachers capable of inspiring great devotion in their pupils. Jahn is best remembered for his biography of Mozart, and both would probably have risen to positions of eminence in any field they might have chosen. Nietzsche was at first attached to Jahn rather than to Ritschl, but when, as a result of a quarrel they were unable to settle, the two men left Bonn, it was Ritschl he followed to Leipzig, and it is with Ritschl's that his name will always be associated. Their meeting, as described by Deussen, could hardly have been more inconsequential.