The initial reception of Friedrich Nietzsche's work, On the Genealogy of Morality among it, was nothing short of disastrous. Due to its unusual focus and lack of conventional academic tools such as citations, his first book, On the Birth of Tragedy, published in 1872, received a scathing review from Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, the most influential German classical scholar of his era. After retiring from his teaching position at the University of Basel in 1879 for health reasons, Nietzsche spent the following decade largely in isolation from academic life. The formation of a consensus on Nietzsche's Genealogy was a complex event. Though he was an obscure figure during his own lifetime, he harbored hopes for his growing readership in "Vienna, in St Petersburg, in Stockholm, in Copenhagen, in Paris and New York," where the intellectual climate was better suited to his ideas.