[1] Her diverse intellectual interests led to friendships with a broad array of distinguished thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Paul Rée, and Rainer Maria Rilke.

She refused to be confirmed by Dalton, officially left the church at age 16, but remained interested in intellectual pursuits in the areas of philosophy, literature and religion.

Gillot, 25 years her senior, took her on as a student, engaging with her in the fields of theology, philosophy, world religions, and French and German literature.

During this time, Salomé's physical health was failing due to lung disease, causing her to cough up blood.

Rée proposed to her, but she instead suggested that they live and study together as 'brother and sister' along with another man for company, and thereby establish an academic commune.

[5] Nietzsche nonetheless was content to join Rée and Salomé touring through Switzerland and Italy together, planning their commune.

However, the following month Rée and Salomé parted company with Nietzsche, leaving for Stibbe without any plans to meet again.

[9] Salomé and Rée moved to Berlin and lived together until a few years before her celibate marriage[10] to linguistics scholar Friedrich Carl Andreas.

Throughout her married life, she engaged in affairs and/or correspondence with the German journalist and politician Georg Ledebour, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, about whom she wrote an analytical memoir,[11] and the psychoanalysts Sigmund Freud (whom she met personally in September 1911, on occasion of the 3rd Congress of Psychoanalysis held in Weimar[12]) and Victor Tausk, among others.

[14] Salomé was romantically involved with the handsome and melancholic Victor Tausk, member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, 18 years her junior.

She had already published with some success Im Kampf um Gott "where she exposed the problem of loss of faith (which had been her own for a long time)", several articles, and the study Jesus der Jude that Rilke had read.

[19] As Philippe Jaccottet reports, Salomé wrote in Lebensrückblick: "I was your wife for years because you were the first reality, where man and body are indistinguishable from each other, an indisputable fact of life itself.

[10] The romance between the poet and Salomé lasted three years, then turned into a friendship, which would continue until Rilke's death, as evidenced by their correspondence.

Her husband visited her daily during a six-week stay after a foot operation, which was arduous for the old, rather ill man, and this made them grow very close after a forty-year marriage marked by hurtful behaviour on both sides and long periods of non-communication.

[24] Salomé was a prolific writer who wrote fiction, criticism and essays on religion, philosophy, sexuality and psychology.

Salomé's literary and analytical studies became such a vogue in Göttingen, where she lived late in her life, that the Gestapo waited until shortly after her death to "clean" her library of works by Jews.

She wrote more than a dozen novels and novellas, including Im Kampf um Gott, Ruth, Rodinka, Ma, Fenitschka – eine Ausschweifung, as well as non-fiction studies such as Henrik Ibsens Frauengestalten (1892), a study of Ibsen's female characters, and a book on Nietzsche, Friedrich Nietzsche in seinen Werken (1894).

The first English translation of her novel Das Haus (1921) appeared in 2021 under the title Anneliese's House, in an annotated edition by Frank Beck and Raleigh Whitinger.

[36] Salomé is also fictionalized in Angela von der Lippe's The Truth about Lou,[37] in Brenda Webster's Vienna Triangle,[38] in Clare Morgan's A Book for All and None,[39] in Robert Langs' two-act play Freud's Bird of Prey,[40] and in Araceli Bruch's five-act play Re-Call (written in Catalan).

[43] Andreas-Salome is portrayed onscreen by Katharina Lorenz [de] and as a young woman by Liv Lisa Fries.