Source — Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, tr. Horace B. Samuel (1913), full text via Project Gutenberg — checked for "Schadenfreude"

Title: The Genealogy of Morals (English translation of Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887)
Author: Friedrich Nietzsche; translated by Horace B. Samuel
Publication: originally translated 1913; this project used the Project Gutenberg public-domain digitization (ebook #52319)
URL: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/52319/52319-h/52319-h.htm
Date: 1913 (translation); Nietzsche's German original 1887
Accessed: 2026-09-01
Type: primary — the historical English-translation text itself, directly fetched and searched in full by this project (not a secondary report about it). Neutral by nature.

Extract

Nietzsche is named on Merriam-Webster's Word-of-the-Day page as one of three German philosophers (with Schopenhauer and Kant) who discussed Schadenfreude — a claim this project could not corroborate from the Wikipedia article directly (see sources/wikipedia-schadenfreude.md). Since the Genealogy of Morals is centrally concerned with cruelty, resentment (ressentiment), and the psychology of punishment — territory adjacent to schadenfreude — this project downloaded the full public-domain Samuel translation (curl) and searched it programmatically (case-insensitive) for "schadenfreude" and "malicious joy" (a plausible English calque a translator might use instead of keeping the German word).
Result: zero occurrences of either "schadenfreude" or "malicious joy" anywhere in the full translated text. "Malice" appears only twice, in contexts not obviously calquing Schadenfreude specifically (not examined in further detail this session). This is a directly-checked negative result: this particular text, in this particular (older, public-domain) English translation, does not use the word or an obvious English equivalent-phrase — it does not establish that Nietzsche never uses Schaden + Freude language in the German original, nor that a different, more recent copyrighted translation (e.g. Kaufmann's) handles it differently.

Only the Samuel (1913) translation was checked; this project's standing fence against downloading unauthorized scans of copyrighted, in-print books means a more recent translation (e.g. Walter Kaufmann's, still under copyright) was not checked.
Only two candidate search strings were tried ("schadenfreude," "malicious joy"); other plausible renderings (e.g. "gloating," "spiteful pleasure") were not systematically searched this session.
This does not establish whether the German original (Zur Genealogie der Moral) itself uses the word "Schadenfreude" — only that this English translation does not render any such passage using either search string.