For Nietzsche, the relation between life and its past is of high interest because it has a face, is embodied. In the texts of Friedrich Nietzsche, if one follows a quote from his autobiographical work 'Ecce homo', the conflict of life with the face of its past which opens the possibility to "redemption of everything past" (EH, KSA 6, 348), is the true mission o Zarathustra and Nietzsche himself.
Nietzsche even found a signal word for that conflict: "It was"/"Es war". The following text gives an analysis of the writings where Nietzsche used that signal word and gave a description of the conflict between time and life.