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human
What exactly is/was Nietzsche's relationship to nihilism?

I don't know a lot about Nietzsche. I have read parts of the Genealogy of Morality for a class, along with the beginning of Thus Spake Zarathustra. But I don't know very much about Nietzsche's thought in terms of what people call 'nihilism.'

I understand nihilism to be a philosophy of no-values, nothingness, etc. - i.e. where nothing really matters, like staring into the Void. I understand, furthermore, that nihilism is something that Nietzsche either argued against or posited as a problem... What is the relationship between nihilism and Nietzsche's writings, and are we familiar with any biographical reasons (i.e. his depression, mental illness, physical illness, and/or drug addiction) which will have made nihilism particularly a problem for Nietzsche? Is this something that finds counterparts in other contemporary German thinkers, i.e. depressed Germans who sought to look for something revolutionary but instead of finding it were gridlocked into something Nazi-esque, and so on? Is that... kind of what happens at the points of history which are contemporary to Nietzsche's life, or am I inventing that image myself?

Am wondering about the relationships between Nietzsche's life, his philosophical writing, nihilism, and the attitude of Germans (or other European thinkers, or scholars/ordinary people who otherwise might have interpreted him as a comrade in their gazes upon the Abyss?
gpt
Nietzsche is pretty explicit about his views on nihilism. Like lots of thinkers, he thinks value is a product of human experience and existence.  So, there is nothing of value beyond that scope.  Yet also he clearly thinks some things are better than others, and that valuation is very important.  Further, he worries that many of the then-contemporary systems of valuation were fundamentally bad, anti-life, etc.

So, in one sense he is a nihilist.  In another sense he positions himself against a different sort of nihilism, and does so in the strongest possible terms.