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Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche Paperback – January 1, 1993

by Ben MacIntyre (Author)

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Macintyre describes his 1991 journey to the Paraguayan site where Elisabeth Nietzsche and her husband founded a utopian Aryan colony in 1886. He also traces her return to Europe in 1889 to care for her sick brother, philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, and her orchestration of his rise to fame.

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Perennial
Publication date

January 1, 1993
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.5 x 8 inches
ISBN-10

006097561X
ISBN-13

978-0060975616
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Perennial; Reprint edition (January 1, 1993)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 006097561X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060975616
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 7.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.5 x 8 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #7,650,925 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #266,441 in Politics & Government (Books)

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216

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Ben Macintyre

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Ben Macintyre is a writer-at-large for The Times of London and the bestselling author of A Spy Among Friends, Double Cross, Operation Mincemeat, Agent Zigzag, and Rogue Heroes, among other books. Macintyre has also written and presented BBC documentaries of his work.

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3.9 out of 5

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Night-Gaunt

A forgotten part of history abley recounted.

Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2014

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A fascinating look not only in the formation of Nazism in the late 19th century but how it figured in to the more familiar time of the 1930. Elizabeth Nietzsche, one of the advocates of what later became National Socialism was opposite to her brother F. Nietzsche who found her ideas repugnant.

We find out about the interesting history of South America which had fought a huge war started by Paraguay against Brazil, Chile and Argentina. we find out interesting information about Elizabeth and her husband and the way things were in the 1880's and 1990's when Ben McIntyre went.

Photos also help in shots taken when Nuevo Germania was founded and a century later.

Worth it for those who want to find out about those over looked parts of history as I do.

One person found this helpful

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Chocopie DX

Fascinating look at a truly awful woman

Reviewed in the United States on June 3, 2013

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I knew of Nietzsche and his association with Nazi Germany but I had no idea that his legacy had been twisted and utilised by his younger sister for her own benefit. I was fascinated with the idea of a lost Aryan colony in Paraguay but the colony is a mere footnote to the story of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and her single-minded campaign of self-aggrandisement.

The story was compelling but, as other reviewers have said, I would have liked to have learned a bit more about what happened to the colony and know more about the descendants of the original settlers. Obviously, many of the residents of what was known as Nueva Germania were unwilling to speak on record but I wish there had been a little more of them and a little less of Frau Förster-Nietzsche. I suppose it is fitting that she dominates the story to the detriment of others, much as she did in life.

The story of Nueva Germania serves as a warning against the intolerance we see today - highlighting the folly of those who believe that everything would be alright if everyone were the same race/religion/sexual orientation. It is also a reminder that those who espouse prejudice are usually in it for personal gain and are often willing to dispose of their lofty ideals when they become inconvenient.

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brandon

Revealing

Reviewed in the United States on March 18, 2015

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Not as good as McIntyre usual gripping spy works. A good summation of an extremely manipulative and bigoted woman. A pity she didn't last until 1946 to see her colleagues get their just deserts. I also found the work a little jerky and at one point I wondered just what the writer's real aim was.

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nina voronel

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2016

Yes

Reviewed in the United States on July 21, 2014

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I have given this book a four star rating because of the quality of the writing and research but not for its content. Elisabeth Nietzsche must rank among some of the worst Anti-Semites. She lived a life of opportunism and lies and cared little if anything for the people who followed her and her husband to Paraguay. Her fawning attitude to the Wagner family was typical of Anti-Semites of the time. And of course her brother whom she treated so badly and with such opportunism.She turned her brother's writings into Anti-Semitic tracts which were subsequently used by Hitler. Elisabeth Nietzsche is a thoroughly nasty and unpleasant person. However I admire MacIntyre for tackling the subject. It is good to be reminded of the evils of Anti-Semitism.

Reviewed in the United States on January 12, 2004

This is one of the most curious books I have ever read: on the one hand, there is the story of a failed 19th C German colony in Paraguay, founded on eugenic principles that would be echoed in Hitler's time; on the other hand, there is the biography of one of the most overlooked figures in 19th C philosophy - Elisabeth Nietzsche, sister of the famed philosopher, and apparently the one who twisted her brother's ideas to conform to her own concept of racial purity (and a woman who Hitler courted in his early years of power).
The author, Ben Macintyre, does an admirable job of bringing these two stories together: Elizabeth and her husband, "professional anti-semite" Bernhard Forster, attempt the Paraguayan colony as `New Germany' (Nueva Germania); this colony was designed to appeal to `true' Germans who wanted to establish not only an ideological power base, but flee economic problems at home. The colony does not succeed, as Macintyre discovers when he journeys there in 1991: there are a few of the old families around, and the dangers of inbreeding, according to one recent German immigrant doctor, are becoming noticeable, heralding the inevitable decline of what Elisabeth envisioned as her own pure, private kingdom.
As the parallel story of Nietzsche develops, we see perhaps Elisabeth's real impact on history: her reinterpretation - or even reinvention - of her brother's theories. Macintyre makes an excellent case for Elisabeth's "mythologizing" of her brother and his works to further her own agenda (and help set the stage for Hitler and company's racial programs of the 1930s): although Nietzsche himself was "anti-anti-semitic", during his insanity and after his death, Elisabeth shamelessly made herself the custodian - and editor - of many of his works, linking her brother to an ideology he actually despised. It is no wonder that Nietzsche's named became philosophical "mud", as Macintyre recounts. This part of the book is worth reading for the blatant rewriting of history done by a woman who would not apologize for her views or actions (and whose death in 1935 prevented her from seeing the result of racist views she helped promulgate).
Macintyre's physical investigation of what happened to New Germany is entertaining, and provides a respite from the depressing - but riveting - narrative of the rest of the book. His concern with becoming a `stud' to a colony of desperate young German colonists is hilarious, as are his equestrian, translating, and lodging adventures. When he finds the remnants of New Germany, the book seems to lack content - until you realize, as Macintyre does -- that the colonists' dreams for a racially `pure' paradise is exactly what will cause them to disappear. The lack if information on the descendents of the original colonists seems to be because they either won't talk, or avoid talking by hiding in the forest. The pictures included in the book provide a great backdrop to what the colony wanted, and what it actually received. The book also relates a brief history of Paraguay and several colorful characters (some not even connected with the events the book is about), that put the whole thing in an understandable historical context.

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rkt10

Interesting book

Reviewed in the United States on March 19, 2013

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This book focuses more on the life of Elisabeth Nietzsche in Germany, rather than the period of time the author spent travelling to the site in South America of her failed colony. Still it is a very interesting tale.

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ostenh

Interesting topic, poorly written

Reviewed in the United States on September 3, 2004

I was eager to read Forgotten Fatherland because of the fascinating and odd topic. Much of the story of the Nietzsches, the colony, and Paraguay comes through in the book, but in spite of the efforts of Ben MacIntyre. Ben MacIntyre's writing is embarassingly poor. His ideas are disorganized and poorly stated, and some of the metaphors are laughable.

4 people found this helpful

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Mr. G. Savage

Extremely stimulating

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 20, 2023

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I read this because macintyre is so good and I have a passing knowledge of nietzsche but didn't know what to expect but it is excellent. The author clearly knows and loves nietzsche and his quest to disentangle the philosopher from his awful but impressive sister's clutches is the main thrust of the book. The travelogue to Paraguay is very peculiar and rather slight, but nonetheless interesting. Overall it is a stimulating poke around the minds of some very powerful personalities at a crucial historical time

Amazon Customer

Good

Reviewed in India on August 27, 2020

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Wonderful book! Very well researched!

R Ford

Fills a significant gap in the history of Germany

Reviewed in Germany on October 16, 2015

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This interesting account combines historical background information with personal experience and dry humour. Ben Macintyre has a sharp eye for fascinating detail about a part of the world and a period of history which are unknown certainly to most English-speaking readers. He has evidently carried out an impressive amount of research in several languages and nonetheless succeeded in creating an extremely readable story.

salki

I loved this book

Reviewed in Australia on October 2, 2014

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I loved this book. It was written with a light hand, interspersed with personal comments, yet is nonetheless an interesting and compelling account of a horrid woman, her horrid husband and their hand in the rise of Nazism. I had always thought Nazism owed its rise to Friedrich Nietzsche but it did not. His sister took that 'honour'. From the excerpts from selected writings I can see how the idea of the Aryan superman took hold, but the anti-Semitism was simply never in Friedrich's work. The memory of the poor man has been forever tainted by his sister.

It's a fascinating read.

Ralph Blumenau

The life of Nietzsche's monstrous sister

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 2, 2021

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The Foreword is very promising: Macintyre aims to extract the monstrous Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche from being, so-to-speak, a footnote to books about her elder brother, Friedrich Nietzsche, and to put her centre stage.

But the book’s subtitle is “In Search of Elisabeth Nietzsche”, and in 1991 Macintyre went to Paraguay himself. In the first third of the book and again in its last chapter, he gives us many details of his journey from Asuncion, the capital, to Nueva Germania, the German settlement founded by Elisabeth and her husband, Bernard Förster. I found his extensive and rambling travelogues, his stories of local myths and his excursions into local history not all that interesting, and irrelevant to the story of Elisabeth. Later, he tells us a lot about the lives of the Germans who live in the area now; about Mengele, who had spent some time in Nueva Germania; and about the results of inbreeding among the original German families. It takes a long time before he embarks on a proper narrative account of the story of the Försters and Nueva Germania and of Elisabeth’s return to Germany to build up the myth of Friedrich.

From their late adolescence onwards, Elisabeth and Friedrich had disagreed strongly about religion: she was a devout Lutheran, he was already attacking faith as a fraud. Even so, though bossy with other people, she adored her brother, and they were very close. She would often come to nurse him during his frequent spells of illness.

Friedrich (for a while), and Elisabeth (for the rest of her life) were devotees of Wagner, and part of the circle around him. She became close to another member of the circle, Bernhard Förster, who was so crudely and obsessively antisemitic than he repelled even Wagner – and of course Friedrich. So brother and sister became estranged.

It was Wagner who in an article in 1880 had floated the idea that, to escape miscegenation with Jews, good Germans might emigrate to Latin America. Förster leapt at the idea, and in 1883, having been expelled from his teaching post in Berlin for his racist agitation, he went to Paraguay to reconnoiter. He married Elisabeth on his return in 1885. Friedrich did not attend the wedding. He disapproved of their Paraguay adventure on which they embarked in 1886.

They led a group of fourteen German Aryan families to Paraguay, where they established Nueva Germania, some 150 miles north of the capital, Asuncion.

For all the glowing reports Elisabeth sent home, Nueva Germania was beset by all sorts of problems, some of them serious financial ones. Förster became a nervous wreck, and Elisabeth ran the show. One of the settlers was so disillusioned by his experience that he returned to Germany and in 1889 published a book there, exposing the fraudulence of the propaganda issued by the founders. The few funds that had been sent by supporters in Germany dried up.

Meanwhile, Friedrich, now in Italy, was becoming increasingly megalomaniac about his importance, and in January 1889 he had his famous breakdown in Turin, and never recovered his sanity. Elisabeth was distressed when she got the news and wondered whether she should return to Europe to look after him; but Förster, who spent much of his time away from Elisabeth and Nueva Germania, showed no interest, and the marriage was under severe strain. He was severely depressed, and committed suicide in June 1889. Elisabeth constructed a story that he had died of a “nervous attack”, just as she would later invent the cause of Friedrich’s collapse: that it was due to drugs he had taken to help him sleep. She put Nueva Germania into administration, determined to buy it back one day, and left for Germany, where Friedrich had been committed to a lunatic asylum. He was released into her care in Naumburg, their home town, in 1890.

In 1891, hoping to entice more settlers, she published a history of Nueva Germania which glorified her late husband and was as untruthful as all the other propaganda she had published about it. Leaving their mother to look after her son, she returned to Nueva Germania in 1892; but the place had deteriorated yet further. Elisabeth felt that the place could not be salvaged, and returned to Germany in 1893 - to manipulate Friedrich’s legacy.

(When the Nazi government came to power, it valued the concept of Germandom in Latin America, and the Germans of Nueva Germania became enthusiastic Nazis.)

Friedrich’s books had attracted very little attention before his breakdown; but now people were beginning to take an interest, and Elisabeth took it on herself to become his literary executor, not only in respect of his already published works which she reprinted in cheap editions (with some excisions of passages she did not like), but also of the masses of his unpublished material which gave her more freedom to mould it into a distorted form. Over ten years, Elisabeth also wrote a heavily hagiographical two-volume biography of Friedrich. It was full of blatant lies: she claimed that he had regarded her as his soul mate; that he had approved of her marriage, and had considered joining her in Paraguay himself. She played down Friedrich’s later antagonism to Wagner; claimed that he had appointed her to be the guardian of his heritage; that he had loved Germany and the Germans and would in 1914 have patriotically supported German militarism and imperialism, as she did; denied that he was anti-Christian.

After their mother’s death in 1897, Elisabeth took charge of nursing her brother, and they moved, together with the now vast Nietzsche Archive, to a huge building in Weimar where Friedrich died in 1900.
She received donations of hundreds of thousands of marks from Nietzsche admirers, including from one Ernst Thiel, whose Orthodox Judaism she overlooked. She was three times (in 1908, 1915 and 1923) nominated – though unsuccessfully - for the Nobel Prize for literature. The Archive in Weimar became a place of pilgrimage.

In 1901 she published The Will to Power, a work that Friedrich had never published, and which consisted of mere notes he had jotted down between 1885 and 1888, but which she claimed was his chief work. She gave to her version of the unwritten book an antisemitic, nationalist and state-worshipping character, totally at variance with Friedrich’s views. Mussolini was a great admirer of the book and he and Elisabeth corresponded warmly throughout the 1920s.

She was a passionate opponent of the Weimar Republic, and an ardent ally of Wagner’s widow Cosima, who Nazified Wagner, as Elisabeth Nazified Friedrich.

After the hyper-inflation in Germany and the imminent expiry in the 1930s of the copyright on Friedrich’s books, Elisabeth and the Archive were in financial danger. She looked for a permanent patron, and turned to the Nazis. She was enthusiastic for Hitler, whom she met at Bayreuth after he had seized power; subsequently he paid seven visits to the Archive. Her connections with the Nazis lost her several supporters among the admirers of Nietzsche – but the Archive now seemed secure, as Hitler ordered financial support for her, for the Archive and for a great memorial hall adjacent to the Archive. However, by so stridently accepting Nietzsche as one of the originators of Nazi “philosophy”, Nietzsche was, for two decades after the war, reviled as a proto-Nazi, even by such famous philosophers as Bertrand Russell.

Elisabeth died, aged 89, in 1935 and was accorded a state funeral.

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Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche Paperback – January 1, 1993

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