Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #409545 in Books
• Published on: 1993-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In 1886 Elisabeth Nietzsche, the bigoted, imperious sister of the famous philosopher, founded a "racially pure" colony in Paraguay together with her husband, anti-Semitic agitator Bernhard Forster, and a band of fair-skinned fellow Germans. In 1991 Macintyre, once a foreign-affairs reporter for Britain's Sunday Correspondent , tracked down the survivors of Nueva Germania, as the colony was called; he found a strange, tight-lipped people, still interbreeding to the point of genetic deterioration. Digging into recently opened German archives, he tells how Elisabeth, who returned to Germany in 1893, grafted her anti-Semitic, nationalist ideas onto her brother Friedrich's philosophy, building a mythic cult around him. Elisabeth later became a mentor to Hitler; her stately funeral in 1935 was attended by a tearful Fuhrer. Laced with mordant irony, Macintyre's brilliant piece of investigative journalism adds weight to the view, shared by many scholars, that the Nazis' use of Nietzsche's ideas to justify their evil deeds and doctrines was a perversion of his thought. Photos.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
In 1886, Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth, together with her husband, Bernhard Foerster, and 14 German families, founded a colony in Paraguay that they christened "Nueva Germania." Their purpose was to escape a fatherland they believed to be in serious decline and to live in a place where their beliefs--anti-Semitism, vegetarianism, nationalism, and Lutheranism--could flourish. Macintyre vividly recounts the sights and sounds of the villages and jungles, the flora and fauna he encountered in his arduous adventure to locate the remains of this colony. The story reads like a novel, yet Macintyre's journalistic brio is matched by his solid research into German and Paraguayan history and his wealth of detail about Elisabeth's long life and her relationship with her brother. The pathetic group of descendants he finally found would hardly have delighted the founders. Where Macintyre's book rests on a solid research base, Aschheim's book is exhaustively researched; in addition, it is a model of academic scholarship--highly informative yet accessible even to the lay reader. The narrative sweeps from pre-Weimar Germany to the recent reunification. Especially insightful is Aschheim's balanced treatment of whether Nietzsche can be seen to have been a proto-Nazi and whether the Nazi's claiming him as such is justified. A final chapter, "Nietzscheanism, Germany, and Beyond," considers why Nietzsche's influence has been and continues to be pervasive, not only in Germany but throughout the Western world. Both books are highly recommended for most collections.
- Leon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Mgt. Lib., Washington, D.C.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
A mad curiosity carries an apparently sane young man to a lost German colony in Paraguay. In the picaresque romp that ensues, Macintyre, former foreign correspondent for Britain's Sunday Correspondent, discovers a forgotten people, exonerates Friedrich Nietzsche, and manages to piece together a rather chilling portrait of the troubled philosopher's far more dreadful sister. Not that Elisabeth Nietzsche was all that obscure to begin with: As editor and executrix of her brother's works, she was responsible for misshaping an entire generation of Nietzsche scholarship through a series of blatant misreadings aimed at serving the Nazi cause. A thoroughgoing racist and anti-Semite, she became convinced early on that the purity of the German nation was under siege, and, with her husband Bernard F”rster, concocted the idea of an elite German settlement abroad that would eventually replenish and invigorate the downtrodden Aryan blood at home. Paraguay--of all places--was chosen as the most propitious site, and a small band of pioneers set sail in 1886 for what shortly became an unmitigated disaster. The land turned out to be untillable; the climate was deadly; and the finances were mismanaged from the start. Within a few years, F”rster killed himself, and Elisabeth returned to Germany to care for her brother (who had lapsed into his final madness). Incredibly enough, the colony managed to survive precariously on its own and maintains itself to this day as a surreal Bismarckian outpost in the Paraguayan jungle. Macintyre weaves together several stories here- -Nietzsche's stormy relations with Wagner; Elisabeth's influence on the Nazis; the fate of the colonists left behind--without weakening the central narrative of his own journey to Nueva Germania and its gente perdita, a journey that was both the impetus and agent for this weird and marvelous tale. Lurid and delightful: Rider Haggard couldn't ask for more. (Thirty-two b&w photos.) -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

A Provocative Woman
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.

How could Nietzsche's beautiful ideas be so misunderstood?
This book is interesting up to a point, and it contains some good anecdotes. But the author's almost touching need to prove that the Third Reich's admiration for Nietzsche was based solely on a combination of willful misreading and Elisabeth Nietzsche's influence leads him into all manner of logical quagmires.

At one point, he claims that Nietzsche's idea of the "superman" is "a concept intended to inspire but one which would develop sinister overtones in the wrong hands." This begs several questions: Whose are the right hands? How many people read--and believe-- Nietzsche without considering themselves to be at least larval supermen? Why should anyone be surprised when a philosopher who "rejected Christian morality and all other ideologies with moral imperatives," who claimed that "man should be trained for war and woman for the recreation of the warrior," and who trumpeted the obligation of the self-styled strong to stamp out the "weak" is well received among brutal eugenicists with a lust for military power? I would think that a necessary competence for a career in philosophy would be to possess some slight awareness of the practical implications of one's ideas.

MacIntyre makes a convincing argument that Elisabeth Nietzsche was responsible for trying to pass her brother off as a rabid anti-Semite, but leaves one wondering precisely what benign effects Nietzsche's own drab and cruel political thought was supposed to have had on the world. Nietzsche would surely have rejected the notion that he was dealing in abstractions, so it seems disingenuous to treat his political notions as some form of Platonic ideal. MacIntyre's confusion is especially evident when, after praising Nietzsche for freeing mankind from the tyranny of false morality, he calls the Nazis "moral cripples"...beyond good and evil indeed!

A must if you're interested in this century's politics
MacIntyre's book casts a light over a little known part of our history from the end of the last century over the the Weimar republic (1918-33) and onwards. It also shows how a philosopher's work can be totaly misused in order to fit other purposes; in this case the furthering of nazi theories still, unfortunately, not dead.