This book is the story of two journeys, one through a remote, largely forgotten part of central South America, the other through the thickets of the vast, sometimes impenetrable literature which surrounds Friedrich Nietzsche: both were in search of his sister, Elisabeth.
More has been written, more bafflingly, about Nietzsche than about perhaps any other modern thinker. Scholarly biographies have traced the philosopher’s life in depth and detail; but his sister, whose life was in some ways rather more remarkable than his, usually lurks malignantly in the footnotes, the undergrowth of history. It seems as if her lamentable influence on Nietzsche and the grim prescience of her ideology have often been too much for his supporters to contemplate, too easy a weapon for his opponents to beat him with.
The story of Elisabeth Nietzsche is important partly because of the effect she had on her brother and his philosophy, both during his life and most emphatically after his death. She made him famous and she made him infamous; with her connivance, his name became associated with Nazism; but, without her, he might never have been heard of at all outside a small circle of scholars. But her life is also illuminating in itself. Her ideas foreshadowed one of the darkest periods in human history, but for more than forty years she enjoyed fame and wealth as one of Europe’s foremost literary figures; no woman, except perhaps Cosima Wagner, was more celebrated in the cultural world of pre-war Germany. She died just at the moment when people who shared many of her views were about to plunge Europe into devastating war and unleash the Holocaust of European Jewry.
Most fascinating of all to me was the unwritten story of New Germany, the racist colony Elisabeth helped to found in the middle of South America over a century ago. That community was a reflection and realisation of those beliefs – anti-Semitism, vegetarianism, nationalism, Lutheranism – which Elisabeth shared with her husband, Bernhard Förster, one of the most notorious anti-Semitic agitators of his day. Elisabeth later tried to graft these ideas on to Nietzsche, the anti-anti-Semite, anti-nationalist and self-proclaimed ‘Anti-Christ’. A measure of her success is the fact that Nietzsche’s name has still not fully shaken off the taint of fascism.
It is not the primary intention of this book to discuss, once more, whether the Nazis had any justification when they cited Nietzsche in support of their evil aims. The consensus today is that they did not. I believe Nietzsche would have been appalled at the use which the fascists (ably abetted by his own sister) made of his philosophy. His own words are, I think, sufficient to show that he would have damned Nazism comprehensively. Nietzsche had made no secret of his distaste for his sister’s Paraguayan colony, and he refused to have anything to do with it from the start; in his last years of sanity he distanced himself from his sister, her husband and the South American project, and his biographers have tended to follow suit, largely ignoring Elisabeth and wishing her colony and her ideas into oblivion.
Nietzsche never doubted that he was ‘a destiny’. His ideas continue to shape our own, the problems that obsessed him are as relevant now, perhaps more relevant, as when he first addressed them. Our own world is more anomic even than his was, our need for Nietzschean individuality still more pressing. It is as easy to disagree with Nietzsche as it is hard to dislike him, in spite or because of his cussedness. He is feisty and irritating and fiercely challenging, permanently either moving the goalposts or trying to brain you with them. Some of his thoughts are mistaken, but he has views on everything; all are worth hearing, none is boring and some are surely right.
What follows is in part a personal reading of Nietzsche, not an interpretation of him, still less an explanation. (Nietzsche was constantly worried about not being understood, but would probably have sneered at those who claimed they do.) If this book sheds light on his books or still better encourages the reading of them, then so much the better. But this is not a philosophy book. Anyone who expects to find here another diagnosis of Nietzsche will be disappointed and those who already believe they understand Nietzsche will be disgruntled, as such people normally are; but, as the man said, ‘one has to get rid of the bad taste of wanting to be in agreement with many’.
This is rather the story of a journey in search of a singular, if singularly nasty, woman. But Elisabeth Nietzsche was not just bigoted, ambitious and bloody-minded (although she was all of these things and more), she was also a woman of extraordinary courage, character and (she would have been gratifyingly annoyed by the word) chutzpah. Through sheer willpower she founded one New Germany in the middle of Paraguay and then helped to found another, half a century later, in the shape of the Third Reich. She was awful, in both senses of the word.
What T. S. Eliot wrote about footfalls applies as well to footnotes:
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
The footnotes which had told, tantalisingly, of Elisabeth’s experiment in South American Lebensraum, fifty years before the Nazis, echoed in my mind. I decided to follow in the footnotes of Elisabeth Nietzsche to Paraguay, a savage and beautiful country that deserves its anonymity as little as Elisabeth herself. There can be few peoples, except perhaps the Germans under Hitler, who have been more brutalised by history than the Paraguayans; but there are fewer still, again excepting the Germans, who have overcome their past with more courage and determination.
The revolution overthrowing the communist regime in East Germany in 1989 opened up that region’s history to close self-scrutiny for the first time in nearly half a century. In December 1946, the large house in Weimar where Elisabeth had lived and which she had turned into a shrine to her brother’s work was closed and sealed on the orders of the Red Army; the German staff of the Nietzsche Archive was disbanded and the head archivist, Elisabeth’s gallowglass, was arrested and later disappeared, presumed killed. Soon after, the Nietzsche Archive was incorporated into the Goethe–Schiller Archive, the Nietzsche Foundation (established in 1908) was dissolved and Elisabeth’s house, Villa Silberblick, was used from time to time as a guest house. The study of Nietzsche, the adopted philosopher of fascism, was discouraged by the self-proclaimed anti-fascist state.
In 1991 Villa Silberblick was finally reopened on the orders of the unified German government (it is now a museum), and unrestricted public access was permitted to the Nietzsche papers, still in the Goethe–Schiller Archive in Weimar. The primary source for the biographical sections of this book (Chapters IV–VIII) is that collection; citations and some secondary sources are specified in the Notes; other material was gathered from interviews in Paraguay, Switzerland and Germany. Where I have seen the relevant unpublished documents, translations are my own; in all other instances, translators are cited in the Notes. In quoting from Nietzsche’s works, I have relied on the excellent translations of R. J. Hollingdale.
Elisabeth was a passionate, if selective, hoarder of documents, and the Elisabeth Nietzsche Collection in Weimar contains a wealth of unpublished material: Elisabeth’s diaries and memoranda; her own letters (more than 30,000 in all), letters from her brother, husband, mother and the colonists of New Germany; newspaper clippings and photographs spanning the years 1844–1935; souvenirs and business records. From these, as well as a number of other collections and the published writings of the Nietzsche family, I have tried to create a narrative of Elisabeth Nietzsche’s long, eventful life.
See notes on Foreword