Returning to Naumburg from Paraguay for the second and last time, Elisabeth found her brother more docile, less prone to the terrible rages that had overtaken him in the first flush of madness. He spoke little now and would sit quietly for hours on end staring into space. But he was prone to yawning fits, and his speech began to deteriorate: ‘I do not speak prettily’, he would mumble. Creeping paralysis began to envelop his right side. It was this pathetic figure that Elisabeth now sought to turn into the focus of a cult. Germany in the first half of this century was fertile ground for such an enterprise, and Nietzsche, with his emotive, mythical language, his cruel imagery and his veneration for strength, was partly to blame. Perhaps there would have been a Nietzsche cult without Elisabeth; but it would have been, I think, neither so popular nor so dubious without her remarkable talents for propaganda.
How cynical was Elisabeth in her manipulations? She was merely incapable of distinguishing between what she wanted and what was actually true; it was inevitable once she had gained control of Nietzsche (first his writings and then his body) that her own attitudes would cast a shadow over his. For Elisabeth there was no contradiction in this: she was her own final court of appeal.
If the facts did not fit her own interpretation, then it was the facts which had to be changed, not her opinions; Elisabeth changed her mind often, but her opinions never. Nietzsche once wrote that ‘convictions might be more dangerous enemies of truth than lies … I call a lie: wanting not to see something one does see, wanting not to see something as one sees it.’ Elisabeth didn’t call that lying; that was having the courage of your convictions. But as Nietzsche himself pointed out, having the courage of one’s convictions was ‘a popular error; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack upon one’s convictions’. It was probably while still in Paraguay that Elisabeth became convinced she could make her brother famous – thus, in a way, succeeding where he had failed. She decided to turn her brother into a myth, a cause, a symbol (with all the ugly overtones those words suggest), much as she had attempted and failed to do with her husband. Her job was made easier by the fact that the focus of that myth was no longer in a state to contradict her. She genuinely believed she knew her brother better than anyone else including, quite possibly, himself. If he had regained his sanity, as from time to time seemed possible during the ebb and flow of his illness, she would probably have told him just that. Soon after returning from Paraguay she discovered that Peter Gast was planning to write a biography. Her response was categorical: ‘His life I am going to write myself’, she told him bluntly, ‘no one can do that as well as I.’
The fact that there was money to be made out of her brother had been shown by the speed at which the cheap edition of his works had sold. She set about organising Nietzsche’s friends and associates with the same imperious manner she had used towards her colonists in Paraguay. She warned Gast that he could continue as editor of Nietzsche’s works, but only with her consent. Strictly speaking, this was nonsense. As his legal guardian since the collapse, Franziska Nietzsche was also the executrix of his written works.
Elisabeth began collecting everything Nietzsche had written. The landlord at his writing retreat in Sils Maria had gathered together much of the loose paper left lying in Nietzsche’s room, and though Nietzsche had earlier asked him to destroy the jottings, he kept them, occasionally giving away pieces as mementoes to people who asked for them. Elisabeth demanded them all back. She also wrote to Nietzsche’s friends and correspondents, asking them to send their letters for collection in a Nietzsche Archive. Some complied, others refused, like Cosima Wagner, who promptly destroyed her letters from Nietzsche, leaving only eleven extant and the question of whether he had ever directly declared his love to her while sane for ever open.
The collection of Nietzsche’s works was housed in the upper part of the house in Naumburg, Weingarten 18, now christened the Nietzsche Archive and complete with headed notepaper. The official opening was on 2 February 1894. Into the Archive she crammed everything connected with her brother and everything she could find that he had written. To Franziska she left the duty of nursing the invalid, while she made herself responsible for nursing his rise to fame.
Gast was quickly replaced by a new editor, Fritz Koegel, a young, handsome and artistic individual whom Elisabeth had taken a shine to – not least because of his talents as a flatterer. Another important figure in the early years of the Nietzsche Archive was Rudolph Steiner, later the educational reformer and head of the Anthroposophic Movement. Steiner, though young, had already written a book on Nietzsche and was a well-known intellectual figure in Weimar, where he worked at the newly founded Goethe–Schiller Archive. Elisabeth doted on both these young men, so much her junior in years, and so much her senior in intellect. In August 1896, Steiner agreed to undertake the difficult task of teaching her the meaning of her brother’s philosophy, but soon gave up in disgust, noting that ‘Frau Förster-Nietzsche is a complete laywoman in all that concerns her brother’s doctrine … [She] lacks any sense for fine, and even for crude, logical distinctions; her thinking is void of even the least logical consistency; and she lacks any sense of objectivity … She believes at every moment what she says. She convinces herself today that something was red yesterday that most assuredly was blue.’ Yet Steiner, too, was guilty of contributing to the mythical aura that Elisabeth wove around Nietzsche and his work. ‘Whoever saw Nietzsche’, he wrote, ‘as he reclined in his white, pleated robe, with the glance of a Brahmin in his wide and deep-set eyes beneath bushy eyebrows, with the nobility of his enigmatic, questioning face and the leonine, majestic carriage of his thinker’s head – had the feeling that this man could not die, but that his eye would rest for all eternity upon mankind.’ Elisabeth was the main culprit in the immortalising of Nietzsche before he was even dead, but she had many willing accomplices.
It was Elisabeth’s biographical work that turned Nietzsche into a symbol of something superhuman, rather than merely human, all too human. She made him into a prophet rather than a philosopher. It took Elisabeth more than ten years to write the complete story of her brother’s life in two vast volumes (which were later boiled down into two shorter works: The Young Nietzsche and The Lonely Nietzsche). Her intentions in writing the biography were threefold: she wanted to create an image of her brother that was little short of divine; another of herself as his only true confidante and supporter; and she wanted to put the best possible construction on his philosophy – her own.
The results were gushing, inaccurate and extremely popular. Minute detail was lavished on her brother’s ‘wonderfully beautiful, large and expressive eyes’ and ‘his extraordinarily decorous manner’. ‘The only female relative’, she claimed, ‘who, from her earliest days, saw something unique about Fritz, and who gave expression to her conviction was myself, his little sister.’ She alone, then, could speak with any real knowledge of her brother’s life and philosophy. ‘He used not to speak so openly or so confidentially to any one of his friends as he did to me … I always suspected [no doubt she was right] that my brother said more to his friends than to me concerning all that went on in his soul. Many an error arose from this.’ It was, she claimed, her duty to correct these. ‘I more than anyone am duty bound to repel attacks, to remove errors and to portray the facts and experiences of my brother’s life with the most scrupulous accuracy, for no one stood so near to my brother as I did.’ And when she was not praising herself, she quoted her brother’s praise: ‘“My sister is not a woman at all,” he supposedly said, “she is a friend” – a remark which seemed in laughable contrast to my extremely feminine appearance.’ She was a ‘helpful trusting soul’ and ‘his helper and comforter in times of stress’, who ‘listens not only with her ears and with her understanding, but also with her heart’.
A relationship that had often been stormy, if not straightforwardly hostile, was reduced to a minestrone of mutual adoration, and their serious disagreements were largely ignored. ‘Never in our lives, indeed, did we say an unkind word to each other; and if we sometimes wrote unpleasant things, it is because, when apart, we came under the baneful influence of others.’ Ecce Homo, for example, contained passages which were extremely hostile to Elisabeth; this largely explains why she suppressed its publication for eight years after the death of its author.
The biography was the long-awaited opportunity for revenge on Lou Andreas-Salomé. The Russian littérateuse was nothing but a shallow upstart, ‘a forerunner of a certain sector of the modern emancipated woman’, with a ‘simply revolting’ way of expressing herself (Elisabeth never forgot the gloves-off fight at Jena); it was she who had wanted to marry Nietzsche, but he found her ‘essentially distasteful’. Paul Rée was simply a weak individual, quite under the thumb of the dominating Salomé. It was also a chance for a second line of defence against critics of her colony in Paraguay, that ‘malicious brood of dwarfs who hate everything lofty and superhuman’. Her husband had been ‘marked out by nature as leader and ruler of a community’ and she believed that ‘if Förster had not died so young, the colony of New Germany would have been all that he projected – that with his eminent gifts for colonising he would have attained all that he hoped to attain for the glory of Germany’. The colony, so far from being a swindle, was really a charity: ‘it was principally poor people who came to us; they received land from us as a gift and lived on the advances that we made’.
Nietzsche had, after initial doubts, approved of her marriage, since ‘he was far too good a psychologist not to see that, apart from all questions of love, a woman with so much desire for action as I needed an area in which her energies would find full scope’. The minor differences between brother and husband had been, she said, the work of ‘an intriguing young lady, who wanted to marry Förster herself, [and] thought to achieve this end by secretly setting Nietzsche against Förster’. The only reason her brother had failed to attend her wedding or come to say goodbye was because ‘he dreaded the emotional scene of a personal farewell’, and as for his ‘various adverse and sceptical comments on the colonial enterprise’, they had been ‘much misunderstood’. She claimed that he had even considered coming to the colony himself. Her own anti-Semitism, in the light of Nietzsche’s manifest opposition to it, was blurred; she even claimed that she had never agreed with her husband’s views in this regard. And anyway, she blustered, the anti-Semitic political movement had not helped to support the colony in any way – as if that made it, or her, any less anti-Semitic.
Despite her assertion that she ‘had not the slightest intention of advancing any of her own views’, those areas of Nietzsche’s thinking she found unacceptable were skated over or wilfully misrepresented. The break with Wagner, whose memory she avowedly cherished, had simply been over artistic differences. She dwelt instead on the ‘story of a friendship, with all its sorrows and its delights; the romance of two geniuses who were able for a while to walk side by side along cheerful and sunny highways’. As for her brother’s opposition to German nationalism, she simply denied it: ‘whatever people may say, he loved his German Fatherland. All his passionate reproaches were only the utterances of a loving heart. He wished to see the Germans really great, filled with and transfigured by a genuine culture … and this the German can do because he is brave.’ According to her recollection he ‘often indulged in “a bout of genuine patriotism”, when he would say “I love the Germans’”. And if he seemed to criticise the Germans, that was simply because they had failed to recognise his genius. Neither was the author of The Anti-Christ, apparently, anti-Christian: ‘he cherished a tender love for the founder of Christianity’ and he had ‘a real liking for serene, pious Christians’. Moreover, ‘he never forgot to mention what a boon Christianity has always been, and can still be, as a religion of the masses’. This was the man who pronounced in Ecce Homo that the ‘concept God [was] invented as the antithetical concept to life – everything harmful, noxious, slanderous, the whole mortal enmity against life brought into one terrible unity’.
Elisabeth’s hagiography of her brother could be dismissed as fiction (by the generous) and malicious, self-serving, overwritten nonsense (by the realistic) were it not for the fact that she made it virtually impossible to approach the life of Nietzsche, and indeed his works, other than through her own twisted filter. And she knew what she was doing; in perhaps the most revealing passage in the biography she inadvertently gave herself away. From childhood, she says, ‘the most difficult task of my life began, the task which, as my brother said, characterised my type – i.e. “to reconcile opposites’”.
It took her more than a decade to build up this sanitised, mythical image of her brother. She claimed that Nietzsche had specifically appointed her to be the guardian of his heritage (‘this extraordinarily rich collection was made by myself alone’) and his biographer. As such, she was prepared to defend her self-appointed territory with all her very considerable strength. The only problem was that, while her mother was alive, she and not Elisabeth was the legal guardian of Nietzsche’s work. With the help of Fritz Koegel, Elisabeth worked out a plan to gain full control of the Archive. An anonymous group of donors would offer Franziska a sum of money, with the proviso that all rights to Nietzsche’s estate should be handed over to Elisabeth. Relations between mother and daughter had deteriorated since Elisabeth’s return from Paraguay, and it was only after a series of acrimonious disputes, including a threat from Elisabeth to have her mother declared incompetent to be Nietzsche’s guardian, that she agreed in December 1895 to make Elisabeth and her cousin Adalbert Oehler the sole trustees of Nietzsche’s works. Franziska later claimed she had signed only under duress and had immediately regretted it, the more so when she discovered, as she had always suspected, that the money to be paid to her for the care of her son was in the form of a loan guaranteed by anonymous figures, and not a gift at all.
One of the anonymous ‘donors’ was Count Harry Kessler, a young, debonair aristocrat with aquiline features and a long blonde moustache. On 26 October 1895 he wrote to Elisabeth with a request to send relevant compositions to an art magazine, Pan, with which he was involved. He was, henceforth, to play a key role in Elisabeth’s life. Kessler was one of the paramount observers of his day: an art patron, literary connoisseur, diplomat and indefatigable diarist. The son of a wealthy Hamburg banker and a celebrated Irish beauty, Alice Lynch (no relation), he was educated at Harrow in England, and in France, later going to university, like Nietzsche, at Bonn and Leipzig. Like so many people, he found Elisabeth’s energy and enthusiasm as irresistible as her brother’s writing, and he treated her with an old-fashioned gallantry she adored. In politics they could not have been further apart; while Elisabeth was a fanatical conservative nationalist, and a monarchist to boot, Kessler’s links with left-wing ideas had earned him the nickname the Red Count. For at least the early part of their acquaintance, Kessler was one of Elisabeth’s staunchest supporters; and she doted on him, even offering him the editorship of the Nietzsche papers – which he declined, though he agreed to act as the Archive’s ‘artistic adviser’. Kessler brought to the Nietzsche cult a cosmopolitan élan Elisabeth, now in her sixties, could never muster. The young Count got to know everybody in the course of his extraordinary career: he saw Josephine Baker dance naked in Paris (‘apparently she does this for hours on end’), he heard Yehudi Menuhin’s debut (‘The boy is truly marvellous. His playing has the afflatus of genius and the purity of a child’); at school he had founded a magazine for his schoolmates, one of whom was Winston Churchill; he met Virginia Woolf, Proust, George Bernard Shaw and most of the other prominent intellectuals and artists of his day. On all of them he turned his subtly discerning eye and ready wit. While he provided moral and financial encouragement to Elisabeth Nietzsche, he was also one of the few who managed to penetrate the pseudo-divine mystique she spun around her brother. The description in his diary of his first sight of the insane Nietzsche is moving and rare, perhaps unique for the time, in its lack of pretension and hyperbole:
He was asleep on the sofa, his mighty head had sunk down and to the right on to his chest, as if it were too heavy for his neck. His forehead was truly colossal; his manelike hair is still dark brown, like his shaggy, protruding moustache. Blurred, black-brown edges underneath his eyes are cut deeply into his cheeks. One can still see in the lifeless, flabby face some deep wrinkles dug in by thought and will but softened, as it were, and getting smoothed out. His expression shows an infinite weariness. His hands are waxen, with green and violet veins, and a little swollen as with a corpse … The sultry air of a thunderstorm had fatigued him, and although his sister stroked him several times and fondly called him ‘darling, darling’ he would not wake up. He did not resemble a sick person or a lunatic, but rather a dead man.
That description was written after Nietzsche’s body, as well as the Archive which bore his name, had been moved to Weimar in July 1897. Franziska Nietzsche had finally died on 20 April of that year, leaving Elisabeth in sole control of the invalid her mother had nursed for seven years. Naumburg, she decided, was not the place to house the fruits of his genius or the remains of his body. Far better would be Weimar, seat of classical learning and home to Goethe, Schiller and Liszt. Elisabeth persuaded one of Nietzsche’s richer friends and admirers, Meta von Salis, to pay for an appropriate site for the Archive. Villa Silberblick, on the hill overlooking Weimar, was in some ways a peculiar choice: one might have expected Elisabeth to object to a place which bore the name of an affliction from which she suffered, although Silberblick also means beautiful view. The building itself was large and ugly, so exposed to the elements that the locals called it Villa Sonnenstich – Villa Sunstroke. But it was certainly imposing and grand. On the ground floor was arranged a staggering array of Nietzscheana: letters, diaries, photographs and pictures, not just of Nietzsche’s life, but also of Elisabeth’s time in Paraguay. There was even a bust of Bernhard Förster. Nietzsche was usually kept out of sight upstairs, viewed only occasionally by the most important guests.
While Elisabeth tended to her brother and his image, Fritz Koegel, followed by a stream of other editors, some more, some less competent, had by 1900 begun to work on a third collected edition of Nietzsche’s works. Thanks in part to the popularity of Elisabeth’s biographies, they sold extremely well. As Nietzsche’s health sank, his fame rose. In 1896, Richard Strauss had completed his dramatic symphonic interpretation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and in 1899 he visited Elisabeth, a sign of how well established Nietzsche’s name had become. Prominent intellectuals from all over Europe began to make the pilgrimage to Weimar, and Nietzsche’s works were read by thousands. Elisabeth used some surprisingly modern marketing techniques. In October 1898, Arnold Kramer had completed his studies for a statuette entitled ‘Friedrich Nietzsche in His Invalid Chair’. Elisabeth arranged for replicas of different sizes and prices to go on the market immediately. Inspired by her success, Elisabeth, who had now permitted the publication of The Anti-Christ, decided to publish his unfinished work, The Will to Power: Attempt at a Transvaluation of All Values. To that end she made contact again with Peter Gast, the only man who could decipher Nietzsche’s jottings, and persuaded him to return to Weimar.
Of all this Nietzsche was, perhaps mercifully, unaware. By early 1900, the fawning descriptions of him had moved up a gear: ‘How I felt when I saw him in the grandeur of his being, the infinitely deepened beauty of psychic expression’, warbled Isabella von Ungern-Sternberg, who had met the sane Nietzsche just once before, in 1876, ‘these deep sad eye-stars, which roam in the distance and yet seem to look inward, radiated a powerful effect, a magnetic intellectual aura which no sensitive nature could resist.’ In his maxims Nietzsche had noted that good writers ‘prefer to be understood rather than admired’, and he would have been astonished at how he had become so greatly admired but so little understood.
In fact Nietzsche, an idol in his own twilight, was dying. On 20 August he caught a cold which settled on his lungs. Four days later he had a seizure, and the next morning he was dead. If life means more than the mere exercise of breathing, then Nietzsche’s life had ended in 1889, but, though most other contemporary accounts agree that for the last ten years of his existence he was little more than a human shell, Elisabeth claimed he was still capable of sentient communication, at least to her. In 1891, she claimed,
he wrote me a touching little letter, containing the following stanza:
The tie that sister binds to brother
Is strongest of all ties, I hold;
They’re riveted to one another
More firmly than by ties of gold.
Is it necessary to say that no trace of such a letter survives? Perhaps the real thrust of Elisabeth’s character is contained in another recollection, rank with false modesty: ‘one day he turned to me and exclaimed, “Why are you so famous, Lisbeth?” The question was so pathetic, yet comic, I threw my arms around him, crying and laughing at once, and said, “I’m not a bit famous! The people only come because they haven’t seen me for so long.” Yet he shook his head and remarked again and again, “Well, so the Llama is famous too.”’
By the time Nietzsche died, the Llama was well on the way to becoming very famous indeed; by her own account, he died with her name on his lips. ‘At two o’clock in the morning, when I handed him a refreshing draught and moved the lampshade aside so he could see me, he cried out joyfully, “Elisabeth,” so that I thought the crisis was over. But his beloved face changed more and more; the shadows of death began to overspread it, his breathing grew more and more laboured … then came a slight tremor, a deep breath – and softly, without a struggle, with a last solemn, inquiring glance he closed his eyes forever.’ Was it likely that a man who, for two years had not known where he was, who he was, that his was now a household name and that his mother was dead, would have remembered his sister with his last gasp? Elisabeth thought so.
In the flurry surrounding the funeral arrangements, she entirely forgot a request Nietzsche had once made of her. She remembered it later though, and wrote it down: ‘“Lisbeth,” said my brother solemnly, “promise me that when I die only my friends shall stand about my coffin – no inquisitive crowd. See that no priest or anyone else utters falsehoods at my graveside, when I can no longer defend myself, and let me descend into my tomb an honest pagan.’”
Of all the people who clustered around Nietzsche’s graveside in the little churchyard at Röcken next to the house where he had been born fifty-six years before, perhaps only Peter Gast, now an employee of Elisabeth, could really claim to have been his friend; most of the rest had come to know Nietzsche only in the form Elisabeth had presented him, an unseen, mystical being or a silent wraith wrapped in Brahmin’s robes. Elisabeth had drawn up a long list of mourners and issued a press release; that was how hard she tried to keep out the inquisitive crowd.
The man who had pronounced a ringing curse on the house of God was buried with full Lutheran rites, his coffin adorned with a silver cross. ‘I have a terrible fear that one day I shall be pronounced “holy”’, so Nietzsche had written in Ecce Homo. ‘I do not want to be a saint, rather a buffoon … perhaps I am a buffoon.’ ‘Hallowed be thy name to all future generations’, intoned Peter Gast at his graveside.
At about the time that Nietzsche was lowered into the ground at Röcken, five thousand miles away on the banks of the Aguarya-umí in central Paraguay, Fritz Neumann was fishing and watching the pito-qué birds slip in and out of the forest undergrowth. Underneath a tall tree, where the birds always congregated in the cool of the evening, a tall copse of yerba trees had seeded itself.
In the decade after Elisabeth left Paraguay, New Germany had teetered close to disaster. Since her unlamented departure, it had to be admitted, the ideological heart of the colony had been broken. Those who had stayed were the most dedicated to the founders’ ideals, the Ercks, the Schüttes, the Fischers, the hopelessly poor, like the Schuberts and the Schweikharts, and the grimly determined, like Fritz Neumann himself. The pastor they had been promised had never materialised, and no more money had been sent from the colonial Hermann Society. The ships had been sold off, leaving only the track through the forest to Antequera as a means of getting goods to market. Few bothered, and they survived on what little they could grow. Thankfully no one had tried to take their little parcels of land away, but if there had not been a few Paraguayans left to teach them the tricks of survival, they would all have been dead.
Many of the people who, like Neumann, had come with such grand hopes back in 1887, had trickled away, the richer ones back to Germany, others to the Corrientes in Argentina or to Chile and Brazil, where the life was easier. Those that stayed had clustered around the large house Elisabeth had left behind. Even the richest family was much too poor now to consider returning to a home that was barely a memory; for most there was not enough money to get to Asunción, let alone back to Germany. Some of the poorest had tried to set up on their own in the forest; they were seldom seen, except when they came to town with something to sell, ragged and desperate people. The Paraguayans called them gente perdita.
The population of the colony had dwindled. In the two years after Elisabeth left, more than 100 colonists packed their meagre possessions on to carts and headed back down the river; now there were barely seventy people left. Even Oscar Erck, Elisabeth’s trusty lieutenant, had begun to wonder whether it would be better to disband the colony. Neumann had decided to give it one more year before he and his family abandoned the place. Mistakes had been made; they had tried to cultivate the wrong crops, concentrating on tobacco, cotton, sugar cane and maize, which were difficult to grow and hard to move. Without river transport, they had to go by cart; when it rained, the journey took weeks. An unexpected frost had killed all the coffee plants one year. But it was good land for yerba, the Paraguayan tea to which all the German colonists had become addicted. It grew abundantly in the forest and upriver in the Sierra Amambay, but collecting it was back-breaking work. You had to spend days, sometimes weeks, in the yerbales, as the yerba-rich parts of the forest were called, harvesting by hand. The Jesuits had known how to cultivate the tea, indeed they had established large plantations, but when they had been thrown out of the country in the eighteenth century, the secret had gone with them. The Indians had never bothered to learn how to plant the crop and had reverted to the old methods of collection. For some reason just planting yerba seeds didn’t work – they steadfastly refused to germinate.
The birds flickered and darted around the yerba trees; Neumann put another piece of meat on his hook and tossed it into the river. The grey water sucked at the bank and he sucked on his pipe, deep in thought.
With Nietzsche’s death, Elisabeth’s plans for immortalising her brother took on a new impetus. She had long hoped to turn Weimar into another Bayreuth, a cultural capital, with the worship of her brother at its centre. At her urging, the Grand Duke Wilhelm of Sachsen-Weimar appointed Count Harry Kessler as director of the Weimar Art Museum and his friend, the Belgian architect and designer Henry van de Velde, as artistic consultant to the court of Weimar and director of the Weimar Art School. She had another reason for encouraging van de Velde, a prime exponent of the German form of Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, to make his home in Weimar. Soon after his arrival she commissioned him to redesign Villa Silberblick on a scale commensurate with her ambitions for her brother. Försterhof in Paraguay had been her first architectural monument to herself; the redesigned Villa Silberblick, of which she gained complete ownership in 1902, was her second.
Van de Velde excelled himself: the warren of ground-floor rooms was turned into two large reception rooms; a vast marble bust of Nietzsche, carved by Max Klinger and paid for by Count Kessler, glared down from the far end of the room, panelled now in local beechwood, Buchen, which glowed when the sun shone through the windows. At the other end was the bust of Förster. Elaborately curved and upholstered in strawberry pink, the furniture and interior decor had none of the French frippery, the lavish use of ‘pink satin and little cupids’ that Elisabeth had disliked at the Wagners’ home in Tribschen. There was to be nothing frilly about this martyr’s shrine. The whole was restrained and elegant, and, to make sure no one missed the point, the letter ‘N’ was reflected in the shape of the front-door handles and a brass plaque, a foot high, above the fireplace. Elisabeth was delighted with van de Velde’s work, completed in 1903. The next year Paul Kühn wrote of the Nietzsche Archive as a future ‘memorial and symbol’ of a new culture. At last she had the right dignified setting in which to entertain, with increasing extravagance, the growing lines of distinguished and influential well-wishers.
One person who did not share Elisabeth’s own delight in her new-found fame was the very woman on whom she modelled herself. Even before Nietzsche’s death, Cosima Wagner had written archly to her daughter Daniela about her one-time babysitter: ‘Did you know Elisabeth Nietzsche is now living a life of luxury, with servants and equipage?’ She resented the growing popularity of Nietzsche’s ideas, which she claimed had all originated with her husband, and poured scorn on Elisabeth’s ambitious self-promotion. ‘She seems to have gone a bit loopy since all this fame-madness began’, she wrote to her son-in-law, the English-born race theorist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, ‘the new religion or philosophy she is presenting seems to me to be a clear sign of that, and if the whole thing was not so terribly sad, so frighteningly wild in its consequences, then one couldn’t but find it funny. The best thing to do is to look away and forget it all.’
In the early years of the century, Elisabeth busied herself with the final part of her biography, in which she would set the seal on her image of Nietzsche as the great ‘seer-saint’. She accepted no interpretation but her own: when a Leipzig doctor suggested that Nietzsche’s insanity might be the result of a syphilitic infection, she publicly denounced him; when an Italian writer, C. A. Bernoulli, tried to publish the letters belonging to Nietzsche’s friend Franz Overbeck (which contained unflattering references to Elisabeth), she took him to court in a series of legal actions that dragged on for years.
She was not above plain forgery, if it would help to burnish the image of her relationship with her brother. On more than one occasion, if she found a particularly complimentary passage in a letter written by Nietzsche to someone else, she would burn their name off the top, insert her own and pretend it had been sent to her. She produced ‘copies’ of letters she said had been sent to her, but claimed that the originals had been stolen in a box of letters while she was in Paraguay. It is impossible to say how many letters which failed to give the right impression were destroyed. Fearing that Fritz Koegel, when he left her employ, took with him copies of letters in which Nietzsche said what he thought about his sister, she took legal action against his heirs to prevent their publication. But arguably her single greatest act of misrepesentation was the publication of Will to Power. This was Nietzsche’s supposed masterwork, a grand ‘revaluation of all values’ written before his final collapse. He had certainly planned such a work, but in all probability had abandoned it. He had not prepared it for publication, and thus probably did not want it published; he would have been appalled with it in its final form. The simple fact is that Nietzsche did not write a book called Will to Power; Elisabeth did.
The book that Elisabeth, with the help of Peter Gast, published in 1901 under the title The Will to Power: Studies and Fragments was in fact nothing less than a cobbling together of philosophical flotsam Nietzsche himself had rejected or used elsewhere. It grew in later years, as further fragments were added, and the title changed to the more emphatic The Will to Power: Attempt at a Transvaluation of All Values, firmly establishing Nietzsche as a prophet or ‘valuelegislator’. Elisabeth claimed, however, that this was Nietzsche’s major work, thus giving it a quite spurious importance, and, by grouping otherwise unconnected jottings, notes and aphorisms, imposed an order on it where none existed. For example, the fourth section of Will to Power is misleadingly called ‘Zücht und Züchtung’, Breed and Breeding. True, Nietzsche had in one of his many drafts used this title, but he had abandoned it. In fact, what little he says here about breeding is ambiguous to say the least, and there is almost nothing about biological breeding (as Förster, Elisabeth and later the Nazis conceived it); yet this title was used to cover almost a quarter of what was trumpeted as Nietzsche’s ‘chief work’. Elisabeth tended to conceive editorial licence as mere censorship: while Gast was compiling the notes for Will to Power, for example, she wrote telling him to remove an unflattering reference to the House of Hohenzollern, which she admired greatly.
Will to Power does contain ugly elements. Perhaps the most famous concerns Napoleon: ‘The Revolution made Napoleon possible; that is its justification. For the sake of a similar prize one would have to desire the anarchical collapse of our entire civilisation. …’ Given that this is precisely what almost happened under Hitler, that remark has a most disquieting ring to it. It is true that Nietzsche wrote this and other apparent incitements to totalitarianism; but it is equally true that he rejected them. In the second volume of the condensed version of her biography (published in 1914) she was to write: ‘it looks as though my brother’s fervent advocacy of the Will to Power as a law of nature had come in the nick of time … we cannot become leaders and discoverers; we shall be glad that we may perhaps be allowed “to submerge ourselves” in a great type’ – which makes it clear enough how Elisabeth wanted the Will to Power to be received. Elisabeth was waiting for a ‘great type’ on to whom she could unload Nietzsche’s thinking.
Her sixtieth birthday was the occasion for major celebrations at Villa Silberblick; bundles of birthday cards arrived, flowers and visitors. That year her portrait was painted by the Norwegian artist, Edvard Munch; Hans Olde was commissioned to paint another. The Italian nationalist and poet, Gabriele D’Annunzio, wrote a poem in Nietzsche’s honour which he dedicated to Elisabeth, the ‘Antigone of the North’. She thanked him by letter, and he replied fulsomely:
I have read, Madame, your unexpected letter with overwhelming emotion. The ‘sad shadow of Antigone the Greek’ comes towards me and speaks to me! As for my Ode: no praise for it equals this gift of yours.
Please accept, Madame, this expression of my gratitude. My poem is dedicated to you, entirely and for ever.
I write to you from the coast of Tyrrhenia. I would like to send you, for the Hero’s sepulchre, a large pine branch.
You can have faith, Madame, in my admiration and unlimited devotion.
G D’A.
It was exactly the sort of letter Elisabeth loved, even if she didn’t particularly want lumps of wood cluttering up her shrine, and precisely the sort of letter writer she approved of. D’Annunzio was a fervent nationalist whose ideas helped to lay the groundwork for Italian fascism. Her biographies had been enthusiastically received, her name was linked with the foremost intellectuals of the age and the collected Nietzsche was selling fast.
Even in Paraguay, things seemed to be improving. In 1906 a volume of Paraguayan reminiscences was published in Germany by one Baron Heinrich von Fischer Truenfeld, an adventurer of the old school who had been employed by the dictator Francisco Solano Lopez to build the Paraguayan railway system and had later taken over the country’s communications system, such as it was. His memoirs make interesting reading: it was he who, at the height of the terrible War of the Triple Alliance, had developed a way of making newspapers out of caraguatá pulp and thus kept the Paraguayans informed about the course of the war; in return for this useful discovery, Lopez had had him imprisoned. But Elisabeth was most intrigued by the Baron’s survey of the colony New Germany, which included many flattering references to Bernhard Förster – ‘an idealistic genius pursuing dreams and ideals for the happiness of man and who sought to achieve this with self-sacrificing loyalty and indefatigable work’.
According to Truenfeld, one German colonist in Nueva Germania called Fritz Neumann, originally of Breslau, ‘after six or eight years of tireless experimentation’, had discovered a way to make yerba seeds germinate artificially. The truth was rather more prosaic than that. Neumann had one day, quite by accident, noticed that the areas where the jungle birds roosted tended to produce large quantities of yerba. He deduced that the birds’ digestive system was acting on the seeds they had eaten and accelerating germination. He concocted a mixture of acid and charcoal and, by steeping the yerba seeds in it, achieved the same result; thus Fritz Neumann of New Germany had the brief honour of being the world’s first (if you discounted the Jesuits) and only yerba maté plantation owner. In 1903 the community produced eight thousand kilos of yerba, or ora verde, green gold, as they now called it; in 1904, thirty thousand kilos were shipped downriver to Asunción, where the new ‘artificial’ yerba commanded a far higher price than the wild variety. Neumann had become a rich man and leader of the colony. He built himself a house at Tacarutý, a few miles outside town, with glass in the windows and a real piano. The population of the colony doubled, mostly from migrant Paraguayan peons looking to harvest the crop, but some new German settlers came too, drawn by the new prosperity. The slanders of a few disenchanted people in the past had, said Baron Truenfeld, delayed the development of the colony but they could not prevent it now after Neumann’s scientific breakthrough: ‘For New Germany and yerba have become synonymous. And as the future production of yerba is increased, so the further development of New Germany is assured.’ Elisabeth was delighted. At last, in her sixtieth year, the two great projects of her life seemed to be coming to fruition.
The royalties from Nietzsche’s works, as well as her own, were pouring into the Archive, but the money was pouring out again just as fast. Thanks to the small army of lawyers and the rather larger army of servants in permanent attendance, Elisabeth was perennially short of cash – a problem that was compounded by her taste for expensive entertaining. In 1905 she had received a letter from a forty-five-year-old Swedish banker called Ernest Thiel, complimenting her on her biographies. Thiel was to become the economic mainstay of the Nietzsche cult. But, in addition to being exceedingly wealthy, a dedicated Nietzschean and skilled translator of Nietzsche’s works, Thiel was an Orthodox Jew. This perhaps explains why Elisabeth’s first reaction was to hire a private detective in Stockholm to look into his background before she accepted money from him. But accept she did – the first instalment being 300,000 Reichmarks in September 1907. Her anti-Semitism was of an opportunistic sort; when it became clear that Thiel was prepared to donate large amounts to the Archive, Elisabeth conveniently put her racist scruples aside; indeed she became genuinely fond of Thiel and his family. Whenever Elisabeth ran short of money she would turn to him, and he, uncomplainingly, would dig ever deeper into his copious pockets. Over the next thirty years he gave hundreds of thousands of marks, most of which Elisabeth quite happily spent.
It was a sign of how far Elisabeth’s star was in the ascendant that in 1908 a group of German university professors nominated her for the Nobel prize for literature; it was the first of three occasions that Elisabeth would be proposed (the others were 1915 and 1923) and each time she was turned down, much to her annoyance. But she could take heart from the fact that the Archive in Weimar was fast becoming a place of pilgrimage for every German intellectual worth his salt; foreign dignitaries and even Persian grandees (noting that Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, was Persian) came to pay homage to Nietzsche, whose ‘death room’ was preserved intact, and to the sister who had saved him for posterity and immortalised him in her biographies.
Years before, Nietzsche’s old friend Overbeck, himself a victim of Elisabeth’s will to power, had written of her biographical efforts: ‘Rarely has the reading public been so duped as in [Elisabeth] Förster[-Nietzsche]’s book. It reads sometimes as though Frau Förster wants to prove that she is far wiser than her brother. She is often praised now as a saint among sisters. But this will change. The time may come when she will be considered a prime example of the type: dangerous sisters.’ And not all of those who came to Weimar to pay homage to Nietzsche were taken in by his sister’s posturing. Oscar Levy, the foremost British Nietzsche scholar of the period and the man who would later and quite unfairly be linked with the translation of the forged My Sister and I, visited her in August 1908. He gave this account to a friend following a four-and-a-half-hour encounter with her:
I came here with some trepidation, because I have recently read her brochure ‘The Nietzsche Archive and Its Enemies’, in which she stresses at several points her willingness for sacrifice – and whenever someone mentions ‘willingness for sacrifice’, I invariably feel sick … It was even worse than I anticipated, and I scanned the streets of Weimar for a whole day wondering how it could be possible that such a man could have such a sister! By and large, however, I feel sorry for this woman who pays rather heavily for her ‘celebrity’. She is nervous, talks incessantly, interrupting the flow only in order to fetch some book or other in order to verify something hastily, only to change the subject and to talk about something which has no relation to the previous topic. This is punctuated by a lot of unconscious sighs which would reveal an inner restlessness if the outer one were not already a sufficient indication of it. She also complained to me a good deal about being the subject of attacks, though, as she thinks, ‘her enemies would soon be the worse for it’. ‘But it is all too much for a single woman’, she added dolefully – this is my opinion too: ‘mais Diable! c’est ce qu’elle fait dans cette galère!’ There were also a lot of other utterances – gushingly insincere à la Meysenbug – women’s views of the first calibre – high-sounding phrases peppered with the constant words: ‘acted in the interests of my brothier’. She is also vain, not only in relation to her appearance for which, as a woman and a good-looking old lady, she would have every justification. She still has pink cheeks, rather pronouncedly defined, so that I thought at first she had put rouge on her face – besides, although she is small rather than tall and somewhat plump, she is ‘very mobile’ and ‘I am already 62 years old’. But she is not only vain about her exterior, but also – quelle horreur! – even more so about her literary achievements. About her Introductions [to Nietzsche’s works], for instance, all of which she wants to have translated into English. In short, she is one of those women against whom her brother always thundered!! I can well believe that she often made life miserable for him – and if the great man wrote some tender letters to her, this only proves his generosity of the soul and conciliatory nature in spite of all the vexation … and worse: would you believe it possible that this woman, thanks to her prestige as the sister of Nietzsche, has entered into relationships with all the so-called poets of Germany and beyond, with a Dehmel, with a Hoffmannsthal, with Bernard Shaw, with D’Annunzio, with Gerhard Hauptmann – people her brother would have expelled from the Temple and from the Archive! She also exchanges enthusiastic messages with Graf Zeppelin, the inventor of aviation. Quite up to date – and all this should not make a woman irascible, nervous and contentious!
In the noise of adulation surrounding Elisabeth in these years, such voices of dissent, let alone of criticism, were seldom heard. Elisabeth might talk and write about her enemies, but her friends grew ever more numerous and influential as the Nietzsche cult grew. She herself suggested the foundation of an International Nietzsche Memorial Committee. Van de Velde was entrusted with the design, and Count Kessler did most of the organising: his plans included a Nietzsche shrine overlooking Weimar, a temple and a vast classical stadium where young Europeans could compete in the spirit of Nietzsche. Using his energy and contacts he gathered extraordinary international support from men such as André Gide, H. G. Wells, D’Annunzio and many others. The plan was scuppered by the war.
Eight years earlier Elisabeth had signed a letter to The Times in London along with other ‘distinguished representatives of Science, Literature and Art’ – including Kessler, Richard Strauss, Siegfried Wagner and the composer Engelbert Humperdinck – emphasising their respect for Britain and playing down the possibility of war: ‘none of us, though living in widely distant parts of Germany and moving in different spheres of German society and party life, has ever heard an attack on England seriously discussed or approved of by any man or section of the German public worth noticing … no feelings the German people are ever likely to harbour, can ever rightly endanger the friendship between both nations’. If that really represented Elisabeth’s view in 1906 (which is doubtful), it certainly didn’t by 1914. When war came, Elisabeth was elated. The news that the German armies were advancing stirred her jingoism, never far below the surface. Her brother had written of war as a vital factor in human affairs, of the productive nature of conflict and of the heroic qualities produced by battle. He had spoken of his own ‘warlike soul’, but he had also written of himself as ‘the good European’ who wanted to subsume nationalist rivalries. He used militaristic language, to be sure, but he was very far from supporting war as an end in itself, and certainly not a war of conquest between European countries. But Nietzsche was a peacemaker too:
Perhaps there will come in the future a great day on which a nation distinguished for wars and victories and for the highest development of military discipline and thinking will declare of its own free will: ‘we shall shatter the sword!’ – and demolish its entire military machine, down to its last foundations. To disarm while being best armed, out of an elevation of sensibility – that is the means to real peace … the tree of the glory of war can be destroyed only at a single stroke, by a lightning bolt: Lightning, however, as you well know, comes out of a cloud and from on high.
Elisabeth’s approach was unambiguous. She trumpeted Nietzsche as a militarist and an imperialist. She wrote long articles in the press describing Zarathustra as ‘the great challenge to Germans to rise up and fight … there is a fighter in every German, no matter what party he belongs to and this soldier in him comes to the fore whenever the Fatherland is threatened … Our German mission has not been fulfilled.’ She joined the Party of the German Fatherland (Deutsche Vaterlandspartei) to push for victory and hosted receptions for wounded soldiers at Villa Silberblick. Zarathustra became a bestseller: between 1914 and 1919 more than 165,000 copies were sold and the book was even distributed to soldiers at the Front. She developed a remarkable line in militaristic rhetoric, as when she talked of ‘one of the greatest and most solemn moments in world history when four powers have brought enemies and opponents to us everywhere, to annihilate a young and ambitious people; but divine justice and the shining power of the German people allow us to overcome this huge, malevolent storm so we can be certain with God that Germany will come through this terribly difficult time, despite countless, heartbreaking sacrifices, as a legendary hero and victor’. Elisabeth’s propagandising had its effect abroad as well as in Germany; when the first translation of Nietzsche appeared in England, newspaper placards told book-buyers to ‘read the devil in order to fight him better’.
Elisabeth had never contemplated defeat and when it came, in a welter of revolutionary upheaval, she was furious and blamed the Social Democrats for stabbing her brave German soldiers in the back. She even wrote to the Chancellor, Prince Max von Baden, urging him to continue the fighting. Versailles was a humiliation from which she believed Germany would never recover.
It was Elisabeth’s war rhetoric that began to sow doubts in Count Harry Kessler’s mind about the old lady he had supported for years. In 1919 he noted in his diary, ‘Even in her seventh decade, she remains a flapper at heart and enthuses over this or that person like a 17-year-old … In spite of her name she is … the embodiment of precisely what her brother fought against.’ The Weimar Republic was anathema to Elisabeth’s every political instinct and her own interpretation of her brother’s philosophy. Her conservatism refused to contemplate that a Superman could emerge from the morass of democracy. ‘She insists that she is a “nationalist”’, noted Kessler gloomily, ‘whereas her brother did not even want to be a German, but a Pole. She has had her head turned by all these countesses and excellencies.’ Later he noted, ‘the good old lady simply refers to the right-wing radicals as “we”!’ She poured scorn on the republic, which turned to dismay when a socialist government was elected in Weimar and to fury when it became clear that Germany was slipping into economic chaos. Being nominated (and rejected) for the Nobel literature prize for the third time in 1923 did little to improve her mood.
That same year, though Nietzsche’s books still sold well and Thiel hovered in the background ever ready with more cash, Elisabeth (now Frau Doktor, after the University of Jena presented her with an honorary doctorate on her seventy-fifth birthday) was suddenly reduced to near penury. Her entire capital was wiped out at a blow by the government’s decision to replace the old currency with the Rentenmark. Inflation raged, but Elisabeth took it on her redoubtable chin and, as ever, decided it was time to look elsewhere for patronage. Even Kessler, increasingly disillusioned, was impressed by her fortitude: ‘Admirable, the resignation and courage with which this old woman of eighty mentioned the complete loss through inflation of the accumulated funds (800,000 gold marks in round figures) of the Nietzsche endowment … This courage of hers, which in situations of this sort comes out so strongly, borders on the heroic and compels admiration for Nietzsche’s sister.’
But, though he could still find praise for the old woman, he found her political views, and their effect on Nietzsche’s interpretation, deplorable. One of the most influential figures to be found in Weimar was Oswald Spengler, author of The Decline of the West and a man whose notions of German cultural decay and Prussian imperialism directly coincided with Elisabeth’s. In 1919 he had been awarded the Nietzsche Prize, a considerable sum donated by a wealthy Hamburg shipping agent, Christian Lassen. (Thomas Mann had won it the previous year for his Reflections of a Non-Political Man – his attack on Western democracy. Ernst Bertram was another prizewinner.) Spengler’s views, emphasising the decline of cultural values and prophesying a new age of high technology and ‘caesarism’, laid the cultural groundwork for the rise of Nazism. Spengler was later to oppose the fascist regime, but in the 1920s he was the movement’s intellectual wet nurse, and was present as an observer at Hitler’s trial after the failed Munich Putsch in 1923. Though Spengler had reservations about the young Nazis’ coup attempt, Elisabeth had few; the Putsch, she thought, was quite simply ‘patriotic’, and the trial was ‘deplorable’.
With both Spengler and Kessler on the board of the Nietzsche Archive, the two antithetical approaches to Nietzsche were represented: Spengler the authoritarian, militaristic, radical conservative; Kessler, the social democrat, the consummate ‘good European’ and a pacifist as a result of his war experiences. They did not like each other. When in 1927 Spengler was due to give a lecture at the Archive, Kessler initially refused to come because of Spengler’s ‘political methods and intellectual arrogance’. When he relented and attended, he wished he had not. Spengler was ‘a fat parson with a fleshy chin and brutal mouth’ who ‘spouted the most trite and trivial rubbish. Everything uniformly shallow, dull, insipid and tedious. In short Spengler succeeded in making Nietzsche a bore.’ Kessler, however, was no longer the force he had once been in Elisabeth’s life; increasingly men like Spengler were entrusted with the work of disseminating and interpreting her brother’s work. It was Spengler, not Kessler, who gave the lecture ‘Nietzsche and Our Time’ on 15 October 1924, the philosopher’s eightieth birthday. It was a sign of her continued determination to ‘reconcile opposites’ that she tried to encourage Kessler and Spengler to work together, and a sign of her superficial approach to politics that she was surprised when they could not.
In 1927 she achieved the reconciliation of two opposites that were dearest to her heart. The story of the Nazification of Wagner is almost as unedifying as the story of the intellectual perversion of Nietzsche. With the help of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Cosima Wagner systematically sought to interpret and disseminate her dead husband’s work in the light of her own racist, nationalist ideology. Chamberlain’s theories of the supremacy of the Aryan race influenced the young Adolf Hitler and are at least partially reflected in Mein Kampf; Cosima went to the grave in 1930 believing that ‘the race most capable of culture is the Germanic, which on that account is destined to dominance’. She even traced Nietzsche’s apostasy to his putative Slav origins. With Elisabeth fast pushing Nietzsche’s philosophy down the nationalist path, a rapprochement between the two clans was perhaps inevitable. Her mendacious biographies made it clear that she never really accepted the breach between Nietzsche and Wagner, in spite of her brother’s repeated public denunciations of his former mentor; now, her control over Nietzsche absolute, she sought to ‘mend’ the relationship. Her chance came when Weimar hosted a festival of folk operas written by Siegfried Wagner, Wagner’s son, who had paid several visits to the Archive in 1926; it was also the opportunity for her to return, with interest, a little of the Wagner patronage:
Elisabeth went on to tell me about the reconciliation of the Wagner clan [recalled Kessler]. Last year, during the festival held for Siegfried Wagner, and after preliminary reconnaissance by Countess Gravina, the whole Wagner family called on her. Subsequently she gave a luncheon party for them. On this occasion the reconciliation was formally sealed when they all held hands around the table, and she read them her brother’s ‘Star Friendship’. Siegfried Wagner issued an official invitation to her to share the family box at Bayreuth. She cannot be cross with him, she added, for she still sees him as the little boy who announced that he ‘loved her more than anything else in the world’. The Wagner– Nietzsche feud has petered out in an atmosphere of social cosiness, and in a manner of the courtly style so typical of the Bayreuth crowd. The Princess of Albania was present and duly took cognisance of the reconciliation. The whole business is infinitely commonplace, and removed in sentiment by several thousands of miles from the closing chord of Götterdämmerung, let alone the ending of Zarathustra.
See notes on Chapter VII: Will To Power