As a young Italian schoolteacher, Benito Mussolini believed he had found in Nietzsche’s Will to Power a central political truth. In an essay of 1908, ‘Philosophy of Strength’, he had written that Nietzsche had ‘the most congenial mind of the last quarter of the nineteenth century’. He was later to claim that Nietzsche had ‘cured’ him of his socialism, and in 1924 he was quoted as saying, ‘You are right in assuming that I have been influenced by Nietzsche … I have read them without exception … I was deeply impressed by Nietzsche’s wonderful precept “Live Dangerously”. I have lived up to that I think.’ This was more than the mere political magpie at work, picking up stray, brightly coloured political phrases. Mussolini certainly read Nietzsche – to say that I think he misunderstood him perhaps falsely implies that I do. My point is simply that Nietzsche would have despised Mussolini, although he might initially have applauded his bravado. He would have found Mussolini’s appeal to base, mass instincts, and in particular the new religion of fascism, quite repugnant. Mussolini was clearly attracted by Nietzsche’s potent language and his cult of the great individual who can and should override mere institutions to achieve his ends. It is, of course, impossible to say to what extent Mussolini was ‘inspired’ by Nietzsche (however he misread him) and how far Nietzsche was merely a useful propaganda tool.
Elisabeth had no such qualms about Mussolini. Perhaps through D’Annunzio, she knew he was a reader of her brother’s works, and when Mussolini marched on Rome she wrote to congratulate him and he replied stressing his admiration for Nietzsche. Elisabeth and Mussolini were never to meet, but throughout the 1920s they corresponded with increasing warmth, to their mutual advantage. If Nietzsche was not merely propaganda when Mussolini discovered him, he most certainly was by the time Elisabeth had discovered Mussolini.
Max Oehler, Elisabeth’s fascist cousin, wrote an article on ‘Nietzsche and Mussolini’ which was widely published; as chairman of the Nietzsche Archive, Elisabeth herself gave a ‘speech of admiration’ for the Duce in Villa Silberblick on 5 June 1928; on the same occasion, Consul Wilhelm Mann lectured on ‘Fascism as a Spiritual Movement’. When Mussolini concluded the Lateran Treaty with the Pope and the Italian monarchy, Elisabeth wrote to the Italian Ambassador in Berlin:
I can no longer restrain myself from expressing to your Excellency my whole-hearted admiration for the President Minister Mussolini … His Excellency is not only the pre-eminent statesman of Europe, but of the whole world and I am truly proud that I was able to detect how some of Nietzsche’s philosophy is revealed in the strength in action of this highly esteemed president. With what pride would my brother gaze at this wonderful man, upon someone happy, powerful and triumphant, who offers mankind the happy chance of salvation, so that it is possible to hold firm to faith in mankind itself.
For Elisabeth, Mussolini represented the triumph of her interpretation of Nietzsche’s thought. She called him ‘the genius who rediscovered the values of Nietzsche’s spirit’, and wrote long letters stating how ‘my brother loved Italy more than any other country. How happy he would be now that this country has been so closely connected with his thoughts and ideas by your Excellency’s wonderful influence.’ If Mussolini came to think of himself as some sort of Superman, it was partly at Elisabeth’s urging. ‘Without exaggeration I can say that Nietzsche would have regarded him as his most splendid disciple’, she wrote, ‘and the only one who has implanted to a great degree Nietzsche’s philosophy – humility, discipline and control – into the youth of Italy.’ It was not true, of course, as Kessler was quick to recognise. In 1926 he noted that Elisabeth had written to him ‘bursting with news of her Mussolini friendship and demanded to know whether I had heard of it. Yes, indeed, I said, I had both heard and regretted it, for Mussolini compromises her brother’s reputation. He is a danger to Europe, that Europe which her brother longed for, the Europe of all good Europeans. She will be 80 soon, and it is beginning to show.’
To mark that birthday President Hindenburg awarded her an honorary pension on 16 July 1926, slightly alleviating her financial problems, which were threatening to become serious after 1930 when the copyright on Nietzsche’s books would expire. The long-suffering Ernest Thiel, though he continued to send money to the Archive, was facing cash difficulties of his own. Elisabeth was determined that the Archive should be made financially secure. She needed a permanent patron, someone who could ensure her future and her lifestyle, and the future of her Archive. She chose the Nazis.
Of the brood of second-rate bullies and braggarts that made up the National Socialists, Dr Wilhelm Frick was perhaps the least colourful. A civil servant by training, an anti-Semite by conviction and a bureaucrat by taste, he was a devoted follower of Hitler from the earliest days. They had been tried and sentenced together after the Munich Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Grey-haired and slight, he drifts around in the background of those early puff-chested Nazi photographs, like a lost bank clerk. Yet he played a vital role in the Nazi rise to power, sharing every part of Hitler’s twisted philosophy and helping him to consolidate his hold on power. As early as 1924 he was in the Reichstag, where he proposed a bill to dismiss Jews from the civil service. ‘We deem it below our dignity to be ruled by people of that race’, he averred. And it was Frick who later, as Reich Minister of the Interior, created the pseudolegal apparatus for the oppression of communists, social democrats and Jews which culminated in the Nuremberg Laws. In 1930, as Minister of the Interior in Thuringia, he became the first National Socialist minister in a provincial government. Elisabeth had already noted his ascent with approval, and when Frick won office she was among the first to congratulate him on the election ‘victory’ of the NSDAP. His reply was immediate and fulsome, ending with a transparent recognition of the propaganda use that could be made of Nietzsche’s sister: ‘I am not giving up hope that you too, my dear lady, will one day devote yourself to the liberty movement of the German people, as a fighter like your highly esteemed brother Nietzsche.’
A month later, as an added incentive to Elisabeth to put her considerable cultural clout behind the Nazis, Frick offered to introduce a bill in the Reichstag which would extend the thirty-year copyright on Nietzsche’s works, and thus provide Elisabeth with a continuation of the royalties she so badly wanted. She accepted with alacrity and, though the bill failed, Frick promised official subsidies for the Nietzsche Archive. Elisabeth had taken the bait, not that she needed much encouragement; the hearts (if they had them) of men like Frick beat in time with hers. By 1931 she was ready to write a letter to thank Frick for a donation of 5,000 marks which comes close to admitting its own perjury:
It is certain that my brother wrote against nationalism forty years ago, but then forty years ago the situation was completely different. In those days, Germany was neither as big nor as powerful as it is today. Everything has changed so much. I understand what Herr Hitler has found in Nietzsche – and that is the heroic cast of mind which we need so desperately. There is one quotation by my brother which I always connect with the feelings of the best National Socialists, ‘Don’t throw away the golden guinea in your soul and always preserve your greatest hope.’ I’m quite sure this ‘hope’ of Nietzsche’s lies especially in your heart, surrounded as you are by difficulties. Whenever Germany’s enemies make their stupid remarks that Nietzsche has nothing to do with National Socialism, you should reply in general that the link between National Socialism and Nietzsche is the heroism in both their souls.
In contrast to Mussolini, Hitler almost certainly never read a word that Nietzsche wrote, either now or at any other time. Though he might occasionally style himself a poet-politician, he never mentioned Nietzsche in his writing, and only once, in passing, during his table talk. Nietzsche’s works, and the mythical reputation built up around him by Elisabeth and her Weimar acolytes, were little more than useful propaganda tools. They provided Hitler with an armoury of (admittedly emotive) words and phrases, ‘will to power’, ‘the Superman’, ‘live dangerously’, which, quoted partially and out of context, could be used to provide the Nazi ideology with a spurious philosophical basis.
Elisabeth’s finances improved when, at the end of 1931, a court ruled that she should be considered co-author of the works she had compiled out of her brother’s Nachlass, most notably Will to Power. It was further proof that these were really her creations, not her brother’s. The royalties from these works would still go to her account, as did the royalties on her own works to which she was adding with a book entitled Nietzsche and the Women of His Time, a final swingeing attack on the now ageing Lou Andreas-Salomé. Otherwise, the Archive and its large staff survived on handouts, from Thiel, Frick and a wealthy cigarette manufacturer Philipp Reetsma, who between 1929 and 1945 donated an annual sum of 20,000 Reichsmarks; he was later tried at Nuremberg for attempting to bribe Hermann Goering. Mussolini sent 20,000 lire to the Archive, with sincere congratulations on Elisabeth’s eighty-fifth birthday. She told the Italian Ambassador that it would be ‘the happiest day’ of her life if ‘the deeply venerated Duce were to visit the Archive’. Six months later she saw her opportunity to persuade him by an appeal to his vanity.
Mussolini had co-written a play about Napoleon, Campo di Maggio (The Hundred Days in English) in which Bonaparte is portrayed as a hero brought down by the intrigues of his enemies. Elisabeth liked the play, perhaps because it echoed her own fictional accounts of the heroic deaths of her husband and brother; it certainly mirrored Mussolini’s view of his own greatness, particularly since he portrayed Napoleon as a man whose one fatal mistake was to give in to democracy. It is not clear what part Elisabeth played in arranging to have the play performed, for the first time in German, at the Weimar National Theatre in February 1932, but she wrote to Mussolini:
Can I dare to dream that your Excellency might attend this magnificent work with us? How happy I would be if, before my death, I could tell your Excellency how grateful I am that you have implanted the thoughts and doctrines of my brother Friedrich Nietzsche – respect, bravery, discipline – into numerous young hearts. It would be the most beautiful and joyous day of my life if I could receive your Excellency at the Archive, which would give me the opportunity to thank your Excellency for all the great help you have given the Archive in recent times. …
Mussolini declined, but on the opening night the theatre was packed with the most important people in Weimar, including one who was about to become very important indeed. When Hitler strode down the aisle, flanked by storm troopers, the audience, including Elisabeth in her box of honour, was thunderstruck. During the interval, Hitler paid a courtesy visit to the sister of the great writer and presented her with a large bunch of red roses. Elisabeth was deeply impressed. ‘His eyes,’ she told Kessler, ‘are fascinating and stare right through you.’
Elisabeth was by inclination and upbringing a conservative monarchist; her instincts lay more with the right-wing politicians who helped to bring Hitler to power than with the Nazis. She corresponded regularly with the Empress Hermine, the Kaiser’s wife, now in exile in Holland – a relationship Kessler considered ‘grotesque’ – and talked of a restoration of the monarchy. She was above all a snob; a Hindenburg, the grand old man of German politics, was always more to her taste than an Austrian ex-corporal. Like other conservatives she was prepared to expand her political views to embrace the Nazi cause. Yet her espousal of Nazism was not simply opportunistic. Before Hitler came to power she told Frick of her admiration for the National Socialists. In July 1932, following that first breathless encounter with Hitler, she wrote of the explosive political situation: ‘there is great agitation here at the Nietzsche Archive, because all the men of the Archive have associated themselves so much with the Hitler movement, as I have too.’ Kessler had already noted that ‘inside the Archive everyone, from the doorkeeper to the director, is a Nazi …’. Elisabeth’s enthusiasm for Hitler was little short of hysterical, eclipsing even the lavish praise she had heaped on Mussolini. But it was not just hyperbole. Elisabeth found in Hitler an idol, another object of veneration, a new Superman.
On 30 January 1933, Max Oehler, Elisabeth’s cousin and head of the Archive and now a committed Nazi, made an entry in his diary which is ringed in red and blue crayon and surrounded by exclamation marks: ‘Hitler in power!!’ Three days later Elisabeth wrote to Frick:
A wave of joyous enthusiasm is coursing through Germany, because the beloved Führer, Adolf Hitler, is now at the head of the German Reich; German Nationalists and Stahlhelm [two right-wing parties] are included in this joyful flood. This is a situation which hearts of national sensitivity have dreamed of and there are not sufficient words to describe the deep impression made by the Führer’s superb action in taking German Nationalists and Stahlhelm into the Reich cabinet. But I have a particular reason to be filled with happiness, for I think of you as a good friend, and am proud that you have become Reich Minister of the Interior and also delighted that my concern, the Nietzsche Archive, is under your special care. My constant anxiety is that I may die and leave the Nietzsche Archive in strange hands. But I can now look happily into the future, for not only have all Germany’s economic needs been smoothed away, but now also cultural concerns are being taken over by a Reich government that has a heart for it.
To Thiel she talked of the ‘wonderful, indeed phenomenal personality of our magnificent Chancellor Adolf Hitler’. She even used the new Führer’s rhetoric: ‘We have suddenly achieved the one Germany … which we have all been waiting for: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer.’ These are not the extravagant ravings of senility, they are the effusions of a believer.
Less than a fortnight after the Nazis came to power, Elisabeth met the Führer again, at a performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Hitler’s enthusiasm for Wagner’s music had already turned Bayreuth into a centre for Nazi propaganda with the willing connivance of Wagner’s heirs; now he and his ‘cultural advisers’ turned to Elisabeth Nietzsche and Weimar, and she welcomed them with open arms. On the same day as the performance, Hitler came to Villa Silberblick. It was to be the first well-publicised visit of many, as the Nazis contrived, with Elisabeth’s help, to entwine the tendrils of Nazism around Nietzsche’s name.
Harry Kessler, who said he felt like weeping to see what had become of Nietzsche and was shortly to leave Germany for exile in Paris, was not the only person whose gorge rose as Elisabeth paid court to the Nazis. Dr Fritz Rütishauser, a Swiss democrat and member of the board of the Nietzsche Archive, wrote to Elisabeth from Switzerland soon after Hitler’s first visit, appalled at events in Germany and their effect on Nietzsche’s name: ‘It is becoming ever clearer that the land of poets and thinkers, this great people, is becoming a phalanx to fight everything that is not völkisch – a place where people are set upon in the streets … that Nietzsche’s name is associated with these events is evidence of the deep turmoil in the German spirit.’ Elisabeth justified herself to him with customary vigour:
We are very happy at Nietzsche’s adoption by Mussolini and Hitler … you can’t understand it because you do not live in our country. If you were here you would understand … The Nietzsche Archive has become a centre not only of the German Reich, but of the whole intellectual world. I could tell you so many good things: our splendid Führer has visited me three times in eleven months, and he is the most honourable man you can imagine. If my brother had ever met Hitler his greatest wish would have been fulfilled. It amazes me that in these unintellectual times such a hero can still emerge. He will change Germany completely, but we must be patient … what I like most about Hitler is his simplicity and naturalness, and he wants nothing for himself but thinks only of Germany. I admire him utterly.
Rütishauser replied, regretfully severing links with Elisabeth for ever. ‘A trip to Weimar is, for me, like a trip to the Holy Land. But the new political orientation has become an ideology. You and the Archive are taking part in this event, and adhering to that ideology. The development is dreadful, and I oppose it.’
Even her old Jewish protector, Ernest Thiel, was belatedly beginning to have doubts. ‘Yes, Elisabeth, you are living in a great time’, he replied to one of her more effusive protestations of Hitler-worship, but added, ‘you make no culture through a police force … both Nietzsche and I belong to a different culture’. Elisabeth was no stranger to criticism and was adept at ignoring it. If Dr Rütishauser, Kessler and Thiel disagreed with her, then they were wrong. She wrote long, adoring letters to the Führer, repeatedly urging him to visit her in Weimar. And, since the propaganda value of Nietzsche as a Nazi prophet was immense, he accepted no less than seven times. He was photographed staring avidly into the eyes of Nietzsche’s bust, apparently deep in reverential thought, or poring over copies of Nietzsche’s works in the Archive; on every visit, children would line the road to the Archive and present the Führer with flowers before he paid homage to the philosopher’s sister. Elisabeth happily connived at the propagandising: on 2 November 1933 she presented Hitler with Nietzsche’s walking stick and, even more symbolically, with a copy of the anti-Semitic petition that Bernhard Förster had presented to Bismarck in 1880. If Hitler had taken the trouble to read it, he would have found sentiments which prefigured his own.
Max Oehler described in lavish detail each of Hitler’s visits: the result was pure grist to the Nazi propaganda mill, such as this account of July 1934:
The Statesman comes to the house of the leading philosopher of the state; he comes not as a politician visiting a philosopher, but as a well-intentioned visitor making a personal and friendly call on the ‘sister’ who has now reached such advanced years and whose unparalleled loyalty we have to thank for the consciousness of our new aims.
So, in the olden days, might a great mother have greeted her great son, so might a prophet have received a hero, and a great man the holy flame of a watchful priestess … Hitler spake – and we can still hear the quiet and admirable tone of his voice – of Mussolini: He is a completely great and powerful man. He has not followed his genius for his own sake, but he must make his people completely powerful. He is a Roman from days long past. Hitler moved on to the subject of our own boys and girls, as simple and serious as a father with his own children … Frau Förster-Nietzsche took the opportunity to speak. She thanked Hitler for honouring with his affection the two geniuses of Weimar and Bayreuth, who were of equal birth and whose friendship made in the stars had lasted beyond a later falling out which had been preordained. How above all else, he was putting everything to right and joining together what was opposed only in appearance. She compared her own hard task with that of Cosima: to protect the inheritance of a genius and to fulfil it despite difficulties that only the bravest could overcome.
The Führer then spoke meaningfully. In misfortune, misunderstanding and even in evil, fate finds its way for the best, and he considered that it was fortunate for himself and us that Wagner and Nietzsche had been kept apart to preserve their purity. The leader of the Archive now explained, in her lively, inimitable style, about Tribschen and Bayreuth and of those great days which are certainly in store for us, amid much serious but also light-hearted talk … the circle around them became lively in his great presence and he told how he had found in her a worthy follower. It was, as Cosima had once explained, the most important moment in German history after Goethe, when Wagner, with Nietzsche in the carriage, had driven to lay the foundation stone at Bayreuth, so that in that half-hour young Germany had found the most profound expression of German unity, which has been achieved so recently.
No one who saw it will ever forget how the man to whom the whole world looks with the liveliest interest took his immortal leave of the elegant old lady as they both stood in the bright sunlight.
In Hitler’s wake, the tribe of moral cripples and pseudo-academics that made up the thinking part of the Nazi Party trooped to Weimar to pay homage.
Hans Frank, the Nazi Party’s leading jurist, Hitler’s personal lawyer and later the sadistic Governor General of Poland, flattered Elisabeth after their first meeting: ‘both personally and objectively’, he wrote, as Reich Commissar for Justice, ‘it is of importance to me that Nietzsche of all people has become the mentor of German jurisprudence’. Frank, of course, was rather more interested in eliminating the Jews than in Nietzsche’s notions of justice. In 1940 he told his troops: ‘… in one year I can do away with neither all the lice nor all the Jews … but in the course of time that will be made attainable.’ If that could be achieved more effectively by twisting Nietzsche and then hiding behind him, so much the better. In May 1934, Frank had visited the Archive in the company of Alfred Rosenberg, a German Balt of vicious anti-Semitic inclinations with a large appetite but little aptitude for intellectual activity. As editor of the Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, he, along with Frick and Frank, had played a vital role in the early days of Nazism. Hitler was impressed by his ‘great intellect’ and made him the theoretician of Nazi racism and head of cultural propaganda, although he later fell from favour. His book The Myth of the Twentieth Century helped to form the Nazi view of culture and history. It was his opinion that ‘German post-war art is that of mestizos laying claim to the licence of depicting bastard excrescences, the products of syphilitic minds and painterly infantilism’. As part of Nietzsche’s ninetieth-birthday celebrations, he had a wreath bearing the words ‘To the Great Fighter’ laid on Nietzsche’s grave. (Never mind that Nietzsche’s great mind was itself, in all probability, syphilitic.) The Volkischer Beobachter carried an official tribute: ‘We honour Friedrich Nietzsche … who called us, and still calls us, to arms, to the arms of the German spirit and to service in the spirit of German arms, to the tragic-heroic soldierdom of the whole nation.’ In the grip of a man like Rosenberg, Nietzsche’s philosophy was doomed. In 1933 a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, perhaps the most poetic work of anti-dogmatism ever penned, was laid in the vault of the Tannenburg memorial to the German victory over Russia in the First World War; alongside it were placed Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century.
As Elisabeth observed to Margarethe Frick, wife of Wilhelm, ‘Hitler and the party prove that it is not just academics who show an interest in Nietzsche.’ It was an unintentional admission that the National Socialist approach was anything but scholarly. Any careful (or even careless) reading of Nietzsche would have revealed his loathing of anti-Semitism and of nationalism and his scorn for the German Reich, facts which Nietzsche’s newest disciples conveniently ignored, or perverted by quoting out of context. It was Nietzsche’s language, his myth-spinning martial exhortations and his celebration of strength that appealed to the Nazis; the rest they ignored. The fascists, in fact, fulfilled Nietzsche’s dictum about ‘the worst readers … who behave like plundering troops: they take away the few things they can use …’. As Elisabeth did herself. In a paper entitled ‘Was Nietzsche a National Socialist?’ she spoke of his ‘passionate patriotism’ and stressed that Nietzsche had been a soldier himself in the Franco-Prussian war. By quoting him out of context, and partially, she implied anti-Semitism in his writing where there is none. She concluded that ‘Nietzsche had always seen very clearly how alien Jewish behaviour has been in Germany.’
The effect of all this on Nietzsche’s reception both inside Germany and elsewhere can be gauged by the fact that for two decades after the war Nietzsche’s name was philosophical mud. Bertrand Russell suggested he was ‘merely megalomaniac’, a hilltop Lear, impotent and dangerous, a prophet of the police state. The war against fascism safely won, Russell could state that ‘his followers have had their innings, but we may hope that it is rapidly coming to an end’. That was in 1946. Nietzsche was accused of inciting genocide in the preceding years. George Lichtheim wrote: ‘It is not too much to say that but for Nietzsche the SS – Hitler’s shock troops and the core of the whole movement – would have lacked the inspiration to carry out their programmes of mass murder in eastern Europe’ – though Nietzsche always claimed to be Polish. Even P. G. Wodehouse’s excellent Jeeves cannot find a good word for him. Nietzsche, he tells Bertie Wooster, is ‘fundamentally unsound’. This must be one of the few occasions on which Jeeves is demonstrably wrong. Nietzsche was an elitist conservative; he opposed equally democracy and socialism, though both democrats and socialists have claimed him as their own. He demolished the traditional values of humanism and championed the right to greatness in individuals, couched in Platonic terms, in the face of mass mediocrity. His works do not support Nazism, or anything like it, and Nietzsche himself, I feel certain, would have looked with horror on what was done in his name. He opposed German nationalism and every mass movement; he distrusted ideologues; and he loathed anti-Semitism. He criticised Judaism, certainly, but with the same criteria that he used to attack Christianity; the Jews, he said, were responsible for bringing Christianity, ‘the lie of millennia’, into being in the first place. That was not racism; on the contrary, he looked forward to the ‘great task and question [which] is approaching: how shall the earth as a whole be governed? And to what end shall man as a whole – and no longer as a people or race – be raised and trained?’ The Jews, he said, were ‘beyond doubt the strongest, toughest and purest race at present living in Europe. The Jews could, if they wanted – or if they were compelled as the anti-Semites seem to want – even now predominate, indeed quite literally rule over Europe [this is where the Nazi citation tended to stop, but he continues] … that they are not planning and working towards that is equally certain … it would perhaps be a good idea to eject the anti-Semitic ranters from the country.’ If he had heard Bertrand Russell’s understandably facile remarks, he would have surely reiterated what he wrote in Ecce Homo: ‘I have a duty against which my habits, even more the pride of my instincts, revolt at bottom – namely to say: Hear me! for I am such and such a person. Above all, do not mistake me for someone else.’
Elisabeth’s support of the Nazi cause brought material as well as personal satisfaction to the old woman. Early in 1934 she received a letter from Hans Heinrich Lammers, the Führer’s secretary. ‘The Chancellor of the Reich’, it said, ‘has felt moved to recognise your great service in maintaining and spreading the life-work of your brother, who will be for ever famous, who is so perpetually significant for our Fatherland and the world, and therefore grants you for your lifetime an honorary stipend of 300 Reichsmarks a month.’ Given that she was almost ninety, this was hardly a long-term financial commitment, but it was followed, just over a year later, by another act of Nazi munificence. The Führer gave orders that 2,000 Reichmarks should be transferred immediately to the Archive, and moreover that his own ‘special fund’ was ‘always gladly at the disposal of Frau Förster-Nietzsche’.
Suddenly, she was bombarded with letters from the victims of her new patrons, urging her to intercede with the National Socialists on their behalf. Most of these were Jewish: schoolteachers, journalists, composers, civil servants, artists, all of whom had lost their jobs and livelihoods under the Nazi’s discriminatory legislation. Some are pathetic in their wheedling flattery; many are heart-rending. ‘I am not an Aryan’, wrote a journalist, Rudolf K. Goldschmit, ‘I was a volunteer in 1914 but now non-Aryans have to give up all activities in the press. This would be the destruction of my life. Can you send some word to Frick and Goebbels on my behalf, then I could get on to the list of accepted journalists…?’
In some instances Elisabeth did try to intercede, if the supplicant was sufficiently important or culturally recognised, like the sculptor Richard Engelmann. Elisabeth’s snobbery had always been even stronger than her anti-Semitism. She even wrote to Lammers on behalf of Ernst Praetorius, a celebrated Wagnerite composer now reduced to driving a taxi in Berlin. But she was far more concerned with the fate of Schulpforta, Nietzsche’s old school, which was threatened with closure after a sex scandal. She was relieved when Lammers told her it was to become a National Socialist school: ‘I’m so glad this is happening … I’m looking forward to this new future for the school, because I perceive that the pupils will be educated in the image of our splendid Reich. It will remain a school for the elite, nothing could be better than that.’ Among the begging letters she received at this time is one from a schoolteacher called Schmid, a Jew, who had been sacked from Schulpforta under the new laws to ‘cleanse’ the civil service – laws for which Elisabeth’s friend Wilhelm Frick was largely responsible. ‘I will be sacked now because of the law’, he told her; ‘even former pupils have said they are appalled at my sacking’. There is no evidence that Elisabeth tried to help him. She gloried in her new-found political influence. ‘I am now the good old lady of Weimar’, she told Frick proudly, ‘receiving all the problems of everyone around because I know, indeed I am a friend of Frick. Everyone knows that.’
Everyone included the inhabitants of New Germany, Paraguay. Elisabeth’s interest in the colony had been rekindled by the news that the situation had improved there; she started to take a renewed interest in its future, particularly when the principles on which it had been founded were apparently coming to fruition in Germany itself. She often used to regale her friends and associates with stories of colonial life in Paraguay and, recalled Kessler, ‘of the atrocities performed under the Lopez dictatorship, tales that sounded as if recounted by Hudson or Cunningham Grahame [sic].’ To Kessler’s annoyance, she claimed that her nationalism was the result of being an ‘expatriate German’, though she had left Paraguay more than three decades earlier: ‘Painful to hear such nonsense from Nietzsche’s sister in the environment of the Nietzsche Archive.’ Through the German Consulate in Asunción, and correspondence with chosen protéges, the Ercks, the schoolteachers, and even Fritz Neumann, the son of her former enemy, Elisabeth kept a watchful eye on the colony, her rediscovered ‘adopted child’.
The boom brought about by Fritz Neumann’s discovery of yerba cultivation had been short-lived. He had been too generous with the secret method of germination, and yerba plantations began to spring up everywhere, not just in Paraguay but also in Argentina and Bolivia. Still hampered by inadequate communications and isolation, New German yerba soon lost its corner of the market and the settlement swiftly lapsed back into economic torpor. In 1929 Elisabeth had received a discouraging report from the German Consulate. Exports of yerba had dwindled, and the demand from Argentina was negligible.
Three years earlier, a young, nationalistic German schoolteacher called Cornelie Nürnberg had arrived in the colony, filled with determination to revive the settlement’s flagging geist, though the school in the colony had been closed for two years. She found the colony in a ‘miserable state’. A tiny house of just two rooms, one of which she slept in, served as the school. There were, in addition, four benches, one slate, one table, two chairs, some mouldy pictures and a map. To remind themselves of Germany and German culture the original settlers, now considerably outnumbered by their descendants, sang old German folk songs. The children spoke only German and had been brought up strictly under a primitive patriarchal system at home; they were disciplined severely and taught to work for their parents. But they had a clear idea of their German Fatherland, Fräulein Nürnberg recounted, ‘with which they associated everything that was good, happy and great on earth’. Their greatest joy was to hear their schoolteacher tell stories about Germany, about German life, German schoolchildren, German winter and Christmas. On the rare occasions that the Paraguayan authorities visited the school, she would make the children sing the Paraguayan national anthem.
Normally, of course, they sang the German one and flew the Prussian flag on every special occasion.
On her return to Germany in 1928, Cornelie Nürnberg had found Elisabeth keen to use her influence to help the struggling colonists. She persuaded the Foreign Office to pay for another teacher, Alfred Meyer, a fascist in the making, and a man after Elisabeth’s heart. In 1930, Fritz Neumann the younger had sent a letter which described the colony as a knot of beleaguered Germans, their German values surviving against all the odds. It was the sort of heroic image so beloved of Elisabeth. ‘The colony’, he wrote, ‘can be very proud that, although it is still so small, it has not disappeared over the last fifty years. While it is a desperate place, the colony can still claim some fame as a centre of true Germanness, even though it is so small.’
The German Consulate reported that under Meyer the school was making good progress; when the schoolteacher wrote to ask for copies of Nietzsche’s works (‘though I believe the works of your husband might find a larger audience’), Elisabeth promptly complied. If she couldn’t build New Germany in person, she would do it by proxy. It was a blow when Meyer wrote again from Argentina to tell Elisabeth that he had decided to leave New Germany. In the harsh, unhealthy conditions at the settlement, his young son had simultaneously contracted malaria, paratyphoid and colic, and Meyer had decided to take up a teaching post in more hospitable climes. He was happy, he said, to ‘remain true to the service of foreign Germanness’ by teaching in South America, but he yearned ‘for Germany, where finally my like-minded compatriots and comrades are in government’. ‘I feel most disloyal’, he grovelled to his sharp-tongued patroness, ‘but I have the consolation that I have made a foundation on which others can build … I implore you not to be angry. Please understand and write me a few friendly lines to assure me of your understanding and forgiveness.’
In July 1933 Elisabeth wrote again to the German Consulate inquiring about the ‘cultural health’ of her colony. The reply was not immediately encouraging: some of the settlers were doing reasonably well and ‘old Fritz Neumann is living in reasonable circumstances. The younger generation had managed a few profitable yerba harvests, but they are all suffering because of falling prices. Obviously no one has saved any money, so they have to struggle to survive and thus their spiritual interests are rather neglected.’ Spiritual and cultural interests meant only one thing: the Nazification of Germans living abroad. It was a central tenet of Nazi thinking that the huge numbers of expatriate Germans should be incorporated into the National Socialist fold. The first Nazi Party outside Germany was established in Paraguay and the Hotel del Lago in San Bernadino, where Förster had killed himself half a century earlier, became a centre for Nazi meetings. The Nazis canvassed for support in South America with almost the same energy as in Germany, and with the undisguised backing of the embassies. The German pastor of Asunción, Carlos Richert, under orders from the Evangelical Church in Berlin, travelled the country spreading Nazi propaganda. When he appeared in New Germany, with a portable film projector on which he showed his propaganda films, the settlers were first amazed and then enthusiastic. Elisabeth was delighted when Fritz Neumann reported that the Nazi doctrine had been well received by the colonists. ‘It is a great pleasure to hear that the National Socialist Party is strong in the colony’, she wrote. ‘One day they will all become National Socialists. Our wonderful Chancellor Adolf Hitler is such a splendid gift from heaven that Germany cannot be grateful enough.’
The historical link between events in Germany and a tiny colony in the middle of the Paraguayan jungle did not go unnoticed by the German authorities: the Volksbund für das Deutschtum in Ausland (a sort of Nazi British Council) wrote to Elisabeth with the news that it intended to commemorate the main passion in her husband’s life by publishing an article detailing ‘the enmity of the Jews that Herr Bernhard Förster exposed’; the grave where he lay buried in San Bernadino was tidied up and fresh flowers planted around it. There was even talk of setting up a memorial to the fallen martyr in the anti-Semitic struggle. Elisabeth began to receive letters from people she had never met describing her husband as a national hero. One such arrived just before Christmas 1934, from a Frau Böckel, containing a poem which she said her husband had written back in 1889 about Bernhard Förster. The poem ended, ‘May God give the German people many such men.’ The Nazi Party plainly agreed. One afternoon in 1934 the German schoolchildren of San Bernadino were rounded up by their teachers and amid much excitement were taken to the cemetery overlooking the lake. A large package had arrived from Germany on Hitler’s orders, containing real German soil, something very few of the inhabitants of San Bernadino ever expected to see. Ceremonially it was strewn over Bernhard Förster’s grave, while the children sang.
Elisabeth wrote to the Consulate offering to intercede with the new government to alleviate the poverty of New Germany: ‘I want to help the colony. I know Frick, so if there is a problem just let me know.’ When it came to it, the colonists were too proud and too patriotic to accept the Reich’s handouts. One of the colonists, Martin Schmidt, had become an energetic Nazi and later tried to enlist younger settlers to go and fight for a country they had never seen. He spread the rumour that the Führer would send a submarine to Buenos Aires to fetch them if there was a war. Despite the fact that plunging prices had left the colony almost destitute, Schmidt later wrote on the colony’s behalf: ‘Because of the Reich’s foreign debts’, he said, ‘we don’t want to add more of a burden by asking for money … but from private people we would accept gifts and perhaps books because we want to make our children understand
the Germany of today, the Reich of Adolf Hitler and his aims.’ Cornelie Nürnberg thought this reflected the pride of the settlers, who were determined to stay whatever the cost; but their refusal to accept money also showed the ‘dull inflexibility of their minds, which the idealistic founders must also have had to overcome’.
Elisabeth quickly convinced herself that she enjoyed not only Hitler’s admiration and his economic protection, but his friendship as well. She sent him a birthday card and a copy of her new book, Nietzsche and the Women of His Times, with a handwritten dedication; when she injured her arm by falling downstairs one day, late in 1933, she sent him a long letter describing the circumstances of the accident and asking him to visit. Hitler obliged, and Elisabeth was embarrassed that with her arm in a sling she was unable to give him the correct Nazi salute. She then sent him a series of letters detailing the progress of her recovery.
While she treated the Führer to the minutiae of her medical condition, she continued to shower praise on Mussolini; when he narrowly escaped assassination she wrote ‘in admiration, veneration and with deepest joy at his deliverance’. When her two political idols met on 14 June 1934 in Venice, Elisabeth sent a telegram suggesting that ‘the spirit of Nietzsche hovers over this meeting of the two greatest statesmen of Europe’. Mussolini and Hitler were far more concerned with the immediate problem of defusing the political situation in Austria than with the finer (or less fine) points of Nietzschean thought; yet both took the trouble to reply, confirming that, yes indeed, they had sensed the spirit of the great philosopher above them. Hitler later told Elisabeth that as the two leaders sailed down the Lido together they had discussed her and her sterling work in her brother’s name. It probably wasn’t true, but Elisabeth was deeply flattered. The little bourgeois girl from Naumburg, with the provincial Saxon accent that would not go away (after she gave a radio talk in Weimar, she was complimented on her speaking voice; in fact, an actress had been brought in to cover the embarrassing country tones), was still a praiseworthy subject for the most powerful men in the world. By 1935, her ego was in better shape than it had ever been in all the eighty-nine years it had gradually expanded. Her body, however, was less robust, though she still hurtled around the Archive bullying her staff with scarcely diminished energy.
In June she had to go into an eye clinic in Jena for a cataract operation. As usual, she assumed that the Führer of all Germany, busy as he might be, would nonetheless want to know the details of his friend’s health. She wrote:
In my long time of suffering, waiting impatiently for the return of my sight, I had to keep myself in inactivity which is not part of my nature (and took all my strength) and this strength I found for myself in your wonderful book Mein Kampf, which I had, of course, already read years ago, but which now I could study thoroughly as if for the first time. [It was, presumably, read to her.] Those wonderfully and deeply strong perceptions and insights into the new creation of the German character took hold of me, so that I would advise anyone who is an invalid to sink themselves into the individual chapters of this wonderful book and to find there strength and courage to oppose the trials of fate.
With these words of heartfelt thanks, my deeply revered Führer, I sign myself, yours, in deepest respect and admiration, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
Hitler responded by visiting her again, this time in the company of Albert Speer, the Nazi architect. To mark the official adoption of Nietzsche by the Nazi Party, Hitler had decided, he told Elisabeth, to order the construction of a Nietzsche memorial and auditorium adjoining Villa Silberblick. It was to contain a vast conference hall, with busts of the philosopher and a library for the writings of both brother and sister – an ugly parody of the Nietzsche memorial Kessler, now in exile, had once planned. Hitler diverted 50,000 Reichmarks from his personal fund for the project. Elisabeth, though frail after her operation, was overjoyed; ‘one cannot but love this great magnificent man’, she wrote of Hitler, ‘if one knows him as well as I do’.
Her own Machiavellian talents never alerted her to the same skills in others. Elisabeth believed that she and the Führer thought as one, and she saw genuine respect in the attention lavished on her by the Nazis. That was not the impression gained by others. Speer later recalled: ‘We went to Nietzsche’s house where his sister Frau Förster-Nietzsche was expecting Hitler. This solitary eccentric woman obviously could not get anywhere with Hitler; an oddly shallow conversation at cross-purposes ensued. The principal purpose of the meeting, however, was settled to the satisfaction of all parties; Hitler undertook to finance an annexe to the old Nietzsche house and Frau Förster-Nietzsche was willing to have Schultze-Naumburg [one of the prime architectural exponents of so-called National Socialist Realism] design it.’ She was sad, she told Hitler, that her brother could not share her deep joy at his ‘enormous interest in Nietzsche’s works’.
At the beginning of November 1935 a bout of flu confined her to her bed, but she continued to dictate letters at her old rate. On the 8th Max Oehler noted that she seemed to have thrown off the infection and had got up. But in the afternoon, she felt a little weak and decided to take a nap. She felt much better, she said, and would take her dinner in bed. The housekeeper, Frau Blankenhahn, brought the meal to her room at 7.00 p.m. Elisabeth had tried to get up, but had fallen back on the bed, where she now lay dead, fully clothed.
The Führer, Rosenberg, Frick and Fritz Sauckel, the Gauleiter of Thuringia, were informed immediately. Hitler was in Munich, celebrating the anniversary of the 1923 Putsch; a state memorial service, he said, should be arranged for the 11th, which he would attend. Six hundred death notices were sent from Villa Silberblick, and letters of commiseration poured in: from leading members of the Nazi Party, from Mussolini and, several weeks later, from the colonists of New Germany. As Elisabeth lay in state in the downstairs room of the Archive, surrounded by flowers, the staff frantically arranged the funeral.
By 1.00 p.m. on the day itself, a Nazi guard of honour – the SA, the SS, the Hitler Youth – lined the street leading up the hill to Villa Silberblick; behind them crowded the people of Weimar. In the garden of the Villa, SS officers bore wreaths, while the photographers milled around. Every prominent Nazi had been invited to attend, and many did, including Baldur von Schirach, leader of the Hitler Youth, and Winifred Wagner – the Welsh-born wife of Cosima’s son Siegfried and a keen Nazi sympathiser. Goebbels had flu, but sent his regrets and a wreath, as did Frick, whom work confined to Berlin. At 3.00 p.m. Hitler’s car drew up and he inspected the guard of honour before entering the building and taking a seat at the foot of the coffin, flanked by Fritz Sauckel on one side and the President of Thuringia on the other. A Palestrina Mass was played. When the music stopped, the packed room fell silent.
‘You could see from the Führer’s face,’ noted Oehler, ‘how deeply moved he was. He hardly uttered a word.’ It says something for Hitler’s acting talents that he could produce crocodile tears for a woman he had needed rather than liked and whose brother’s works he had almost certainly never read.
Fritz Sauckel had been chosen to read the funeral oration. He was, perhaps, an appropriate choice. An ex-sailor and factory worker of minimal intellect, Sauckel was distinguished only by his slavish adherence to Nazi doctrine and by his devotion to Hitler. It is probably safe to assume that he could not spell Nietzsche, let alone understand him. (Later he would become Plenipotentiary General for Labour Mobilisation, and an honorary general of the SS. It was Sauckel who was responsible, under Albert Speer, for organising slave labour in the Third Reich, for the transportation of foreigners to Germany and the extermination of Jewish workers in Poland.) On behalf of the government, the party, the whole of National Socialist Germany and the Third Reich, he gave thanks to the deceased, ‘the fearless, determined and motivated guardian of a great German genius’. He compared her to the woman she had modelled herself on for fifty years. ‘Who has not been struck,’ he asked, ‘by the wonderful character of this woman (and here we think of Bayreuth), who has used her energy in the fight to create a true German master, and who had cemented a friendship with the single-minded Frau Cosima Wagner? Our German people should be eternally happy to praise this noble and magnificent woman in the same breath as the greatest statesmen, heroes, generals and the most powerful creators of culture.’ He promised that the Nazis would protect and for ever be grateful to her for the important intellectual legacy she had preserved.
Finally he turned to Hitler. ‘You have, mein Fiihrer, spoken to us with great respect and admiration of this great German woman, whom eternal providence has gathered to join her incomparable brother the searcher for truth, the prophet of the struggle, the exalted and heroic Friedrich Nietzsche.’ Hitler rose and placed his own laurel wreath on the coffin. A special truck had to be used to carry the wreaths and flowers to the graveyard at Röcken, and storm troopers lined the roadside. Above the Nietzsche family graves, the little church was draped with swastikas. A nephew of Bernhard Förster spoke a few words over the coffin.
Nietzsche had been buried next to his father and brother. An exactly matching gravestone had been prepared for Elisabeth, and she had taken the precaution of leaving a space between Nietzsche and her father for herself, a position where the eye was immediately drawn to it. At least one person, who knew her personally and whose mother attended the funeral, believes Elisabeth had to move Nietzsche’s gravestone about four feet to the left to make room for herself. If this is so, the stone which supposedly marks Elisabeth’s grave actually stands over that of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Elisabeth had not lived to see the Nazis declare war on Europe, finally smashing Nietzsche’s ideal of European solidarity, or their glorification of a Reich that Nietzsche wanted to ‘sew up in a metal jacket’. She did not see the Nazi programme of mass Jewish extermination, those people whom Nietzsche had lauded as the most robust and useful race on earth. But perhaps she would not have objected. She would certainly have delighted in the monster of Nazi architecture which arose beside the Nietzsche Archive, bearing the inscription ‘In memory of Friedrich Nietzsche, built in the 6th year of the Third Reich under the direction of Adolf Hitler’. Officially opened on 3 August 1938, the final memorial consisted of a ninety-metre high central hall (which was never completed) to house the busts of sixteen thinkers and mystics who had influenced Nietzsche’s development, a reception room, formal terrace and research institute, as well as a library with glass cases containing a variety of Nietzscheana. One newspaper stated: ‘One cannot but feel melancholy and bitterness at the memory of the attempts to stifle the passionate writings of the great upholder of values, Friedrich Nietzsche. The compensation for a terrible wrong is represented by those pictures in the Nietzsche Archive, which show the repeated visits to this house of Adolf Hitler, Führer and best of Germans, as well as a picture of the Duce, Mussolini, which he personally gave to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.’ The building is now a radio station.
The Nazis had found it hard to choose the appropriate statue to commemorate the great philosopher; Mussolini finally sent a replica statue of Dionysus, the classical god whom Nietzsche had used as a symbol of his philosophy. Max Oehler, Elisabeth’s faithful Nazi henchman, drove to collect it from Weimar station, as British bombers battered the city with explosives in 1943. Two years later, when the Red Army marched into the city, both Max Oehler and the statue disappeared. Dionysus eventually reappeared in a Berlin museum. Max Oehler never did.
Elisabeth had written about Nietzsche’s love of Weimar in his last years, even though he was already insane when she first brought him there. ‘How he rejoiced every day’, she wrote, ‘in the beautiful view over Weimar and towards the lights on the Ettersberg hills, always repeating, “This now is Weimar.’” It was in those Ettersberg hills, facing the house where Nietzsche died and where Elisabeth resurrected him as a myth, that the Nazis built the concentration camp of Buchenwald.
On 16 October 1946, four men whom Elisabeth had considered her friends were executed in the gymnasium of Nuremberg jail. They died within half an hour of each other. Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi intellectual, was the first to hang, which he did defiantly and without a word. When Hans Frank, the butcher of Poland, was led to the gallows he pleaded with his newly discovered Catholic God for mercy. Wilhelm Frick, Elisabeth’s protector, the dour, dowdy Nazi bureaucrat, died next, aged sixty-nine. ‘Long live eternal Germany’, he said, before he dropped through the trap. Fritz Sauckel, the Gauleiter of Thuringia and organiser of Nazi slave labour, the man who had been chosen by Hitler to read the funeral oration over Elisabeth’s coffin, was the last of the four to die. The prosecutor at Nuremberg had called him ‘the greatest and cruellest slaver since the Pharaohs of Egypt’. It was rather a grand description for such a pitiful and profoundly dense man. (In IQ tests carried out on the Nuremberg defendants, only two of the leading Nazis were found to be less intelligent than him.) Sauckel was defiant. ‘I am dying innocent!’ he bellowed from the platform. ‘The sentence is wrong. God protect Germany and make Germany great again. Long live Germany!’
The long shadow of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche had touched the judicial proceedings at Nuremberg. In the course of the trial, the French prosecutor had stated: ‘If it is certain that the higher races should exterminate the people considered subordinate and decadent, the people who are incapable of living as they are supposed to, then which method of extermination will be shied away from?’ This was, he said, ‘the morality of immorality, the result of Nietzsche’s purest teaching, which regards the destruction of any conventional moral as the highest duty of man’.
There were some notable gaps in the ranks of the Nuremberg war criminals. Martin Bormann, the man usually to be found at Hitler’s right hand, was tried and sentenced to death in absentia. But he was never caught and the sentence was never carried out; it was often rumoured that he had disguised himself as a priest and, like Adolf Eichmann, instrument of the Final Solution, and Josef Mengele, the Auschwitz doctor, had headed for the anonymity of South America.
See notes on Chapter VIII: Mother Of The Fatherland