Forgotten Fatherland: The True Story of Nietzsche's Sister and Her Lost Aryan Colony

ISBN: 0307886441

Author: Macintyre, Ben

Condition: New

A fascinating, provocative, and highly eccentric volume (The New York Times) exploring the true story of Elisabeth Nietzsches maniacal attempt to found a utopian colony in the jungles of Paraguay in the late nineteenth century-from the bestselling author of Prisoners of the Castle.In 1886, Elisabeth Nietzsche, the bigoted, imperious sister of the famous philosopher, founded a racially pure colony in Paraguay with her husband, anti-Semitic agitator Bernhard Frster, and a band of fair-skinned fellow Germans. More than a century later, Ben Macintyre tracked down the survivors of Nueva Germania to discover the remains of this bizarre colony, and found a strange, tight-lipped people, still interbreeding to the point of genetic deterioration.Digging into recently opened German archives, Macintyre unfolds how Elisabeth, who returned to Germany in 1893, grafted her anti-Semitic, nationalist ideas onto her brothers philosophy, building a mythic cult around him, and how she later became a mentor to Hitler-her stately funeral in 1935 attended by a tearful Fhrer. Laced with mordant irony, Macintyres brilliant piece of investigative journalism explores how the Nazis perverted Friedrich Nietzsches ideas to justify their evil deeds, and unearths a rich and disturbing vein of the twentieth centurys dark history.