Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche: Ben Macintyre's book is highly recommended.
Quote: >In 1886 Elisabeth Nietzsche, sister of the famous philosopher, and friend of Richard Wagner, traveled with her husband, Bernhard Forster, and a select group of blond-haired, blue-eyed Germans to the remote Paraguayan wilderness to found an Aryan colony she called Nueva Germania. In Forgotten Fatherland Ben Macintyre tracks down the descendants of this early racial experiment, still living in Nueva Germania and breeding among themselves. Many have maintained the language, customs, and ideals that first brought their ancestors over from Europe more than one hundred years ago. But Elisabeth Nietzsche's story does not end in Paraguay. A supremely dominating woman, she returned to Europe to take control of both her brother and his work until his death, and beyond. It was she who largely wrote Nietzsche's posthumous "masterwork", The Will to Power; invested Nietzsche with her own proto-Nazi views; and invented and organized the semi-mythical cult of his philosophy, projecting it into the new order emerging in war-torn Europe. Admirer of Mussolini, mentor to Hitler, she died just before the outbreak of the Second World War and was given a full Nazi funeral, attended by a tearful Fuhrer. Forgotten Fatherland re-creates the bizarre history and atmosphere of Nueva Germania, and contains startling revelations about the last days of Josef Mengele. A remarkable work of investigative journalism, shot through with Waughian wit, Forgotten Fatherland will necessitate major reevaluations of the life and posthumous reputation of one of the most influential thinkers of the nineteenth century, and provides an illuminating portrait of a woman whose influence on the history of the twentieth century can onlynow be fully understood.<
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posted by johannes,
Friday, December 31, 2004
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