Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche

Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche

Ben Macintyre, Cara Shores

Language: English

Pages: 230

ISBN: 2:00186610

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In 1886 Elisabeth Nietzsche, Friedrich's bigoted, imperious sister, founded a 'racially pure' colony in Paraguay together with a band of blond-haired fellow Germans. Over a century later, Ben Macintyre sought out the survivors of Nueva Germania to discover the remains of this bizarre colony. Forgotten Fatherland vividly recounts his arduous adventure locating the survivors, while also tracing the colourful history of Elisabeth's return to Europe, where she inspired the mythical cult of her brother's philosophy and later became a mentor to Hitler. Brilliantly researched and mordantly funny, this is an illuminating portrait of a forgotten people and of a woman whose deep influence on the twentieth century can only now be fully understood.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

namesake grabbed it and rolled off into the inner recesses of the house, laughing heartily. Yolanda I, who appeared to be in charge by virtue of being marginally more obese than her partner, went off to cook, leaving me to sit in front of the house with a warm beer, Bremen again. Antequera seemed to be deserted. In the heavy dusk, an anorexic chicken plucked absent-mindedly at the dirt road around my feet; after about a quarter of an hour, a gloomy-looking cow wandered down the street. I knew

war was won. Fourteen witnesses to the hiding place were executed. By February 1870 Lopez and his ragged army (numbering 409 old men, children and women) were finally surrounded in the woods of Cerro Corá, a few miles from the Brazilian frontier. For several weeks the Brazilians built up their forces for the final assault, and Lopez, too, kept himself busy: he had a special medal designed to commemorate the imminent victory, tried and executed a number of his leading officers and signed a death

the unyielding clay-like earth; some had just moved away, south to Argentina, where the land was more fertile and the life easier. Some had married Paraguayans and adapted to the local way of life. Here in the village, he said, you could see the German genes reflected in the children, whose skin was usually dark, but whose eyes were blue. Other families, mostly German, had moved into the area after the war. But many of the descendants of the original settlers, the fourteen mostly peasant families

thoroughly; he had no wish to make the acquaintance of another Förster, and, indeed, it was almost a decade before the two would meet for the first and only time. In the interim, Förster introduced Elisabeth to a new and exciting set of moral certainties – to an ideology she never lost. Förster had fought in the Franco-Prussian war in which he had won the Iron Cross, and on his return to Berlin had taken up schoolteaching. But he believed he was destined for better things and thought he had

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

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