Nietzsche's Sister and the Will to Power: A Biography of Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche (International Nietzsche Studies) Carol Diethe ISBN: 0252028260 Format: Hardcover, 214pp Pub. Date: June 2003 Publisher: University of Illinois Press Series: International Nietzsche Studies

IN HIS WRITINGS, Friedrich Nietzsche dreamed of deporting and, in one instance, shooting all of Germany's "anti-Semitic screamers." One can only imagine how vitriolic his hatred of Adolf Hitler would have been. But Nietzsche's philosophy was shoehorned into the Nazi jackboot nonetheless--the credit for which belongs in large part to Nietzsche's younger sister, Elisabeth. Upon her brother's mental and physical collapse in 1889, she appointed herself sole executor of his literary estate and seized his extensive unpublished writings (as well as his pension and royalties).

Though Nietzsche died in 1900, Elisabeth worked tirelessly to create the myth that he was the intellectual godfather of National Socialism. She doctored his writings, created phony letters, and published them in her numerous books about Nietzsche's life and ideas. She cobbled together several hundred disparate notes and aphorisms into The Will to Power, a book she claimed represented her brother's true philosophic system. In 1914, Elisabeth wrote that the most vigorous supporter of the fatherland would have been her brother (the same brother who wrote that even hearing Germany's national anthem made him feel ill). When Elisabeth began hobnobbing with Hitler in the early 1930s, her brother's legacy became guilty by association.

Because she hoarded Nietzsche's writings, however, no one could authoritatively challenge Elisabeth until years after her death in 1935. Much scholarly elbow grease was needed to debunk "the Nietzsche legend," and one wonders what can ...