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Notorious Lives

Richard Walther Darré

Adolf Hitler

Benito Mussolini

Winifred Wagner.

Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche

by John F. Gamber Jr.

Editor of the works of Friedrich Nietzsche

Cause of notoriety: Förster-Nietzsche made accessible the work and ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche to individuals and groups who used it as the justification of nefarious ends, most notably the Nazis. She also established a racist and anti-Semitic colony in Paraguay with her husband, Bernhard Förster.

Active: 1897-1935

Locale: Germany

Early Life

The second child of the devoted Lutheran minister Carl Ludwig Nietzsche and his wife Franziska, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (FOOR-stehr NEE-tchah) received little in the way of education. Following the death of her father in 1849, Elisabeth and her brother Friedrich—who would become the famous philosopher—became extremely close as Franziska increasingly focused her religious zeal on her two children. Elisabeth kept house for her brother while he was a professor at the University of Basel (1869-1879), since he was often too ill to take care of himself. However, the two siblings split following what Friedrich characterized as Elisabeth’s meddling in his relationship with Russian intellectual Lou von Salomé, which led to a severing of the romance.

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.

ph_0111226686-Forster_Nietzsche.jpg

Prior to this, Elisabeth had become friends with German composer Richard Wagner and his wife and thus began her practice of making important friends. She met Bernhard Förster at Wagner’s home in Bayreuth, Germany, in 1870, and the two were married in 1885. It was with Förster that Elisabeth would later found the colony called New Germany in Paraguay, South America.

New Germany was founded on racist, anti-Semitic, and vegetarian principles. Elisabeth’s brother Friedrich condemned the move, predicting that it would destroy both of the Försters. He was partially correct. The colony struggled, and in 1889 Bernhard Förster died—most likely by suicide—and Elisabeth fled creditors and the suspicious colonists to return to Germany. She had heard that her brother had gone mad and wanted to see for herself if this rumor was true. In fact, Friedrich had suffered a mental breakdown in 1889.

Literary Career

Elisabeth’s literary career really began when her mother died in 1897, leaving Elisabeth in control of her brother’s substantial literary estate. She got to work immediately in making the incapacitated Friedrich say and think what she wanted. While she did care for her brother from the onset of his illness until his death in 1900, some maintain it was in order to reap the benefits of Nietzsche’s literary output, a bounty that Friedrich was himself far too ill to enjoy.

While at the helm of the Nietzsche Archive, which she founded in Weimar, Elisabeth changed Nietzsche’s words to suit her purposes, ignored what contradicted her beliefs, and at times stooped to outright forgery. As Nietzsche’s popularity rose, the Nietzsche that Elisabeth brought forth to his fans was a philosopher largely of her own making. Some of the changes she made to his work were minor: She changed Friedrich’s words when he mentioned her in order to reflect an ongoing affection for her, when he in fact loathed her after his split with Lou von Salomé.

However, Elisabeth also enacted substantial changes in her brother’s work. For example, Nietzsche’s long text Der Wille zur Macht (1901; The Will to Power, 1910) was published by Elisabeth in 1901, a year after her brother’s death. This lucrative volume earned Elisabeth a large sum; however, the book was never intended by her brother to be published. The aphorisms that make up The Will to Power were actually widely scattered and random scribblings from notebooks and essays abandoned by Nietzsche.

Fascists such as Italian leader Benito Mussolini and German leader Adolf Hitler later adopted Nietzsche’s philosophy, or rather, Elisabeth’s interpretation and misrepresentation of Nietzsche’s thoughts. The Nazis in particular were attracted to Nietzsche’s praise of strength, the ideal of the Superman, and Nietzsche’s supposed stressing of the martial spirit. Hitler almost certainly never read a word of Nietzsche’s writings, however, and merely used Nietzsche’s popularity to advance the Nazi cause. The German führer even used Elisabeth’s considerable cultural influence as a propaganda tool, making several well-publicized visits to the Nietzsche Archive and being seated at the foot of Elisabeth’s casket at her funeral in 1935. By that time, she was one of the most culturally famous women in all of Germany.

Impact

Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s deliberate misreading and misrepresentation of her brother’s works led to some of the most nefarious twentieth century individuals adopting Friedrich Nietzsche as the inspiration and philosophical justification for the greatest atrocities of that century. Elisabeth distorted her brother’s philosophy, with which the Nazis used to justify Aryan supremacy and their ensuing war and mass murder.

Nietzsche’s name was sullied in the philosophical community for decades after the end of World War II. Some claimed that the war and the Holocaust would not have been possible were it not for Nietzsche’s dangerous writings, regardless of the fact that there is absolutely nothing in Nietzsche’s work that would support the Nazi cause. Only after the middle of the twentieth century did serious scholarship of Nietzsche return to the philosophical community.

Further Reading

1 

Cate, Curtis. Friedrich Nietzsche. New York: Overlook Press, 2005. A biography of Nietzsche, which provides a better understanding of Förster-Nietzsche, since the two were so close and each played such a crucial role in the fame of the other.

2 

Diethe, Carol. Nietzsche’s Sister and “The Will to Power”: A Biography of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. A biography of Förster-Nietzsche.

3 

Macintyre, Ben. Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1992. Biography of Förster-Nietzsche with emphasis on the period of New Germany in Paraguay.

4 

Peters, H. F. Zarathustra’s Sister: The Case of Elisabeth and Friedrich Nietzsche. New York: Crown, 1977. An account of the intertwined lives of Förster-Nietzsche and her brother Friedrich.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Gamber, John F. "Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche." Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives, edited by Carl L. Bankston III, Salem Press, 2007. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLN_1210.
APA 7th
Gamber, J. F. (2007). Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. In C. L. Bankston III (Ed.), Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Gamber, John F. "Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche." Edited by Carl L. Bankston III. Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2007. Accessed September 17, 2026. online.salempress.com.