Forgotten Fatherland: The True Story of Nietzsche's Sister and Her Lost Aryan Colony (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780307886446)

"A fascinating, provocative, and highly eccentric volume" (The New York Times) exploring the true story of Elisabeth Nietzsche's 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 Fster, 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 brother's 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 F?rer. Laced with mordant irony, Macintyre's brilliant piece of investigative journalism explores how the Nazis perverted Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas to justify their evil deeds, and unearths a rich and disturbing vein of the twentieth century's dark history.

Author: Ben MacIntyre
ISBN-10: 0307886441
ISBN-13: 9780307886446
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group (NY)
Language: English
Published: 04/05/2011
Pages: 320
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.55lbs
Size: 7.95h x 5.19w x 0.70d