Friedrich Nietzsche was a pale, crabby hermit who sat in a cheap Swiss boarding house peering beyond good and evil and demanding, at the top of his apocalyptic voice, the rearing of a daemonically driven breed of superman. Just when the world began to get wind of his prophetic fulminations, he went mad. For the last tragic eleven years of his life, he was a myth—and so he has remained. Out of that myth Hitler's propaganda made him the philosopher of Naziism in World War II.
Last week the talk of literary Germany was a Darmstadt professor's painstakingly documented debunking of that myth. The crude myth of the racist Nietzsche, argued Professor Karl Schlechta in his new edition of the seer's works, was the consciously perpetrated fraud of his sister, guardian and sole literary executrix, the late Frau Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche.
Elisabeth, a smug and righteous climber, happened to be visiting her brother Friedrich when he fell in with Richard Wagner. Before long Friedrich was telling Wagner to his outraged face that he thought Bizet's operas better ("Bizet's music does not sweat," explained Nietzsche). But his dumpy little sister fell hard for the antiSemitic, Valhalla-first rantings that her brother Friedrich dismissed as Wagnerian idiosyncrasies. She took up with a Wagnerian camp follower named Bernhard Forster, who organized Germany's first anti-Jewish mass meetings and rounded up 267,000 signatures for his appeal to Bismarck to register all German Jews and bar them from key jobs. When Nietzsche found out that Forster's outfit was quoting some of his own diatribes against the values held sacred since Greek and Jewish times, he was furious at what he considered misappropriation of his views: "This damned anti-Semitism!" he wrote a friend. "It is the reason for the abrupt break with my sister." And to another: "I will not be associated with anybody who has any part in this lying race-swindle." Elisabeth married Forster and went off with him to Paraguay to start a "Nueva Germania" of 100% blue-eyed, red-bearded Teutons. The colony flopped. Forster committed suicide, and Elisabeth bounced back to Europe just in time to take care of Friedrich. who had suddenly and finally collapsed in 1889.
Hitler's Author. Calling herself Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, she sued for and got all her brother's manuscripts. Forthwith, she grandiosely renamed her family home the Nietzsche Archive, where she exhibited Nietzsche, white-gowned and empty-eyed, to teatime guests. But she allowed no one else a look at the manuscripts, put together her brother's last writings in a volume that she entitled The Will to Power. This is the book which pan-Germans and Nazis acclaimed as "Nietzsche's crowning philosophical work . . . the most important philosophical system of the 19th century."