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A smaller band of Nietzscheans led by Novelist Thomas Mann acclaimed the Nietzsche of Thus Spake Zarathustra, the prophet-poet who looked piercingly about his Victorian world and pronounced all its accepted truths a sham. But his sister zealously vaunted her status as the Nietzsche Archive's high priestess, fostered the myth she had largely created, lived to transmit her priestess' blessing to Mussolini and Hitler. Nietzsche, Hitler proclaimed, was "the pioneer of National Socialism."
Finally gaining access to the Nietzsche papers after the death of this jealous keeper in 1935, Professor Schlechta has worked ever since over the last writings. His definitive editing downgrades The Will to Power to what he found it to be, a series of notebook jottings in no way coordinated or assembled and never intended for publication in such schematic form or under such a title. Stripping the notes of Elisabeth's gratuitously added chapter headings and subtitles, he lists them as they were written, along with thousands of other jottings that Elisabeth saw fit to omit because they did not suit her distorting purpose.
Everybody's Ancestor. Schlechta was able to prove what scholars have long suspected, that Elisabeth suppressed letters in which Nietzsche spoke ill of her and forged others to prove her authority as her brother's only trusted interpreter. Nietzsche wrote many affectionate letters to his mother; Elisabeth dropped ink blots on the word "Mother" and published the letters as if addressed to herself. Schlechta also spotted other frauds with the help of a pack of notebooks that Elisabeth had hidden under attic eaves (Nietzsche had a habit of drafting letters to friends in his notebooks before sending them). The only copies extant of Nietzsche letters saying, "You are the only person I trust absolutely," and "You are such a good friend and helper," were in Elisabeth's own hand; on these she had written that the originals were "later lost" or "burned by our dear mother." In all, Schlechta traced about 30 forged letters.
In Western Germany the impact of Schlechta's findings was instant. Said Hamburg's newspaper Die Welt: "A new Nietzsche dates from this edition." In Schlechta's interpretation, Nietzsche's "will to power" emerges not (or not alone) as man's will to mastery over other men, but as his will to a sort of excellence or virtue in his own inner being. Far from upholding Deutschland-über-Alles traditions of Germanic superiority, this Nietzsche is the elite-minded aristocrat who wrote scornfully of his countrymen: "The Germans are responsible for the neurosis called nationalism from which Europe suffers." To Schlechta and his colleagues, the new Nietzsche is the seer whose volcanic revulsion against what James Gibbons Huneker once called the Seven Deadly Virtues furnished existentialists of modern France and Germany with much of their original inspiration, and whose evocations of the darker side of human consciousness lighted the way to some of the first insights of Freud and psychoanalysis.
Freed at last from the clutches of his sister and her racist friends, Nietzsche may find his place in Germany and Europe not as a national but as a universal ancestor of a troubled age.