Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche
Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Förster-Nietzsche (10 July 1846 – 8 November 1935) was the sister of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the creator of the Nietzsche Archive in 1894. Förster-Nietzsche was two years younger than her brother. Their father was a Lutheran pastor in the German village of Röcken bei Lützen.
Also recorded as Elisabeth Nietzsche
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche
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- Name
- Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche
- Birth Name
- Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Nietzsche
- Born
- 10 July 1846
- Birthplace
- Röcken, Province of Saxony, Prussia
- Died
- 8 November 1935
- Place of death
- Weimar, Nazi Germany
- Known for
- * Sister of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche
- Spouse
- Bernhard Förster
- Full name
- Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Nietzsche.
- Nationality
- Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire and Nazi Germany.
- Occupation
- archivist, literary executor, politician and writer.
- Languages
- German.
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Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Förster-Nietzsche (10 July 1846 – 8 November 1935) was the sister of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the creator of the Nietzsche Archive in 1894. Förster-Nietzsche was two years younger than her brother. Their father was a Lutheran pastor in the German village of Röcken bei Lützen.
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wikidata · Q77377 · wikipedia · Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche
In this article
Biography
Biography
The two children were close during their childhood and early adult years. However, they grew apart in 1885, when Förster-Nietzsche married Bernhard Förster, a former high school teacher who had become a prominent German nationalist and antisemite. Nietzsche did not attend their wedding. Förster-Nietzsche and her husband created an unsuccessful colony, Nueva Germania, in Paraguay in 1887. Her husband committed suicide in 1889. Förster-Nietzsche continued to run the colony until she returned to Germany in 1893 where she found her brother to be an invalid whose published writings were beginning to be read and discussed throughout Europe. Adolf Hitler attended her funeral in 1935. In the 1950s, it was claimed by Nietzsche's new editors and translators such as Walter Kaufmann that Nietzsche's work had been edited by Förster-Nietzsche to highlight racist and eugenicist themes, but this account has been the subject of debate in recent scholarship. An alternative theory exonerates Förster-Nietzsche and places the distortion of Nietzsche's works in the hands of the Nazis themselves.
Key facts
Key facts
• Name — Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche • Birth Name — Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Nietzsche • Born — 10 July 1846 • Birthplace — Röcken, Province of Saxony, Prussia • Died — 8 November 1935 • Place of death — Weimar, Nazi Germany • Known for — * Sister of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche • Founder of Nueva Germania • Political Party — German National People's Party • Spouse — Bernhard Förster • Parents — * Carl Ludwig Nietzsche • Franziska Nietzsche
Early life
Early life
• Illustration — Elisabeth Nietzsche Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Nietzsche was born in 1846 to Carl Ludwig Nietzsche and Franziska Nietzsche (née Oehler). She was named after three sisters whom her father had tutored: Princess Therese, Princess Elisabeth, and Princess Alexandra of Saxe-Altenburg. Carl Ludwig was a Lutheran pastor in the German village of Röcken bei Lützen. Franziska was a rustic. Carl Ludwig died in 1849. Franziska had no prospects and her husband's pension was insufficient. She chose to rely on the charity of Carl Ludwig's mother, Erdmuthe, and the more distinguished prospects which she could open for the children. When remembering her early life, Förster-Nietzsche would suggest that they may have cried a lot. Friedrich and Förster-Nietzsche were close during their childhood and early adult years. In 1864, she suggested "that she join him in the new manner of free-thinking he had adopted." He replied that, if she wanted to follow him "into higher intellectual realms" she would have to choose between "views about the world, God, and atonement held by family and society, and the difficult, convention-defying search for truth." Nietzsche took to calling her "Llama" throughout their lives because he felt that the description of the load bearing, saliva spitting, stubborn animal fit her well.
Nueva Germania
Nueva Germania
Bernhard Förster planned to create a settlement in the New World and had found a site in Paraguay which he thought would be suitable. The couple persuaded fourteen German families to join them in the colony, to be called Nueva Germania, and the group left Germany for South America on 15 February 1887. The colony did not thrive. The German methods of farming were not suitable to the land, illness ran rampant, and transportation to the colony was slow and difficult. Faced with mounting debts, Förster committed suicide by poisoning on 3 June 1889. Four years later, Förster-Nietzsche left the colony forever and returned to Germany. The colony still exists as a district of the San Pedro department.
Affiliation with the Nazi Party
Affiliation with the Nazi Party
The common account presented by Nietzsche editors and translators in the 1950s was that in 1930, Förster-Nietzsche, a German nationalist and antisemite, became a supporter of the Nazi Party and, as has been traditionally claimed, that she falsified Nietzsche's work to make it a better fit to Nazi ideology. This narrative is now disputed by recent scholarship, which argues that Elisabeth's motivation in selectively editing Nietzsche's works was primarily intended to protect her brother from criticism and to present herself as being close to him. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nietzsche Archive received financial support and publicity from the government, in return for which Förster-Nietzsche bestowed her brother's considerable prestige on the regime. Förster-Nietzsche's funeral in 1935 was attended by Hitler and several high-ranking German officials. Despite such close connections, she never became a member of the Nazi Party; she joined the German National People's Party in 1918.
Life and career
Dated record
Life and career
The full dated record · 2 entries
1846
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche born at Röcken.
1935
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche died at Weimar.
Places
Named by the record
Places
Only places the record itself states, plotted where the house gazetteer settles their coordinates. Nothing is inferred from a name or a nationality.
Röcken.
Birth place
Weimar.
Death place
Publications
• Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches, 3 Bände ("The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche", 3 volumes; Vol. I: 1895, Vol. II/1: 1897, Vol. II/2: 1904) • Das Nietzsche-Archiv, seine Freunde und seine Feinde ("The Nietzsche Archive, His Friends and His Enemies", 1907) • Das Leben Friedrich Nietzsches, 2 Bände ("The Life of Friedrich Nietzsche", 2 volumes); • Bd. 1: Der junge Nietzsche ("Vol. 1: The Young Nietzsche", 1912) • Bd. 2: Der einsame Nietzsche ("Vol. 2: The Lonely Nietzsche", 1914) • Wagner und Nietzsche zur Zeit ihrer Freundschaft ("Wagner and Nietzsche at the Time of their Friendship", 1915) • Nietzsche und sein Werk ("Nietzsche and His Work", 1928; edited with Henri Lichtenberger) • Friedrich Nietzsche und die Frauen seiner Zeit ("Friedrich Nietzsche and the Women of His Time", 1935) *
Nietzsche Archive
• Illustration — Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, 1910, Louis Held. Friedrich Nietzsche's mental collapse occurred in 1889 (he died in 1900), and upon Elisabeth's return in 1893 she found him an invalid whose published writings were beginning to be read and discussed throughout Europe. Förster-Nietzsche took a leading role in promoting her brother, especially through the publication of a collection of Nietzsche's fragments under the name of The Will to Power.
Nobel Prize in Literature
For Förster-Nietzsche's collective work on the Nietzsche archives, she was eventually nominated four times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. • Illustration — Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Edvard Munch, 1906. She was first nominated in 1908 by German philosopher Hans Vaihinger of Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. The Nobel Committee acknowledge the significance of her nomination and the publication of a comprehensive biography of her brother, Friedrich, to which they commented: "It contains a wealth of material for knowledge of Nietzsche's life and development, but is reasonably uncritical and anecdotal and partly extremely biased towards Nietzsche and partly biased very biased towards people who have been displeasing to the author." In 1916, she was nominated jointly be Vaihinger and Harald Hjärne, a member of the Swedish Academy. In the deliberations, Nobel Committee member Per Hallström expressed that Furthermore, Hallström noted that Vaihinger's proposal "seems to be primarily concerned with awarding the prize to the Nietzsche archive in Weimar." The Swedish Academy though has the authority to award a Nobel Prize to any institution or association', in this case there is hardly any reason to do so. In 1917, she was nominated once again by Vaihinger but the Nobel Committee immediately put her name aside, commenting: "Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche should also now, as [we] advised last year, be left aside, because her purely literary merits, whatever one may think of her activities for the preservation of her brother's memory, are not of any higher order." In 1923, Förster-Nietzsche received her last of the four Nobel nominations from classical philologist Georg Goetz, professor of German literature Ernst Bertram, historian Kurt Breysig and philosopher Hans Vaihinger. Upon receiving the recommendation, the Nobel Committee immediately withdrew her name in creating their shortlist, commenting that "this proposal, which probably originated rather from admiration and piety for Nietzsche, than from an every-higher appreciation for her sister's beautiful biography of him, has not been considered to be worthy of recommendation, – now as before." • Illustration — Nietzsche and Elisabeth in 1899.
Notes from the source article
Cited by Wikipedia
Notes from the source article
These works are cited by the source article, in its own numbering. They are recorded as its citations, not as sources VALÉORINE has verified.
- 1.Diethe, Carol. Nietzsche's Sister and the Will to Power. University of Illinois Press. xii. 2003.
- 2.Gray, John. Anti-Education by Friedrich Nietzsche review – why mainstream culture, not the universities, is doing our best thinking. The Guardian. 8 January 2016. 0261-3077.
- 3.Holub, Robert C. Nietzsche's Jewish Problem. Princeton University Press. 20–26. 2016. 9780691167558.
- 4.Leiter, Brian. Nietzsche's Hatred of "Jew Hatred". The New Rambler Review of Books. 21 December 2015.
- 5.Mandel, Siegfried (1998). Nietzsche & the Jews: Exaltation & Denigration. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, pp. 39-40. (The quotations are Mandel's paraphrases.)
- 6.Prideaux, Sue. I Am Dynamite! : A Life of Nietzsche. Tim Duggan Books. 20, 261–262. 2018. 978-1-5247-6082-3.
- 7.The colony "Nueva Germania" in Paraguay. Deutsche Welle dw.com. 9 April 2020.
- 8.Martin Heidegger, 1930s courses on Nietzsche (parts of which have been published under the name Nietzsche I (1936-1939), ed. B. Schillbach, 1996, XIV, 596p. and Nietzsche II (1939-1946), ed. B. Schillbach, 1997, VIII, 454p. – note that these publications are not the exact transcription of the 1930s courses, but were done post-war), and Mazzino Montinari, 1974 (Montinari made the first complete edition of Nietzsche's posthumous fragments, respecting chronological orders, whilst Elisabeth Förster's edition was partial, incomplete and arbitrarily ordered, as Heidegger had already noted. Montinari's edition has provided the basis for all further scholarship on Nietzsche's work).
- 9.Nomination archive – Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. nobelprize.org. 21 May 2024.
- 10.Svensén, Bo. Nobelpriset i litteratur. Nomineringar och utlåtanden 1901–1950. Svenska Akademien. 2001. 978-91-1-301007-6.
- 11.Wroe, David. 'Criminal' manipulation of Nietzsche by sister to make him look anti-Semitic. The Daily Telegraph. 19 January 2010.
- 12.University of Illinois Press. Nietzsche's Sister and the Will to Power: A Biography of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. International Nietzsche Studies. July 2007.
Bibliography printed in the source article · 2
- Diethe, Carol, Nietzsche's Sister and the Will to Power, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. (A biography of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche)
- Macintyre, Ben, Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1992.
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