Significant Others - Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

Friedrich Nietzsche spent the final years of his life incapacitated by illness while his sister bent his works to her use as a social-climbing fascist.Starring Laura Ramoso as Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and Flula Borg as Friedrich Nietzsche.Also featuring Matt Gourley, Jessica Chaffin, and Anja Albertson. Source List:Nietzsche’s Sister and the Will to Power by Carol Diethe, First Illinois Paperback, ©2007, ©2003 by the Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisI Am Dynamite!, by Sue Prideaux, ©2018, Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of The Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New YorkIn Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World, ©2022 by Nate Anderson, WW Norton & CoThe Making of Frederich Nietzsche: The Quest For Identity 1844-1869By Daniel Blue , ©2016, University Printing House, Cambridge CB2, 8BS United KingdomThe Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols And Other Writingsby Frederich Nietzsche, Edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith NormanCambridge University Press, ©2005Haaretz, Was Nietzsche Hitler’s Spiritual Godfather?Big Think, How the Nazis Hijacked Nietzsche, and How it Can Happen to AnybodyThe Guardian, Far Right, Misogynist, Humorless? Why Nietzsche is MisunderstoodThe Nietzsche Channel, Nietzsche’s Writings as a StudentStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Friedrich NietzscheThe New York Times, Rocken Journal, No Superman, Perhaps, but the Titan of his Townhttps://www.philosophizethis.org/Cambridge University Press, Friedrich NietzschePhilosophize This!London Review of Books, It Wasn’t Him, It Was HerBritannica, Return from Exile of Richard Wagner

Welcome to Significant Others, a podcast that takes a look at the less familiar side of history. I'm Liza Powell O'Brien, and today we're asking the question, how did a fiercely anti-nationalist thinker become a favored tool for fascists and Nazis? Thanks to his beloved sister, who appropriated his work, forged his letters, lied about his childhood, and was, in some circles, believed to have been his incestuous lover. This time, on Significant Others, meet Elizabeth Forster Nietzsche. In 1951, a book was published under the name Friedrich Nietzsche that confesses to an incestuous love affair between himself and his sister.

It took decades to uncover the truth, or at least part of it, which was that the book was definitely not written by Friedrich Nietzsche. The exact authorship has yet to be confirmed, so just know that if you do happen to pick up a used copy of it somewhere, it should definitely be read as fiction. But that author was not the only fabricator of truths about Nietzsche, nor really was he the most egregious. Nietzsche's sister Elizabeth committed far worse crimes against the historical record. She wrote multiple biographies of her brother,

in which she took endless liberties with the facts. It took years to dismantle her lies, so the bottom line is that even if you think you know the story of Friedrich Nietzsche and his sister Elizabeth, you might be wrong. The Nietzsches were a devoutly Christian, proudly nationalist, and determinedly royalist family. Friedrich was named for the king of Prussia, and Elizabeth, born a couple of years later, was named for the three royal princesses who their father, Pastor Karl Ludwig, had once tutored. They lived with their father's mother and his two sisters in the parish house, surrounded

by lush grounds the children loved to explore. At 17, Nietzsche wrote, Here I lived in the happy circle of my family, untouched by the wide world beyond. The village and its immediate environs were my world, the everything beyond it an unknown, magical region. world, the everything beyond it, an unknown, magical region. At fourteen, he had written, Harmony and peace reigned over every roof, wild events entirely absent. But when Friedrich was almost four and Elisabeth two, just around the time that their younger brother Josef was born, My beloved father suddenly became mentally ill.

Karl Ludwig Nietzsche developed a condition that caused vicious headaches, vomiting, seizures, and eventual blindness and loss of speech. The teenaged Friedrich looked back on this period and wrote, The increasing suffering of my father, his blindness, his haggard face and figure, my mother's tears, the doctor's portentous mien, and also the incautious remarks of some villagers must have given me a sense of impending doom. Less than a year later, before baby Yosef's first birthday, their 35-year-old father was gone.

The official diagnosis was softening of the brain. An autopsy later revealed that one quarter of it had in fact disappeared. This event would shape everything that was to come. Carl Ludwig had been a pretty big deal, both as the local pastor and a highly talented musician. Folks would travel miles to hear him improvise on the piano, a skill his famous son inherited. He was not only the spiritual centerpiece of the region, but also the only man in the immediate family. His death brought not just sadness and longing, but a loss of income, status, and housing.

And then, before they had even moved out of the parish house, another shock arrived. Yet when our wounds had only just begun to heal, a new event painfully tore them open. Little Yosef suddenly fell ill, seized by severe cramps, and after a few hours he died. The tiny corpse was laid to rest in his father's arms. In this double misfortune, God in heaven was our sole consolation and protection. our sole consolation and protection. Baby Yosef died of a stroke before his second birthday,

after suffering a series of seizures, and this second tragedy compounded the first. The resulting material and emotional void drove their mother Franziska to pour all her energies, religious reverence, sense of duty, love, and need for love—into mothering her two remaining children. Just 23 when her husband died, she never married again, choosing instead to devote her life to serving her husband's religious legacy. And so Friedrich and Elizabeth grew up in a house where women ran everything, but men remained at the center, even if they were dead or, you know, divine. Friedrich, as the man-to-be, became the sun around which everyone else's planets could orbit, and he was groomed as a kind of living shrine to his father, or, as Nietzsche perceived it himself, a continuation of him. In the last book he wrote, Ece Homo, Nietzsche referred wryly to his incomparable

father and how he had felt condemned to live in echo of that man's existence. My father died when he was 36 years old. My life went downhill the same year as his. I kept on living, but without being able to see three steps ahead of me. I am just my father once again, and, as it were, a continuation of his life after his all-too-early death. Carl Ludwig, man of God that he was, got conflated, as time passed in the Nietzsche house, with the Holy Father himself, which only amped up Franziska's commitment to religious observance

and set Friedrich even more surely on a course to rebel against it. Elizabeth, meanwhile, was set on a course to be the one thing German women of her time could aspire to be. As dictated by the convention of the time, she concluded her studies after her confirmation at age 14. But she did go on to attend finishing school, where she did well in languages, especially French. Her brother encouraged her always to keep learning, sending books to her and recommending that she audit courses at the local university. But he moaned to their mother about her writing style. If only she could learn to write better. Then when she narrates something,

she must leave out all the R's and O's. That trademark cheesy style didn't stop Elizabeth from writing a short novel as an adult, which was mostly a takedown of her brother's love object at the time. And it actually came in handy later for historians who were trying to untangle the truth of Nietzsche's life from his sister's fictions. But mostly, Elizabeth spent her time as a teen trying to become good marriage material, perfecting the art of pencil drawing and writing letters to her dear brother at boarding school in her exercise

book. Translation. But then, goodbye, my dear brother. Have the goodness to call me soon. Your affectionate sister. Translation. What a pity you weren't with us. So then, farewell, my dear brother. Have the goodness to write me back soon. Your affectionate sister. Friedrich and Elisabeth were close. They had shared a bedroom and largely been each other's only playmates.

Tragedy had bonded them even further. He called her the llama in honor of both her loyalty and her stubbornness. And she, like her mother, treated him as a legend in the making. Both women saved pretty much every scrap of paper he ever touched. When Elizabeth learned he was leaving for school at the age of 13. She was bereft. I, the poor llama, felt myself exceedingly badly used by fate. I refused to take any food and laid myself down in the dust to die. Friedrich had his own separation anxiety, but excitement overrode it. After all, this wasn't just any school. It was the Schupforte, the most prestigious

academy in Germany. He had been obsessed with the place for years, writing in his diary at age 10, Forte, Forte, I dream only of Forte. The students' rigorous daily schedule began at 4 a.m. when all the doors were simultaneously unlocked, as in a prison. At 5.25 a.m., they had prayers and breakfast. Lessons began at 6. And by 9 p.m., the doors once again clanged shut for the night. Nietzsche was desperately homesick there, but also he was sick-sick, suffering from headaches that lasted for days, nausea, and ears that leaked pus. This wasn't new for him, but it also wasn't getting any better.

And it certainly didn't make school an easy place to be. The infirmary did their best to treat him by regularly applying leeches to his head and neck, which was gross and ultimately useless. He was told he would likely go blind, which he eventually did, and he had to wear tinted glasses all the time to protect his vision. Athletically ungifted, precociously intelligent, somewhat odd, and sporting shady-looking eyewear, he was not exactly big man on campus. But he did shine at the piano, where he impressed everyone with his improvisational abilities. He was, in almost every way, following right in his sainted father's footsteps. Except for one thing, Friedrich Nietzsche was beginning to doubt everything. When he first arrived at the academy,

Nietzsche was unfailingly devout and pledged himself completely to God. By the time he graduated a few years later, he had begun to rebel, if only intellectually, alarming his teachers by aligning himself with anti-nationalist thinkers and portraying mankind in his fiction as a walking question mark. He was beginning to build for himself a concept of humans as individual creatures of crisis rather than potentially perfectible cogs in the German state machine. In doing this, he was taking his first steps on a path that diverged so completely from his family's, it would ultimately lead him to write a book called The Antichrist, call religion a narcotic art based on slave morality, and proclaim the death of God entirely.

God is dead, wrote Nietzsche in 1882. His mother and sister were horrified, if for slightly different reasons, but none of this was new for any of them. By this point, his mother had already told him he was a disgrace to his dead father, his sister had ghosted him, and he had moved house and forbidden friends from to his dead father, his sister had ghosted him, and he had moved house and forbidden friends from sharing his new address with his family. I cannot stand them any longer. I wish I had broken with them earlier. The first sign of trouble came in 1865 when he went home for Easter but refused to take communion. He wrote to his sister then,

If what you want is peace of soul and happiness, then believe. If you want to be a disciple of truth, then seek. But Elizabeth found herself intellectually unable to undo her religious training. When she tried to consider atheism, she said, I am completely confused and prefer not to think about it because I just come up with nonsense. As Nietzsche's faith wavered, Elizabeth fretted over what it would do to her marriage prospects. Franziska did what many devout mothers do. She tried to guilt trip him back into the fold. She sent him religious blessings, reminders, and at one point, a large oil portrait of the Madonna. But even as she annoyed him, her unconditional love was hard to quit. I mean,

no one else really liked his attempts at composing music. And besides, where else is a single guy supposed to find free domestic help if not by hitting up his adoring mother and sister? But adoring doesn't really even begin to describe the relationship between Friedrich and Elisabeth when they reached adulthood. Each of them tried to be rid of the other for good at various points, but in the end, they were bound together for better and worse even more than if they had been married. This was part of the condition Nietzsche called chainsickness,

which he saw as a universal human trait, and he would suffer from it on and off his whole life. The first real break between the siblings came in 1878 with the publication of Human, All Too Human, the book in which Nietzsche calls Christian faith a mistake. Dedicated to Voltaire, the patron saint of free thought, the text was out of step with mainstream German society, and Elizabeth feared it would render her socially untouchable by association. She had been caring for her brother on and off for nearly two years by that point, while he chaired the philology department at the University of Basel.

But when she was unable to keep him from publishing the book, she dropped him and glommed on to a pair of his besties instead, Uber celebrities Richard and Cosima Wagner. As noted by biographer Sue Pridot, Nietzsche wrote about Wagner more than any other individual, including Christ. Music had always spoken to Nietzsche in ways that nothing else could. As a toddler, he threw temper tantrums that could only be soothed by his father's playing the piano. When he discovered Wagner's work as a teen,

the man became a god to him. All things considered, my youth would have been intolerable without Wagner's music. Wagner was at the height of his fame and artistic power when Nietzsche entered his family circle. Although, maybe circle is too simple a shape to describe the Wagner family situation at the time. This is a bit of a digression, but it's a juicy one, so bear with me. Wagner's wife, Cosima, one of the illegitimate daughters of megastar Franz Liszt, had originally been married to Wagner's conductor, Hansima, one of the illegitimate daughters of megastar Franz Liszt, had originally been married to Wagner's conductor, Hans von Bulow, who she wed as a teenager when she and the much older von Bulow were both in a sort of post-operatic refractory phase.

But they were not a good match. Cosima's marriage to von Bulow was so unhappy, she tried repeatedly to catch a fatal disease and even once begged a friend to kill her. Her affair with Wagner was happier and more fruitful. She bore him two children while still married to von Bulow, but finally, after giving birth to their third child and only son, she asked for and got a divorce. Which is when Nietzsche entered the scene. got a divorce. Which is when Nietzsche entered the scene. Very quickly, the illustrious couple became a sort of surrogate family for him. Nietzsche and Wagner bonded over Schopenhauer, and of course, a shared reverence for Wagner's genius. The composer became a fantasy-level

father figure. Cosima was an intellectually evolved mother figure, a fellow acolyte, was an intellectually evolved mother figure, a fellow acolyte, and an object of the 24-year-old Nietzsche's puppy love. Together, she and Nietzsche worshipped at the shrine of Wagner, went picnicking while the great composer worked, and had fun trying to summon powers of the occult with Nietzsche's passionate piano playing. Frau Cosima Wagner is the noblest nature by far that exists,

and, in relation to me, I have always interpreted her marriage with Wagner as adultery. Nietzsche wrote that in 1888, long after their relationships had fallen apart. But for nearly a decade, he was so enthralled to be in their inner circle, he proudly shopped for Wagner's special silk underpants, even rousing himself once from a debilitating illness to make sure the errand got done. But the Nietzsche-Wagner love affair was ultimately ill-fated. As Nietzsche developed his ideas, he rejected both nationalism and religion and moved far from reverence for the monarchy. Wagner was the king's pet, and his music is like the literal soundtrack

for the glory of both Germany and God. While Nietzsche surrendered his citizenship and pulled up his roots, Wagner was erecting a massive stone hall, complete with marble busts of musical geniuses, including himself, and a grand balcony from which he could address an adoring throng.

It was, he argued, the very least he required. I cannot live like a dog. I cannot sleep on straw and drink common gin. Mine is an intensely irritable, acute and hugely voracious, yet uncommonly delicate and tender sensuality which one way or the other must be flattered if I am to accomplish the cruelly difficult task of creating in my mind As the years passed, Nietzsche found his former idol strikingly nationalist, unforgivably solipsistic, and detestably anti-Semitic.

But Elizabeth, who had ridden her brother's coattails into the Wagner's milieu, and even worked for them one summer as a nanny, remained thrilled to associate with such influential and glamorous people. So when Cosima Wagner wrote to Elizabeth expressing her disapproval of human all too human, it proved to Elizabeth that she was right. The book was a liability, and her brother should never have written or published it. She told him her time as nursemaid and housekeeper was up, she would return to their mother's house in Namburg, and he was on his own. Without his sister's help, Nietzsche could not take care of himself well enough to stay in a house or sustain his professorship.

Her departure kicked off the decade-long period in which he bounced around Europe with his club foot, which was what they called the 229 pounds of books he schlepped everywhere. books he schlepped everywhere. In a series of borrowed rooms, he read, thought, and suffered his migraines alone while writing nearly all his most important works. The second major break between Nietzsche and his sister happened because of a woman. Lou Salome was a free-thinking, free-living, intellectually gifted Russian expat whose list of powerhouse relationships would come to include Rilke and Freud. When Nietzsche and his best friend Paul Ray met her in 1882, they both fell promptly in love. And the three of them proceeded to have a kind of sexless ménage à trois for a while. There's a photo you can look up online in which Salome holds a whip over the two of them

as they pretend to pull a cart for her in a playfully scandalous pose. Don't get too excited, they're all fully clothed. And Salome was unconventional in more unusual and interesting ways. She was a major thinker whose historic impact seems to have been diminished by the possibility of romantic attachment to multiple famous men. She was a world-class flirt for whom the erotic was a field of study, and she cultivated dozens of intimate connections, but she also maintained a marriage for more than 40 years that was never consummated. She is a larger enigma than we can decode here, so for now let's just say that what she was after was not just a shocking domestic arrangement. She called it an intellectual and philosophical holy trinity,

though Nietzsche proposed that a better word might actually be unholy. Nietzsche and Ray both repeatedly proposed marriage to her, including the possibility of a polygamous one that could include all three of them, but she demurred. including the possibility of a polygamous one that could include all three of them, but she demurred. Then came the Bayreuth Festival and the debut of Wagner's new opera, Parsifal. It was the big event of the summer. Lou wanted to go, and Nietzsche had tickets, but only two of them.

How could he use them to impress her without upsetting Ray, their third, who would necessarily be left out. The solution, he decided, was to give the two tickets to Lou and his sister Elizabeth, who wanted to make up for having abandoned him four years earlier. That way, Lou would be going on a Nietzsche-sponsored date, but with someone who posed no threat to their little triangle. Or so he thought. When Lou replied yes to his invitation, he was beyond thrilled. Now the sky above me is bright. The plan was for the two women to attend the festival and then join Nietzsche for a vacation in the country, but the trouble started almost immediately. Elizabeth had always been predisposed toward jealousy of any girl or woman who caught her brother's eye.

And 21-year-old Lou, with her striking Slavic looks, her supple mind, and her brazen freedom from social conventions, could not have been more intimidating to the 37-year-old, single, and parochial Elizabeth Nietzsche. Meanwhile, a nasty rumor was spreading through the festival that Nietzsche's health problems were the result of too much masturbation. This came actually from Wagner himself, who had been so worried by his young friend's illness a few years earlier that he wrote to a doctor friend. I have long been reminded of identical or very similar experiences of young men with a great intellectual ability. Seeing them laid low by similar symptoms, I discovered all too certainly that these were the effects of masturbation. Ever since I observed and closely guided by such experiences, all his traits of temperament and characteristic habits have transformed my fear into conviction. In other words, Wagner subscribed to the once prevalent belief that excessive masturbation

led to loss of eyesight and the doctor was inclined to agree. It took five years for this exchange to leak out. Once it did, Nietzsche's friendship with Wagner was over for good. But at this moment moment it created added interest for the gossips and added anxiety for the status-obsessed Elizabeth. Watching Lou cavort through the festival, flirting seriously with other men, showing off the whip and cart photograph, and acting as if she were trying to destroy her own reputation, Elizabeth couldn't take it. She bailed on Lou, but Nietzsche begged her to keep her plans for the vacation. Elizabeth gave in, but when Lou met up with them in the country,

she happened to be sharing a carriage with none other than Bernard Forster, the man whose eye Elizabeth had been trying to catch for years. Elizabeth had had it with this young hussy. She unleashed on Lou, essentially slut-shaming her and accusing her of sullying the Nietzsche name. Lou laughed in her face. Who started up the mental friendship when he could not get me for something else? Who thought of concubinage? Your noble, pure-minded brother. Men only want one thing, and it is not mental friendship.

Lou went on to say that, regardless, she would be doing no sullying of any kind. I could sleep all night in the same room with him and not feel the least aroused. At which point Elizabeth responded by throwing up. Nija and Lou proceeded to have a profoundly meaningful, if exclusively mental, congress for the next few weeks, while Elizabeth seethed and poured her thoughts into a novelized caricature of her new nemesis, in which she accused her of, among other things, falsely enhancing her breasts. Nietzsche was ecstatic. He thought he had found his alter ego, his sister brain. But as soon as Lou left,

Elizabeth wrote their mother and basically told on him. Franziska lost it. On top of everything he had already done, leaving the church, the anti-Christian books, now he wanted to live in sin with a woman of poor character? He had truly disgraced his father's name and dishonored his grave. Nietzsche wrote his friend Franz Overbeck about what Elizabeth had done. She wrote to my mother. She has seen my philosophy come to life and was shocked. I love evil, but she loves the good. If she were a good Catholic, she would enter a convent and do penance for all the harm that will arise from it. In short, I have Naumburg virtue against me. There is a real break between us.

And even my mother was so far out of her mind that she said something that made me pack my bags and leave early the next morning. It was in this mental space that Nietzsche wrote part one of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, perhaps his most popular work, which posits hope for mankind in a godless world, if only he can be honest and brave enough. Once again, Nietzsche was estranged from his family. But also, he would never see Lou or his friend Ray again. The two skipped town together without a word, leaving Nietzsche crushed and more alone than ever. Into his wound, Elizabeth poured the lie that Ray had told Lou Nietzsche had low intentions and was after more than just her mind. Elizabeth made use of Nietzsche's pain

and resentment to serve her own vendetta, convincing Nietzsche to help her get Lou expelled from Germany and sent back to Russia, though that attempt failed. She made it her mission to split Nietzsche from Ray, who she called the Israelite, for good. In the wake of this betrayal, Nietzsche channeled much of his emotional distress into part two of Zarathustra, after which he resolved to be more accepting of fate as an expression of his own agency. He softened toward Lou and Ray, and instead began to examine his sister's hand in the breakdown of their relationship.

Elizabeth, he realized, had purposefully led him to evil, black feelings. Among them there was a real hatred of my sister, who has cheated me of my best acts of self-conquest for a whole year, so that I have finally become the victim of a relentless desire for vengeance, precisely when my inmost thinking has renounced all schemes of vengeance and punishment. This conflict is bringing me step by step closer to madness. I feel this in the most frightening way.

Perhaps my reconciliation with her was the most fatal step in the whole affair. I now see that this made her believe she was entitled to take revenge on Fräulein Salome. Excuse me! So, Elisabeth was already on thin ice with him. And it was at that moment that their mother implored him to come home right away to talk her out of ruining her life. This precipitated the third major break between the siblings, when Elizabeth finally won the role she had been prepping for her whole life, becoming a bride. Bernard Forster was a proud anti-Semite who Elizabeth had first met in 1876.

Semite who Elizabeth had first met in 1876. She found him handsome and charming and had no problem with his intention to start an Aryan colony outside Germany. After all, her good friends and bona fide fancy people the Wagners were unapologetically anti-Semitic, as were all of their friends. But it wasn't until her falling out with her brother in 1878 that she really made her move. After resigning from her post as Friedrich's nursemaid and majordomo, Elizabeth was sussing out other options. She had stayed in contact with Forster, who was roaming South America looking for a home for his pure race project. And so when Forster mentioned in a letter to Elizabeth

that 5,000 marks would secure a nice plot of land in Paraguay, she offered to send the money to him, plus 800 extra so he could hire himself a servant. Feigning sheepishness, she told him she came with a dowry of 28,000 marks. Can we take a moment here for poor Franziska, who's got one kid off renouncing God and so sick he can't hold a job or take care of himself, and another child who's throwing her lot in with a radical political agitator and racist ideologue who would drag her off the continent completely? Franziska begged Friedrich to come talk sense into his sister, and even though this news made things worse between them,

Elizabeth knew her brother despised Forster and had been actively hiding the fact of their ongoing correspondence from him. Friedrich agreed, for his mother's sake, to try. But it didn't work. And the only thing his homecoming brought about was a chance for the two women in his life to berate him in person for his ideas, his books, his companions, and his lack of religion. So off went Nietzsche to write part three of Zarathustra, and then off went Elizabeth to convince Bernard Forster to marry her, which, in early 1885, he did.

Her brother did not attend the wedding. To her, he wrote, Forgive me for not coming to your wedding. Such a sick philosopher would be a bad person to give away a bride. With a thousand affectionate good wishes, your F. His health had, in fact, gone from bad to worse. In a later letter, however, he clarified his objections directly about the llama who has jumped away from me and gone among the anti-Semites, which is about the most radical method of finishing with me. When the newlyweds arrived in Paraguay, Elizabeth sent word home.

Beloved mother of my heart, on 5th of March we arrived in our magnificent new homeland and made an entry like kings. In fact, it is wonderful here. Everything has a functional and therefore splendid veneer. Our administrator and our clerks are gentlemen and respectable people who are particularly suited to their posts, and one assumes that the colonists are like the clerks. This was pure poppycock. The heat was stifling, the locals were beleaguered, her new home was a shambles, and they didn't have nearly as much money as they needed. But like a social media influencer paid to promote a faulty product, she knew that everything depends on how you frame things. telling you that before I go to sleep, I often lie in bed making calculations and asking myself, how did we actually acquire the money for this magnificent undertaking? God has blessed it.

He has multiplied every mark we had or which loving hearts gave to us or lent into five marks. Otherwise, it cannot be explained. Cruise Line copywriters, take note. This is how you sell a vacation spot. She also began signing her letters Eli Forster, combining her new husband's nickname for her with his surname. Nietzsche found it incredible and not entirely unamusing that these two anti-Semites had chosen as part of their love language a Hebrew word for God. She tried to get her brother to invest in their colony, promising him she would name a plot of

land after him. He countered that instead she should call it llama land. Within a few years, however, the llama was realizing that she had married a bit of a dud. Forster was struggling to make the colony a success, and they were in deep financial trouble. Elizabeth tried to make up for it with a massive letter and article writing campaign to drum up new members from home. Employing the important-sounding sign-off Frau Dr. Forster, she leaned heavily into her propaganda campaign, raving about Paraguay's fertile soil, pleasantly servile natives, and the practically bug-free air, all while knowing the colony was founded on rough, wild, unbreakable land. The mosquitoes were ravenous and carried disease, and no one was happy about the appearance of the colonizers, least of all the native population. of the colonizers, least of all the native population. She fraudulently claimed the colony was a financial success in an attempt to bully members into handing over cash, until finally,

one of them returned to Germany and published a book that told the truth about the colony and its founders. She fought back in print, but it didn't work. She was widely discredited, even as she continued to write letters to her brother that flaunted her imaginary success. Nietzsche, meanwhile, had been discovered by an important Danish critic and was, after a lifetime of toiling in relative obscurity, on the cusp of real success. When he wrote to Elizabeth with the news, she sneered that he just wanted to be famous like her. He wrote a letter in return saying he must sever ties with her forever, but he must have reconsidered because

it was never sent. And rather than being done with her, he was about to enter a period of his life which would end with him relying on her for everything. As time ran out on the Forster's colony, Nietzsche's mind was beginning to fray. In 1889, his poor health finally got the best of him, and he collapsed in a square in Turin, Italy. A psychiatrist diagnosed him with syphilis, though this has been rejected by historians. It's now thought that he might have had a tumor in his brain or some other kind of medical disorder. For a year, he was institutionalized, then released to his mother's care. But his mind was completely gone. When Elizabeth heard from their mother about her brother's collapse,

she of course pointed out how difficult the news was for her. Naturally, I am an excellent wife, when, as usual, I take every burden upon myself with pleasure. The only reward, the success of our enterprise. Never desiring anything for myself, but only ever caring about Bern and the colony. But now, for the past six weeks, I have thought about myself for once. First, I had a painful eye infection and then this great trouble, and I am only now discovering that Berne is a terrible egoist, and that hurts me so much. Like Jesus, when he asked the disciples,

Cannot you watch with me one hour? I want to say, cannot you have some sympathy with what I am suffering and feeling while I only think of you and your work year in, year out? The failure of the Nueva Germania colony ultimately drove Bernard Forster to take his own life, just four years after he and Elizabeth were married. She quickly papered over the truth with tales of a heart attack, just as she would later fabricate whole stories of a mysterious drug that caused her brother's mental collapse. She had always been prone to bending the truth to her will. Her description of the welcome she received in Paraguay reads like a Game of Thrones script, complete with flower maidens and shouts of long live the mother of

the colony. But 1889 marks the beginning of her career as a liar, as she attempts to emerge triumphant from the ashes of a national embarrassment, a personal tragedy, and a brother whose young brilliant life had been ruined by his illness. Arriving home to Namburg, ostensibly to care for her brother but in reality to raise fresh capital for the failed colony, to care for her brother but in reality to raise fresh capital for the failed colony, she wrote articles and books full of propaganda which she signed Eli Forster Nei Nietzsche to re-invoke her maiden name now that her brother was lending it some notoriety. She observed her brother's near incapacitation and heard the inarticulate cries he made at night. She could see he would never be in charge of himself or his work again.

When the four books he had written in the period just before his collapse arrived for the approval of their mother, to whom his estate had reverted, Elizabeth told Franziska to block their publication. The content was simply too blasphemous, and she was bent on cleaning up the family name. But demand for Nietzsche's work was growing, and as soon as Elizabeth realized this, she changed course, elbowing her mother aside to negotiate a lucrative contract for those final works, which, she stipulated, would be paid to her, before heading back to Paraguay to sell her house

and be done with Nueva Germania for good. Once that business was done, she told her mother to demand she return to help care for her brother so as not to appear to be running away. So in 1893, Eli Forster Born Nietzsche returned to Nambg with money in her pocket and a scheme in her sights. The works of Friedrich Nietzsche were finally finding widespread success, just as their author had lost his capacity to comprehend it. But one person's tragic turn of events is another person's opportunity. Dropping the cumbersome Ney from her name, she formally hyphenated it, transforming herself legally to Elizabeth Forster Nietzsche. Launching her new project, she established an official Nietzsche archive inside their mother's home, knocking down a wall on the first floor to make room for all the

material. She also installed small statues of the animals that appeared in Zarathustra so as to enhance the overall theme. She demanded that all of Nietzsche's correspondence turn over all of his letters to her as rightful property of the archive. This, of course, was not only a way of profiting from her brother's work, but manipulating it. She had long ago proven that she saw no value in truth, and she now had everything she needed to fashion a version of events that suited her. Well, almost. Cosima Wagner, who was definitely not going to let Elizabeth Nietzsche tell her what to do, declined to comply. And Franz Overbeck, who was perhaps the closest and most steadfast fixture in Nietzsche's life, and who had exchanged hundreds of letters with him,

refused to give Elizabeth anything. So she sued him. Eventually, she won the right to redact any passages she wanted if the papers were published, and he sent them to the University of Basel for safekeeping. Elizabeth's next move was to write a biography of her brother, which was chock-full of fallacies. Among other things, she lied about their father's manner of death, pinning it to a fall on the stairs rather than an illness of the brain, and the reason for Nietzsche's fallout with Wagner, which she said boiled down to ideological differences, rather than a behind-the-back diagnosis of addiction to self-pleasuring. Her mother, with whom she was fighting at the time,

essentially doesn't appear in the text at all. Franziska said, She is making things up to an extraordinary degree, for I lived through it all too. Franziska didn't like what Elizabeth was up to. She leveraged her brother's rising fame for social capital, holding salons in the archive room while Nietzsche howled upstairs, and occasionally parading guests through to get a view of him. Franziska, aging, frail, and practically illiterate, had almost no recourse against the tornado of will that was her daughter.

They fought constantly, hence her excision from Elizabeth's version of their childhood, but ultimately, Franziska was so desperate to separate her children so as to protect one from the other, that she finally accepted Elizabeth's offer of 30,000 marks in exchange for all the rights and royalties to Nietzsche's work. At least that way, she could afford to move out of the house Elizabeth had colonized and try to care for her ailing son in peace. But just a couple of years later, Franziska died herself, leaving Nietzsche in Elizabeth's care once again. She moved him to a fancier house in a fancier town and continued her practice of pimping him out as a highbrow tourist attraction while living off his royalties and making up reports of his lucidity.

The reality, according to others, was that he was a living corpse lying in a mattress grave, boxed in by heavy furniture so he could not wander, and prone to stuffing shiny objects in his mouth. At night, he would moan and scream wildly, but according to Elizabeth, he was completely clear-minded and able to articulate all the ways in which he was grateful to her. In reality, he died after contracting a cold. In her legend, he died of a sudden stroke and his final word was her name. Elizabeth Forsternich's historical crimes only grew from there. She had a death mask made of her brother and then adjusted it to give him better hair. She threw him an over-the-top funeral which he had expressly

forbidden. She had him interred between his parents, then rethought it and had him dug back up and moved to the end of the row so the middle spot could be hers when the time came. She published a new work he had planned, but expanded it threefold, cramming the text with all the draft material he himself had edited out. For its title, she chose a phrase of his with no apparent clue as to its original meaning. The will to power was Nietzsche's way of describing an individual's life force. Elizabeth, through her editing, gave it the ring of one individual's domination over another. What was meant by him to be a book that critiqued existing systems like Christianity, philosophy, and morality became a collection of aphorisms

with no central design. This only left the contents more vulnerable to further misappropriation. She also continued to publish her own manufactured versions of his life story, work for which she was nominated for the Nobel Prize. She became the unchallengeable authority on the subject of Nietzsche, even though she did not have, by her own admission, the intellectual facility to grasp his ideas, purely because she had squelched all possibility for fact-checking or debate. his work. The will to power became a buzz phrase for pro-war sentiment in Germany in the lead-up to World War I, though Nietzsche himself had become passionately anti-conflict and even anti-statehood after tending the wounded during the Franco-Prussian War in 1872. His word Übermensch, or overman, became a symbol to some of a superior Teutonic specimen, even though Nietzsche rejected the concept of perfection in any form. Elizabeth got cozy with Mussolini, then Hitler, who boldly

misused Nietzschean phrases and concepts without showing proof of ever having read or even entertained the ideas behind them. The Nazi party even seems to have acknowledged that divorcing the phrases from the writings was where they got their usefulness. And for that, they knew exactly who to thank. Hitler sat in the front row at Elizabeth's funeral, but said he couldn't really do much with Nietzsche, that he was not his guide. All of this would have saddened Nietzsche, but it would not have surprised him. I am frightened by the thought of what unqualified and unsuitable people may invoke my authority one day.

Yet that is the torment of every great teacher of mankind. He knows that, given the circumstances and the accidents, he can become a disaster as well as a blessing to mankind. The world is still unraveling some of Elizabeth's myths, even as it continues to misuse her brother's words. It wasn't until the 1960s that Elizabeth's version of the record was properly interrogated and found to be full of invention. And as noted by Nietzsche biographer Sue Prideaux, some leaders of the current alt-right movement claim him as their intellectual North Star. right movement claim him as their intellectual north star. Association with Nazis and anti-Semitism is a sticky affiliation, even if it was unintentional on the author's part.

But Nietzsche knew that in a godless society, morality will be up for grabs. I know my fate. One day there will be associated with my name the recollection of something frightful, of a crisis like no other before on earth, of the profoundest collision of conscience, of a decision evoked against everything that until then had been believed in, demanded, sanctified. I am not a man. I am dynamite. He may just not have foreseen that his dear llama would aim the explosion in the wrong direction. Or did he? In Eche Homo, the book he wrote in the year before his mind dissolved, he wrote, When I look for my diametric opposite, in a measurably shabby instinct, I always think of my mother and sister.

It would blaspheme my divinity to think that I am related to this sort of common element. The way my mother and sister treat me to this very day is a source of unspeakable horror. A real time bomb is at work here, which can tell with unerring certainty the exact moment I can be hurt. In my highest moments. Because at that point, I do not have the strength to resist poison worms. Physiological contiguity makes this sort of disharmonia possible. But I will admit that the greatest objection to eternal return, my truly abysmal thought, is always my mother and sister. Thank you. And lastly, I'd like to thank my significant other for never choosing Wagner over me. Join me tomorrow as I examine Nietzsche's legacy with Stephen West, host of the podcast Philosophize This. Significant Others is written and read by me, Liza Powell O'Brien. I am not a This podcast philosophizes this. autobiographies and articles which represent countless hours of work by people who are far

more knowledgeable than I. Sources for each episode are listed in the show notes. If you hear something interesting and you want to know more, please consider ordering these books from your independent bookseller. And if you are a historian or someone who knows something about the people I'm talking about, and you'd like to take issue with an impression I've made or a conclusion I've drawn, I welcome the dialogue. Finally, if you have an episode suggestion, let us know at significantpod at gmail.com. History is filled with characters, and we tend to focus only on a few of them. Significant Others is produced by Jen Samples. Our executive producers are Nick Liao, Adam Sachs, Jeff Ross, and Colin Anderson. Engineering and sound design by Eduardo Perez, Rich Garcia, and Joanna Samuel.

Music and scoring by Eduardo Perez and Hannes Brown. Research and fact-checking by Michael Waters and Hannah Sio. Special thanks to Lisa Berm, Jason Chalemi, and Joanna Solitaroff. Talent booking by Paula Davis and Gina Batista.