Thus Spake Elisabeth
BROSE, CHRISTIAN D.
Thus Spake Elisabeth The will to power of Friedrich Nietzsche's sister. BY CHRISTIAN D. BROSE In his writings, Friedrich Nietzsche dreamed of deporting and, in one instance, shooting all of...
...Better schooling would not necessarily have eliminated anti-Semitism...
...and she lacks any sense of objectivity...
...Much scholarly elbow grease was needed to debunk "the Nietzsche legend," and one wonders what can be contributed by Carol Diethe's revisionist smdy, Nietzsche's Sister and the Will to Power: A Biography of Elisabeth Fdrster-Nietzsche...
...In fact, "her overt intentions always appear to have been good...
...Slinking back to the scholarly status quo, concluding, "my chief accusation against Elisabeth is that she tarnished her brother's name...
...And when this fails to convince, Diethe editorializes bitterly: "From today's perspective, the restricted syllabus fed to girls under the name of education during the nineteenth century was little short of a scandal...
...She] lacks any sense for fine, and even for crude, logical distinctions...
...She even translates and offers as an appendix an untitled novella Elisabeth wrote in her late thirties...
...Of Elisabeth's anti-Semitic husband, who attempted to colonize a sliver of Paraguay as Neu-Germania, Diethe declares, "Though [Bernhard] Forster was authoritarian, humorless, and eccentric, this does not detract from his passionate campaign against cruelty to animals...
...After all, many Nazis were well-educated...
...her thinking is void of even the least logical consistency...
...In 1914, Elisabeth wrote that the most vigorous supporter of the fatherland would have been her brother (the same brother who wrote that even hearing Germany's national anthem made him feel ill...
...Provisionally titled by Diethe "Coffee-Party Gossip about Nora," it is about as dull as it sounds...
...When ElisaChristian D. Brose is assistant managing editor of the Public Interest...
...Lest we forget, Elisabeth had to take private lessons in her brother's ideas before she could molest them...
...She dredges up documentary table-scraps that ultimately prove Nietzsche's sister was neither intelligent nor likable...
...Diethe grudgingly admits this halfway through the book and undermines her own thesis...
...She doctored his writings, created phony letters, and published them in her numerous books about Nietzsche's life and ideas...
...Her attempts to make the reader sympathize with poor Elisabeth are unbelievable, and her revisionist character sketch falls flat...
...True enough, but Walter Kaufmann established that in 1950...
...A former lecturer at Middlesex University in London, Diethe does not pardon Elisabeth's actions, but rather attempts to explain why a girl she believes was "bright and talented" went so far off course...
...Diethe mentions this—but not the tutor's assessment of Elisabeth: "Frau Forster-Nietzsche is a complete laywoman in all that concerns her brother's doctrine...
...Diethe argues that a "faulty education" left the intelligent Elisabeth dis-advantaged and was ultimately to blame for her scholarly atrocities...
...Elsewhere her editorializing is unintentionally humorous...
...If this were not inane enough, Diethe adds that Elisabeth "worked very, very hard...
...To prove her case, Diethe documents her subject's life chronologically and unearths a wealth of primary material: diaries, grammar workbooks, and correspondence...
...Diethe's efforts to revise scholarly opinion are desperate and unconvincing...
...Her psychoanalytic and feminist presumptions reveal more about the author than her subject...
...BY CHRISTIAN D. BROSE In his writings, Friedrich Nietzsche dreamed of deporting and, in one instance, shooting all of Germany's "anti-Semitic screamers...
...Because she hoarded Nietzsche's writings, however, no one could authoritatively challenge Elisabeth until years after her dea± in 1935...
...Equally funny is Diethe's constant psychoanalytic speculation about Elisabeth's more-than-sisterly affection for her brother: "Perhaps the severe hairstyle with center parting and side bun . . . was a visible expression of her inhibited emotions...
...beth began hobnobbing with Hitler in the early 1930s, her brother's legacy became guilty by association...
...Nietzsche was spot on when, in Ecce Homo, he described his sister as his "most abysmal thought...
...The answer is not much...
...So what can be said of Diethe's efforts...
...Though Nietzsche died in 1900, Elisabeth worked tirelessly to create the myth that he was the intellectual godfather of National Socialism...
...She cobbled together several hundred disparate notes and aphorisms into The Will to Power, a book she claimed represented her brother's true philosophic system...
...The author's archival spelunking is ambitious, but the results are such facts as Elisabeth's grade-school award "for immaculate conduct...
...Upon her brother's mental and physical collapse in 1889, she appointed herself sole executor of his literary estate and seized his extensive unpublished writings (as well as his pension and royalties...
...One can only imagine how vitriolic his hatred of Adolf Hitler would have been...
...After all, Diethe writes, Elisabeth did not set out with "deliberate malice...
...But Nietzsche's philosophy was shoehorned into the Nazi jackboot nonetheless—the credit for which belongs in large part to Nietzsche's younger sister, Elisabeth...
...But the fact is, even if Diethe could prove her case, she would still be wrong—for Elisabeth's crimes resulted more from her own moral failings than from intellectual neglect or vague "personality factors...
Vol. 9 • March 2004 • No. 27
