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From the bestselling, acclaimed author of A Spy Among Friends, The Spy and the Traitor, and Rogue Heroes, the fascinating story of Elisabeth Nietzsche's maniacal attempt to found a utopian colony in the jungles of Paraguay in the late nineteenth-century.
In 1886 Elisabeth Nietzsche, the bigoted, imperious sister of the famous philosopher, founded a "racially pure" colony in Paraguay together with her husband, anti-Semitic agitator Bernhard Förster, and a band of fair-skinned fellow Germans. In 1991, Ben Macintyre tracked down the survivors of Nueva Germania, as the colony was called, and found a strange, tight-lipped people, still interbreeding to the point of genetic deterioration. Digging into recently opened German archives, Macintyre tells how Elisabeth, who returned to Germany in 1893, grafted her anti-Semitic, nationalist ideas onto her brother's philosophy, building a mythic cult around him. Elisabeth later became a mentor to Hitler; her stately funeral in 1935 was attended by a tearful Führer. Laced with mordant irony, Macintyre's brilliant piece of investigative journalism adds weight to the view, shared by many scholars, that the Nazis' use of Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas to justify their evil deeds and doctrines was a perversion of his thought.
In 1886 Elisabeth Nietzsche, the bigoted, imperious sister of the famous philosopher, founded a "racially pure" colony in Paraguay together with her husband, anti-Semitic agitator Bernhard Förster, and a band of fair-skinned fellow Germans. In 1991, Ben Macintyre tracked down the survivors of Nueva Germania, as the colony was called, and found a strange, tight-lipped people, still interbreeding to the point of genetic deterioration. Digging into recently opened German archives, Macintyre tells how Elisabeth, who returned to Germany in 1893, grafted her anti-Semitic, nationalist ideas onto her brother's philosophy, building a mythic cult around him. Elisabeth later became a mentor to Hitler; her stately funeral in 1935 was attended by a tearful Führer. Laced with mordant irony, Macintyre's brilliant piece of investigative journalism adds weight to the view, shared by many scholars, that the Nazis' use of Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas to justify their evil deeds and doctrines was a perversion of his thought.