Placing Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche in the Crosshairs
AbstractIn the postwar era Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche has been held responsible for the reputation her brother acquired during the Third Reich as a prophet of National Socialism. In scholarly writing and popular accounts Forster-Nietzsche’s manipulation of her brother’s writings and letters, as well as her philologically unsound editorial practices, has led most observers to the hasty assumption that she intervened in his texts in order to fashion the image of Nietzsche as a German nationalist and anti-Semite. Recently Christian Niemeyer has renewed these attacks on Nietzsche’s sister, fearing that contemporary scholarship has forgotten the violations of her brother’s legacy. His philological accounts are flawed, however, and his arguments are contrived and unpersuasive. In fact, if we look closely at the evidence and Forster- Nietzsche’s editorial practices, we find that she consistently included letters and passages that demonstrated Nietzsche’s intense opposition to the anti-Semitism of his era and to conservative Wilhelmine politics. In Niemeyer’s article Forster-Nietzsche is once again unfairly blamed for Nietzsche’s favorable reception as a proto-Nazi.