From the bestselling, acclaimed author of Operation Mincemeat and The Spy and the Traitor, the fascinating story of Elisabeth Nietzsche’s maniacal attempt to found a utopian colony in the jungles of Paraguay in the late nineteenth century “A fascinating, provocative, and highly eccentric volume that is part biography, part travelogue, part detective story.”—The New York Times In 1886, Elisabeth Nietzsche, the bigoted, imperious sister of the famous philosopher, founded a “racially pure” colony in Paraguay with her husband, anti-Semitic agitator Bernhard Förster, and a band of fair-skinned fellow Germans. More than a century later, 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 unfolds 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, and how she later became a mentor to Hitler—her stately funeral in 1935 attended by a tearful Führer. Laced with mordant irony, Macintyre’s brilliant piece of investigative journalism explores how the Nazis perverted Friedrich Nietzsche’s ideas to justify their evil deeds, and unearths a rich and disturbing vein of the twentieth century’s dark history.
ISBN: 978-0-307-88644-6
