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 to discover the remains of this bizarre colony, 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.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 5, 2011 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780307886453
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780307886453
- File size: 9423 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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