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About Forgotten Fatherland: The True Story of Nietzsche's Sister and Her Lost Aryan Colony (Unabridged)

“A fascinating, provocative, and highly eccentric volume” ( The New York Times ) exploring the true story of Elisabeth Nietzsche’s maniacal attempt to found a utopian colony in the jungles of Paraguay in the late nineteenth century—from the bestselling author of Prisoners of the Castle . 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.