Forgotten Fatherland

In 1886, Elisabeth Nietzsche and her husband Bernhard Förster establish Nueva Germania in Paraguay as an antisemitic German colony intended to demonstrate their racial and nationalist ideas. The settlement fails to fulfil its promises, leaving descendants and local families with an inheritance very different from the ideological community its founders imagined.

Macintyre travels to Paraguay in 1991 to investigate the surviving colony and Elisabeth’s later role as custodian of her brother Friedrich Nietzsche’s papers. He traces how she edited and promoted his work, cultivated nationalist admirers and helped make a distorted version of Nietzsche available for appropriation by the Nazi movement.