Footfalls - The archive
End of ‘Nueva Germania’ and of queen-hood model one. Although Elizabeth had returned from Paraguay, disappointed and widowed, her need to create a New Germany and to be a part of it had not ended. Far from it. The little goblins still hovered around her neck and shoulders and demons played around her hair. The queen of ‘Nueva Germania’ now began to make herself queen of New Germany. It wasn’t easy but she did it. Later, Cosima, furious at the success of her new rival, commented to her daughter, ‘Did you know that Elizabeth Nietzsche is now living a life of luxury with servants and an equipage’. The Nietzsche cult was so successful that it was becoming a threat to the Wagner cult and that would never do.
But first the boss must make herself the boss. She moved the madman to her mother’s house, 18 Weingarten, in Naumberg. Her mother was given the task of caring for the body while Elizabeth began to deal with the mind. She stuffed all the material she had already collected plus everything that she could lay her hands on in the downstairs rooms. The house was renamed ‘The Nietzsche Archive’. It was graced with headed notepaper and opened on 2nd February 1894. She made a grab for everything, a process which she was well used to. From her earliest years she had begged, borrowed or stolen her brother’s material, all the stuff which he would have burnt or thrown away, putting it carefully into boxes. Now she appointed herself as sole and official editor of all his material. The landlord of the house in Sils Maria had collected every bit of paper which Nietzsche had thrown into the wastepaper basket in his room. He had been happily giving them away piece by piece to anyone who bothered to ask even though Nietzsche had told him to destroy everything. Elizabeth wrote demanding it all back and got it. She soon expanded, grabbing for herself the rights to everything he had written, getting her mother to sign away her title as executrix, suing anyone who published anything which she felt was hers and sending requests to everyone she could think of to return letters sent to them by her brother. Most concurred. Cosima refused, burning the lot.
Peter Gast had been asked by Nietzsche’s mother to edit a collected edition with his own introductions. However, he soon discovered Elizabeth’s intentions. He had been at work on the texts for a year when she re-appeared. He wrote to Overbeck, ‘An event has occurred that is bound to disrupt both myself and the whole Nietzsche cause. Frau Förster has returned from Paraguay. There followed a couple of days during which I was tempted to chuck in my editorship’. No need. He was sacked as soon as convenient.
She discovered quickly that her brother’s work was valuable. She began to publish cheap editions and settled down to write a biography resolving that she would be the only channel to her brother’s philosophy, ‘I, more than anyone, am duty bound to repulse attacks, to remove mistakes and portray the facts and experiences of my brother’s life with the most precise accuracy as no-one stood as close to him as I did’. Of course, she had a problem. Much of her brother’s thought was anathema to her and could never be allowed to see the light of day. All that, she simply discarded. In her efforts to create the image she desired, she chose to ignore those elements in his philosophy with which she couldn’t agree. Then there was another problem, even closer to her heart. The relationship between Nietzsche and herself. Obviously she wanted to show this in the best possible light. This was not so easy or, if you like, was very easy indeed. The big lie is always the easiest lie as Goebbels knew so well. Thus, when she came across letters which contained compliments addressed to others, she would singe their names away with a candle and claim that they has been sent to her. She became a forger on a truly grand scale.
How do we know that this happened? Well, some of those correspondents had kept copies of their letters and didn’t like praise which had been directed at them being hijacked by a third party.
The task she had set herself was an imposing one so she gathered malleable and subservient editorial help around her. Gast, the only man then alive capable of deciphering Nietzsche’s appalling scrawl, had already prepared an edition before he had been sacked. He was replaced by Dr Fritz Koegel. Another useful follower was Rudolph Steiner, later to found anthroposophy, who agreed to instruct Elizabeth in the fundamentals of her brother’s thought. The job proved difficult, ‘Frau Nietzsche […] lacks all sense of fine and even of crude logical distinctions. Her thinking is void of even the smallest logical consistency. […] She can persuade herself that what was blue yesterday is red today’. Thus the luck of the draw for editors.
On her mother’s death she took her brother to Weimar, seat of German learning and home of Liszt, Goethe and Schiller. Here, she thought, he would be in the right sort of company. With money given by Meta von Salis, she bought the Villa Silberblick. The fact that it was an impressive edifice constructed on high ground must have allowed her to ignore its name which, as well as ‘silvern view’, also means ‘squint’, a problem that Elizabeth had always suffered from. She would disturb people by seeming to look at something away in the distance a little over their left shoulder. Her philosophical and political squints were no less disconcerting. She ripped the place to pieces and turned it into a shrine to herself and all her associations, to the memories of her brother and her husband. It was done up in pink and made to look like a funeral parlour. It had a bust of Nietzsche at one end and one of Förster at the other. A huge N (with vague echoes of an earlier dictator with large ambitions) was embossed in brass over the fireplace. Thus Walter Jessinghaus, ‘From Kaiserin Augusta Strasse which curves down from Wieland Square into Louisen Strasse and along it to number 30. This is beyond the town, past the Felsenkeller inn. The villa lies in its own grounds commanding a view of its surroundings’. Philo van Walden tells us, ‘The house has three floors and a mansard apartment’. The style is simple, plain but noble, ‘an unstuccoed red-brick building with white trim, a gently sloping slate roof, lobby and balcony, a large garden with young olive trees and clusters of other trees all around’. It is a ‘beautiful home which overlooks the meadows far and wide’. There is ‘a splendid view over the whole city and beyond to the sumptuous crops and the green forests that covered the hilly landscape on the other side’. Van Walden again, ‘Peaceful solitude, distant horizons, laughing sky all around and golden sunshine in all the windows’.
Today the building is still there. A short gravel drive leads up to the front door above which is a grey stone block on which is a chiselled inscription, ‘Nietzsche Archiv’. Inside is a photograph of the place during Elizabeth’s reign. The inscription then was a little different. It read, ‘Nietzsche Archiv. In memory. Placed here by Adolf Hitler in the sixth year of the Third Reich’. The building has survived the war intact on top if its hill and stands there today overlooking the countryside to the west, square, solid and quite imposing in its quiet middle-brow way. Inside it is not difficult to imagine it as it was although there have been some changes. The bust of Förster has gone. The room in which Nietzsche lived those three years and in which he died is occupied by a student and the staircase to the upper floors is roped off. Let’s hope that whoever sleeps there now has pleasant dreams.
Elizabeth set to work with a will. Jessinghaus again, ‘It is known at least in her circle of friends with what industriousness and endurance she often works late into the night in the interest of her brother’s great cause. When everyone far and wide is already fast asleep, her lamp - the only light in all that darkness - is still shining in the window of her room and keeps company with the restlessly active woman who in spite of the hard heavy suffering inflicted on her by fate, still looks insistently and actively into life and reveals no trace of brooding pessimism’.
Guests were overawed at Elizabeth’s staging of her brother. Occasionally they were even allowed into his presence. Dr Horneffer in August 1899, ‘Anyone who has seen Nietzsche as a patient must consider himself lucky […] How impressed I was by his beauty! Nietzsche lay on a sofa wrapped in a loose white cloak - I always saw him only in this cloak which heightened his prophetic appearance - and the impression was powerful, indeed overpowering […] a prophet of divine simplicity, nothing fancy in his being, in a word the Zarathustra Nietzsche. I stood still, awe-struck with reverence […] There was something of Goethe, Jupiter-like […] Nietzsche emanated a sovereignty that seemed to force the world to its knees’.
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So many deaths which are not really deaths, of men who go on living even though the clocks have stopped, who live through a time that is static and eternal, through a temporal silence which no pulse punctures.
History enforces other time scales which rip through our spatial certainties, twisting them askew and dropping them in unexpected places. The smallest shift can do it, even a shift as small and as insignificant as death in which so little changes. In that war in which the dictator fought as a corporal ‘Every soldier killed in action died with his knapsack on. When he fell he displaced nothing; his belt, his cartridge boxes, his tassel, bayonet and spade, tent square, the rolled up greatcoat […] everything in its proper place, folded up and buttoned and tied fast […] not even the helmet and its cover rolled away or came off the head. It was as if he had prepared himself for a parade of the dead’. And in his knapsack was Elizabeth’s edition of ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’. Or a different experience encountered unexpectedly like the soldier in one of those innumerable winter trenches dug into a frozen landscape who wrote later that ‘A shell missed me outside Albert and did for my watch. I could shake it, and it would tick for a bit, but the spring was gone. I’ve an idea I don’t grow any older now’. ‘Suddenly somewhere a little thing slips, some little tiny thing. Gliss-iss-iss STOP! I trust I make myself clear’. Tales of the living dead, of zombies not left to lie in peaceful graves but who rise from the tomb and stalk the world in
existences.
Footfalls are heard padding across the floor of the room above while the sister struggles on with her task of editing and re-writing, struggles on into the night. Even makes him famous and popular. Her indomitable will is in step with the times and her brother’s thought has a line put through it here and a scratched improvement there… And, like his works, his body is also edited quite out of its own reality. Sometimes he is helped to the veranda and sits there watching the sun drop ever so slowly behind the Eterburg hills. Maybe he felt like the poet Keats writing from his room overlooking the Piazza di Spagna, ‘I have a habitual feeling of my real life having past, and that I am leading a posthumous existence’. ‘God knows, ‘he added, ‘how it would have been’. His star predominant. There are so many different types of murder and the quick knife in the dark may be the kindest. But a murder of ten years!
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In August 1900, at the age of 55, Nietzsche finally died. Elizabeth sent out cards, ‘At around twelve o’clock today my dearly-beloved brother Friedrich Nietzsche passed away. Weimar 25th August 1900. Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche’. Another, ‘The burial will take place on Tuesday 28th August at 4 o’clock in the afternoon in the family plot at Röcken in the state of Lützen’.
In his writing he had pronounced an intense curse on Christianity and all religion. The aims of Christianity are ‘the poisoning, slandering, life denying, contempt for the body, the denigration and self violation of man via the concept of sin. As a consequence its means are also bad’. Again, ‘It essene is a scikenss’. And again and again. ‘God is dead and we have killed him. There has never been a greater deed’. He had asked his sister as she herself tells it, ‘Lisbeth, my brother said solemnly, when I die promise me that only friends will stand around the coffin - no inquisitive crowd, Make sure that no priest nor anyone else will pronounce falsehoods at my graveside when I can no longer defend myself and let me be lowered into my grace as an sincere pagan’. Elizabeth ignored this plea and he was buried with all the rites of the Lutheran church, in a coffin adorned with a silver crucifix. Peter Gast read the words over the coffin, ‘Hallowed be thy name to all future generations’. Nietzsche had earlier written, ‘I have a terrible fear that one day I shall be pronounced holy. I do not want to be a saint’.
His grave is now in the churchyard at Röcken parsonage where he lies to the left of his sister. Or, at least somewhat to the left, and maybe just a little under his sister. His is the only grave with flowers. His death mask is … archaeological, unreal. Done in white plaster, it looks slightly cracked and broken and perhaps this is appropriate. She allowed none of him to escape.
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Not excluding his moustache. Nietzsche’s moustache, so the story goes, was neatly severed from his body while it lay in its coffin and offered for sale to a number of institutions including some renowned German universities all of which solemnly refused it. Its whereabouts are now unkown.
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By then, her biography of Nietzsche was finished. It was in three volumes and became very popular. Really little more than a piece of hagiography, it was full of inaccuracies and lies which were designed to recreate him as a prophet and show how close he had been to his sister. She wrote, ‘Never in our lives did we say an unkind word to each other’. Max Heinze, accurately summarised her efforts as ‘the erection of a splendid memorial to yourself as his sister’. Von Seydlitz agreed, ‘You have erected a heroic monument to himself and yourself’.
Then there is the question of the final work, ‘The Will to Power’, the book that Bäumler called ‘Nietzsche’s philosophical magnum opus’. The kleptomaniac publishes the results of her crimes, not so much a forgery as a piece of alchemy. Under the name of Friedrich Nietzsche comes a collection of discarded notes, unfinished aphorisms and other scraps which Nietzsche had never collected together as a book. Here were all the scribbles and notes which he had put down on paper between 1883 and 1888 and rejected. But Elizabeth turned this material into the final statement of the Nietzschian philosophy, a summing up of his thinking over all of his creative life. These bits and pieces she put in her own order, arranging them under four headings, an order which had been superceded by some 25 later drafts. The implication was that he had finally come round to promoting breeding, discipline and the priority of Germany, in other words almost everything that he spent his life labouring against.
The old difficult struggling plant had withered in the wrong kind of soil but this new hybrid flourished. Under Elizabeth’s careful nurturing Nietzsche rapidly grew into a household name. When the congress of the International Psychoanalytic Association came to town they avoided the archive on the hill even though it was mentioned often enough that Nietzsche had anticipated many of it’s findings. Elizabeth knew well enough that her old enemy Lou von Salomé was one of the leading lights of this new movement and must have been furious at the thought that her brother’s name was being associated with it, led as it was by that Jew Freud. But she had to keep her infuriation under wraps.
This however, was a mere blip in her resolute progress. She was a good populist and had an understanding of marketing methods which Goebbels might later have secretly applauded. Horrified when Lou Salomé had published articles and even a book on Nietzsche she had angrily called it ‘exploitation’ but didn’t balk at doing the same herself. She published cheap editions of her brother’s works and they sold well. By the First World War she was already well known as his executor. That war presented her with no twinge of a moral choice. Nietzsche was an imperialist and warmonger and, of course, would have been in favour of the cause.
Elizabeth paid for copies of her edition of ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’ to be put into every soldier’s knapsack and, from the sidelines, she encouraged those same soldiers into battle, ‘This is a great challenge to Germans to rise up and fight. There is a fighter in every German no matter which party he belongs to and this warrior comes to the fore whenever the fatherland is threatened’. Closer reading of Nietzsche would have found, ‘Germans have no idea of how vile they are’. There is even the hope that, ‘Perhaps there will come in the future a great day on which a nation distinguished for war and victory of its own volition will declare: “we will smash the sword and demolish our entire military machine down to the last foundations”’.
When faced with the reality of defeat Elizabeth was devastated and ranted, ‘I cannot stand it. At the front our armies were undefeated but our stupid home guards, fools and children, have stabbed our brave soldiers in the back. Germany offers a dreadful spectacle. Every day I wish that I were dead’.
But that was mere hyperbole. She didn’t die. Instead she redoubled her propaganda programme. She was becoming very successful at it. Money was no longer a problem as her publishing activities were bringing in real cash flow. She could afford an extravagant lifestyle. She was even put up for the Nobel prize for literature and, although she was refused the honour three times in a row, she did get an honorary doctorate and was on her way to being Germany’s first woman of letters. She was accepted as the official broker of her brother’s thought. The Nietzsche Archive had its queen bee surrounded by a creative hive of servants, secretaries, lawyers and editors. Weimar was also becoming a social centre.
Since the death of her husband, Elisabeth had remained a widow. Nietzsche’s death had made her a kind of double widow and she always dressed the part. Never seen in anything other than long, black dresses with plenty of lace and tulle at the neck and wrists. She usually topped the ensemble off with a little black hat. By the 1930s her clothes had become a little more ample and the hats rather larger and she had taken to sporting a small umbrella when out of doors. She looked a little like Queen Victoria, the severe widow in perpetual mourning. But in Elizabeth’s case the resignation which this persona implies was missing. Her aim was to make Weimar the intellectual capital of Germany and add the name of Nietzsche to those of Goethe and Schiller.
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To this end she grabbed at every possible opportunity and it was an Italian one that now swam into view. Unlike Hitler it is quite possible that Mussolini had actually read some Nietzsche. But he followed the sister rather than the brother, quoting out of context and managing to make Nietzsche support his own thinking. Mussolini thought of Nietzsche as his one key influence. He saw himself as a superman who could transcend social norms and grab directly at what he wanted. Elizabeth was thrilled to be shown an article in the papers reporting that Mussolini admired her brother. Her response was immediate. She ordered Max Oehler to produce an article in reply showing how Mussolini was the fulfilment of Nietzsche’s social theories. The article was published in both the German and Italian press and was read by Mussolini.
In this way, by the middle of the 1920s she had begun to open up direct lines of contact with Italian fascism. Her ‘New Caesar’ marched on Rome and took power in a coup d’état in 1922. Elizabeth was delighted, ‘I can no longer restrain myself from expressing my admiration. He is not only the pre-eminent statesman of Europe but of the whole world. With what pride my brother would have gazed on this wonderful man, on someone happy, powerful and triumphant, who offers mankind the hope of salvation’. She saw Mussolini as the living embodiment of her brother’s philosophy and her thrilled expression of the fact brought its response. A constant flood of encouragement came from Italy in the form of letters, telegrams and money. Elizabeth’s probing uncovered the fact that Mussolini had written a play and, in February 1932, she arranged a production of it at Weimar’s National Theatre sending a fulsome letter to Mussolini imploring him to come to Germany for the first night. Mussolini replied equally fulsomely that unfortunately he was not able etc. However, in the event, Elizabeth was not to be disappointed, for, that night, she met another and even more pre-eminent statesman of the whole world, Adolf Hitler, who entered the theatre surrounded by his storm troopers, made straight for Elizabeth’s private box and presented her with a large bunch of roses in front of a rapturous first night audience. Elizabeth remembered, ‘His eyes are fascinating. They look right through you’. She might not have realised it at the time but she had finally met the man who would give her the authority she had always craved. These two were quite happy to use each other to further their own ends. With the best will in the world.
When Hitler took power soon after, Elizabeth could hardly contain herself, ‘We are drunk with enthusiasm because at the head of our government stands such a wonderful, indeed phenomenal, personality - our chancellor Adolf Hitler. We have suddenly achieved the one Germany which for centuries our poets have longingly depicted in their poems and for which we have all being waiting. Ein Volk, Ein Reich. Ein Führer’. Just as Nietzsche had feared, “German” had become an argument, “Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles” had become ‘a principle and the end of German thought’.
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Much later in 1943 after the fall of southern Italy, Mussolini was deposed and put under house arrest well out of sight. From the ruler who had certainly never read any Nietzsche to the other one who certainly had was sent a copy of the collected works as a gift on his, the Italian one’s, sixtieth birthday.
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But Weimar was not the only pull on Hitler’s cultural passions. There was also Bayreuth and the other story. Wagner also shared with the chancellor a passionate anti-semitism and it was almost inevitable that Bayreuth would become a centre for Nazi propaganda. Winifred Williams, a Welsh girl who became Wagner’s daughter-in-law, was another keen Nazi. By 1924 Hitler had discovered Bayreuth. Siegfried Wagner noted that ‘it was during this summer that we got to know this delightful man and we will not disappoint him even if we end up in prison (which, unlike so many, she didn’t). In Bayreuth we have never made a secret of our ideas, Jew and Jesuit go hand in hand and seek to destroy what is essentially German’. There is a film made by Syberberg in 1976 for the centenary of Bayreuth which shows Winifred Wagner talking about her great friend Adolf.. She told the camera, ‘He played the piano nicely. In his youth he composed an opera. He loved the children and treated the women with the greatest politeness […] He hated discussing politics and talked passionately about stage problems. He had a deep love for, and knowledge of, Wagner’s music which he tried to hear regularly despite the problems of his profession’. When he telephoned he always called himself Kapellmeister Wolf. When Winifred asked him why he liked the name Wolf he tells her, amazingly, ‘Because it sounds so delightfully Jewish’.
Weimar and Bayreuth were soon the twin capitals of cultural Nazism, a connection which Elizabeth understood very well. She never accepted her brother’s radical break with Wagner and his music, ‘Those who understand my brother can see clearly how greatly he still admired Wagner as the most brilliant and impressive example of the modern soul’.
Elizabeth and Winifred were two pebbles from the same beach. Beyreuth now gloried in the full force of the Nazi propaganda machine. Elizabeth was also ravished, ‘It was in the theatre during a performance in honour of the 30th anniversary of Wagner’s death that I had the great good fortune of a personal conversation with our wonderful chancellor’. Weimar was becoming a setting for love affairs of this kind. Elizabeth had met Förster there half a century earlier and fallen for him. Now she was falling much more deeply for Hitler. Both, of course, marriages of devotion and convenience. Here the intricate webs began to get entangled and stirred into their inappropriate afterlives where two resurrections intermingle.
Hitler thought of himself as a man of letters, a philosopher king. Plato’s philosopher king writes, ‘We must not only compel our poets, on pain of expulsion (merely?) to make their poetry the express images of a noble character, we much also supervise craftsmen of every kind and forbid them to leave the stamp of baseness, license, meanness, unseemliness on painting and sculpture, on building or any other work of their hands and anyone who cannot obey shall not practice his art […] we would not have our Guardians grow up amongst representations of moral deformity as in some foul pasture where […] they would gather a mass of corruption in their very souls’. Thus Plato, thinking of Wagner and the Third Reich. And he continues, ‘rather we must seek out those craftsmen and ….’
Hitler was, at the same time, politician, artist, architect and thinker and therefore the ideal man to dictate the basis of the art of his time. He roared, ‘When does man live by bread alone? We have before us not only a suffering workforce but also an ample and struggling culture. Not only the needs of the body but also the needs of the soul. We cannot think of the German people rising again if German culture does not also rise’. Nietzsche had understood exactly the position which Germany had now reached and he had himself ranted against such rantings, ‘Culture and the state - one should not deceive oneself in this - are antagonists. The one thrives at the expense of the other’. Thus the rise of the ‘Reich’ signifies one thing above all, ‘a displacement of the centre of gravity away from Germany’. These warnings, however, Elizabeth managed to avoid. By now the Jewish Wagner conductors Elmendorff and Muck had been replaced by the Aryan Toscanini of whom Magee has written that, ‘The most knowledgeable Wagnerians I know of, from Ernest Newman down, have tended to agree that the best performances they have ever heard were those of Toscanini in Bayreuth’. He, however, eventually left in disgust to be replaced by the politically more reliable Richard Strauss for whom, as Stephan Sweig wrote, ‘It was of vital interest to be particularly co-operative with the National Socialists because [..] he was very much in the red with them. His son had married a Jewess and thus he feared that his grand-children […] would be excluded from school as scum. His new opera was tainted through Sweig, his earlier opera through the half-Jew Hofmannsthal. His publisher was a Jew. Therefore it seemed to him increasingly imperative to create some support and security for himself and he did it with great perseverance’. Like so many others he simply didn’t see what was going on around him even though he had the ear of the führer and of most of the National Socialist bigwigs’. Roth could write that ‘Strauss’s complete detachment from all political and national affairs was truly monumental. It was no aversion, for any such aversion springs from an act of judgement. Politics simply has no entry whatever into his world’.
Toscanini escaped to Palestine at the invitation of Albert Einstein who called him ‘a man who has shown the greatest dignity in the fight against the fascist criminals’. He stayed in Jerusalem for a month to help the newly created Palestinian Orchestra. He travelled. At almost seventy years of age he chased around the place going to Bethlehem and Nazareth, the Dead Sea, visiting a kibbutz and showing up at a Passover meal which was translated for him. His concerts, of which he gave three in Tel Aviv, three in Haifa and three in Jerusalem, were all sold out. He was enormously popular wherever he went, crowds lining the streets to catch a glimpse of him. A mother who gave birth to twins called them ‘Tosca’ and ‘Nini’.
Interesting that, some thirty years earlier, in 1889 Nietzsche went to see a production of Carmen at the Teatro Carignano in Turin under the baton of Leopoldo Mugnono, the very production which was conducted the following year by Toscanini.
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Hitler perfectly understood the propaganda value of both Bayreuth and the Nietzsche Archive. He saw, without ever reading a word of it, that Nietzsche’s thought as propagated by his sister would give him some of the intellectual weight that he lacked. He nurtured Elizabeth and regularly visited her at Weimar. All of this was perfect for her master plan, ‘If my brother had ever met him his greatest wish would have been fulfilled. He will change Germany completely. What I like most about Hitler is his simplicity’ and, ‘He wants nothing for himself but only for Germany. I admire him utterly’.
Nietzsche was grabbed by Nazism with open arms and given a hug so tight that it almost killed his reputation. He was at the core of their cultural mission. But that doesn’t mean that they neglected other areas. Indeed not. Nazi propaganda reached its fingers into every corner of the national pie. Hitler, with Goebbels at his side, realised that culture was a central part of their political task. Decadence had to be destroyed and true German culture lauded. Philosophy and history, literature and religion were co-opted for the battle, ‘In the one hand the book and in the other the sword - this is how our people have risen to their national transformation. It has advanced wonderfully before our very eyes. Book and sword are and remain the symbols of our time and are the decisive signs of the new century’. Any book thought decadent was burnt in a literary holocaust. May 10th 1933 saw a spectacle that had not been seen in Europe since the middle ages. A torch-light march of students in their thousands made its way to the Unter den Linden opposite the University of Berlin where a bonfire was built. Books were then thrown into the flames and some 20,000 volumes burnt to ashes, ‘I consign to the flames the writings of Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. I consign to the flames Heinrich Mann, and Thomas Mann, Albert Einstein and Erich Kästner. I consign to the flames Sigmund Freud, Erich Maria Remarque, Andre Gide, Emile Zola and Marcel Proust’. Goebbels stood by the fire, ‘For German men and women the time for decadent Jewish intellectualism is over. Our German revelation sets us free […] The soul of the German people can again express itself. These flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they also light up the new’. While this was going on the work of Nietzsche, as radical as any that were being destroyed, became one of the bibles of Nazism. In that bible are the words, ‘Wherever Germany penetrates, she ruins culture’.
Eventually and inevitably the anti-semitism that the Nazis had been so assiduously encouraging erupted in the Krystallnacht. Jews were beaten up and their shops looted. Nietzsche was used to give intellectual backing to this thuggery. The man who had vigorously opposed anti-semitism was quoted to support Hitler’s most savage decrees. Wrote Elizabeth, ‘The link between Nietzsche and National Socialism is the heroism in both their souls’.
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Nietzsche’s attitude to the Germans becomes clearer as he goes along
‘If ever my biography comes to be written, this statement should be put in, ‘only among Germans was he treated badly’.
‘Perhaps I understand the Germans, perhaps I can even presume to tell them a few home truths. The new Germany represents a plentiful amount of efficiency, inherited and acquired, so that for some time to come it even has a right to be extravagant in spending from the store of its accumulated energy. It is not a high culture that has gained the upper hand in Germany, still less a refined taste, a noble instinct for ‘beauty’ but virtues that are more manly than any other country in Europe can show an ample share of courage and self-respect, sterling honesty in the relations of life, a high sense of duty, great industry, great stamina - a hereditary temperance which needs the spur rather than the drag. I must add that here men obey without feeling humiliated by obedience […] And no one despises his opponent’. . . .
But Nietzsche also wants to be just to the Germans to ‘tell them what he objects to’.
Coming to power is costly ‘power makes stupid. The Germans were once called the nation of thinkers. Do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect. Politics devours all serious things. ‘Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles’ was, I fear, the end of German philosophy’ […] “Are there any German philosophers? Are there any German poets?” Are there any good German books? - people abroad ask me these questions and I blush’. All that is left is a ‘confounded instinct of mediocrity!’ Nietzsche asks ‘How much beer is there in the German intellect’ and he declares that ‘the German spirit is growing coarser, it is growing shallower’ and he asks, ‘how is it that German seriousness, German profundity, German passion in spiritual things is more and more on the decline’. German culture suffers from ‘a superabundance of presumptuous journeymen and fragments of humanity, a spiritual instinct-atrophy’. Nietzsche can tell the Germans ‘how many things they have on their conscience. They have on their conscience all the great crimes against culture for four centuries ‘. It is Germany that is responsible for ‘nationalism, ‘this most anti-cultural sickness and unreason’.
No-one, he says, ‘can spend more than he has’. Thus ‘if Germany spends itself on power, grand politics, economic affairs, world trade, parliamentary institutions, military interests - if it expends in these directions the quantum of reason, seriousness, will, self-overcoming that it has, then there will be a shortage in an other direction. Culture and the state - one should not deceive oneself in this - are antagonists. The one prospers at the expense of the other’. Thus ‘the rise of the ‘Reich’ signifies one thing above all, a displacement of the centre of gravity away from Germany’.
‘Nothing as proud and hopeful as our own age has ever existed before […] In 1871 the world was put to rights with the founding of Bismarck’s Reich and this fact abolished all pessimistic philosophising’.
‘The only culture I believe in is French culture and I consider all that is called culture elsewhere in Europe - to say nothing of German culture - a mere misconception […] Wherever Germany’s influence extends, it corrupts culture.
‘So far I have had very little enthusiasm for the German essence, but even less do I wish to keep this “magnificent” race pure. On the contrary, on the contrary’.
He calls himself ‘a very good European’, ‘He who recognises values which he rates a hundred times higher than the welfare of the ‘fatherland’, of society, of blood-relations - values which are international and know no native country or race - such a man would be a hypocrite if he sought to play the patriot’.
He writes, ‘What of our fatherland! Our helm wants to travel out and away, towards our children’s land’.
‘It seems to me that Germany for the last fifteen years has become a regular school of stupefaction: Water, rubbish, and filth, far and wide - that is what it looks like from a distance […] However much it may bristle with arms like a hedgehog, I no longer have any admiration for it. It represents the most stupid, most depraved and most mendacious form of the German spirit that there has ever been - and what absurdities has not this spirit dared to perpetrate!’
The Germans were ‘lying racial cheats, ‘ and ‘rabble’.
‘Does man have no higher duty than to the state? It may be that a man who sees his highest duty in serving the state really knows no higher duties but this is a relapse into stupidity; there are men and duties existing beyond this - and one of the duties is to destroy stupidity in all its forms, and therefore in this form too. There is something beyond the welfare of a state. . . ‘
‘This nation has deliberately made itself stupid for practically a thousand years. Germany counts more and more as Europe’s flatland […] The moment that Germany rises as a great power, France gains a new importance as a cultural power […] What the higher schools of Germany achieve is in fact a brutal breaking-in with the aim of making, in the least possible time, numberless young men fit to be utilised, utilised to the full and used up, in the state service’.
‘I am myself now working on a memorandum for the European courts with a view to forming an anti-German league’.
He speaks of, ‘bitter, old-maidenlike Germany’ and grumbles that ‘Goethe was always offensive to Germans. He had honest admirers only among Jewesses’.
And, inevitably, he homes in on music, ‘I will never admit that a German can know what music means’.
‘Those who we call German musicians, especially the greatest among them, are foreigners: Slavs, Croats, Italians, Netherlanders - or Jews’.
German taste is soon equated with the Wagner cult, ‘When I last visited Germany, I found German taste exerting itself to grant equal rights to Wagner and to the most popular rubbish. Wagner is a sickness and has even made music sick’ and the Germans have deceived themselves about him and his music, ‘The Germans have constructed a Wagner for themselves whom they can venerate’.
Again, ‘The German is foreign to liberality and kindness. The world and especially “Germania” I find increasingly repugnant. The Germans understand nothing, they are insensitive’. Nietzsche took more and more to reading French in preference to German, ‘German books remind me of an untidy bedroom where you trip over things every time you take a step. The Germans are bad’.
‘We must remember that Wagner was a young man when Hegel and Schelling were seducing men’s spirits; that he had guessed and grabbed with his hands the one and only thing that Germans take seriously - “the idea” - that is to say, something obscure, uncertain, and full of intimations; that among the Germans clarity is an objection and logic a refutation’.
‘Wagner’s art requires one thing only -Teutons. Definition of a Teuton submission and long legs’.
He is not afraid to say that ‘The Germans are the most retarded civilised nation in Europe’ and , in fact, insists that ‘it is a part of my ambition to be considered a disdainer of the Germans par excellence. My mistrust of the German character I expressed even when I was twenty-six’ (and he did, writing, ‘anyone who has to live among the Germans suffers badly from the infamous greyness of their life and sense, their crudity, their dullness and oafishness, their awkwardness in delicate relationships and even more their envy and a certain deceitfulness and uncleanness in their character’) - ‘The Germans seem impossible to me. The Germans are canaille - how one lowers oneself when one associates with Germans, the Germans have no notion of how vulgar they are; but that is the superlative of vulgarity - they are not even ashamed of being merely Germans’. He adds, I seek among them for some sign of tact, of délicatesse in relation to me but in vain. From Jews, yes; from Germans never yet’.
‘I have given the Germans the most profound books they have. This is reason enough for the Germans not to understand a single word’.
‘Against the Germans I here advance on all fronts. You will have need no complaints about “ambiguity”. This utterly irresponsible race which has on its conscience all the great disasters of civilisation and at all decisive moments in history has something else on its mind […] now has “the Reich” on its mind - this backsliding into petty state politics and cultural atomism - at a moment when for the first time the great question of values is being posed. There has never been a more important moment in history but who would be aware of that?’
Even in his final madness Nietzsche didn’t forget his hatred of the Germans. In a letter to Burckhardt he wrote, ‘Last year I was crucified by the German doctors in a very long and drawn-out manner’ and in others he wrote to most of the courts of Europe telling them that he would be on his way to Rome on the following Tuesday and instructing them to be there to meet with him and the Pope. He sent a note to this effect to the Vatican telling them to expect him. There was one exception to this general invitation and that was the Hohernzollerns. He advised the courts of the other German princes to have nothing to do with them.
Of course a note should be added once again in respect of mirrors. Where Nietzsche is anti-German and pro-Jewish, Wagner is precisely the opposite.
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Following Hitler’s example, important members of the party came to visit the archive. Alfred Rosenberg, often called the philosopher of Nazism, a party member as early as 1919, had impressed Hitler because he was qualified. He had done what Hitler had failed to do, get into a college of architecture. He was made editor of the ‘Völkischer Beobachter’. Hitler also appreciated his unrelenting anti-semitism and anti-Bolshevism. With Hitler as prop he remained the main race theorist of Nazism and was accepted as an expert in foreign affairs. He wrote relentlessly, his magnum opus being ‘The Myth of the Twentieth Century’. This epic of some 700 pages sold half a million copies although Hitler was said to have tried it and failed. Schirach commented that Rosenberg was ‘a man who sold more copies of a book no one ever read than any other author’.
Fritz Zeickel was another visitor. He had started out in a factory but worked his way up to become Gauleiter of Thuringia where he was renowned for his sadism. At the height of his power he was appointed as chief organiser of slave labour under the Third Reich. Then there was Balder von Shirack, a misguided romantic whose mother was American. He told his American guards at Nuremberg that he had espoused anti-semitism after reading a book by Henry Ford called ‘The Eternal Jew’. Schirack became head of the Nazi youth movement and was later to become the hated Gauleiter of Vienna. Another visitor was Hans Frank, the head of the Nazi judiciary who wrote that ‘the National Socialist ideology is the foundation of all laws’. He became Bavarian Minister of Justice, Reichsminister without Portfolio and President both of the Academy of Law and the German Bar Association. He was Hitler’s personal lawyer and later became governor of Poland where his equity shone through in such statements as, ‘The Poles shall become the slaves of the Third Reich’. Schirer called him an ‘intellectual gangster’ and an ‘icy, efficient, ruthless, bloodthirsty man’. Another visitor was Wilhelm Frick who Elizabeth had courted from the earliest days of Nazism. A dull bureaucrat, Frick was Hitler’s dog and Hitler is famous for his love of dog’s. Slavishly loyal, he accepted all sorts of unpleasant jobs that others refused. He was leader of the party in the Reichstag where he had been responsible for pushing through the Nuremberg laws against the Jews, communists and social democrats. This was the kind of visitor that Elizabeth welcomed with open arms.
She was now near the centre of power. From her secure position in Weimar she kept up a stream of propaganda on behalf of her fascist friends. In 1934, on June 14th, Hitler flew to Venice for a meeting with Mussolini. Dressed in a raincoat and felt hat, he looked insignificant beside Il Duce who sported a uniform and all his fascist regalia. The talks were not a success. Elisabeth sent each of them a telegram, ‘The spirit of Nietzsche hovers over this meeting of the greatest statesmen of Europe’. To which she got replies, gratefully thanking her for her kind wishes and confirming that they had felt the spirit of Nietzsche hovering over them during their conversations. They told her that they had spoken of their admiration for Nietzsche and their respect for her as they made a boat trip to the Lido. A touch of mockery and a smile or two.
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On his return from the Venice trip, Hitler made another visit to Weimar and to an Elizabeth who, at 88 could no longer be ignored. He stayed at the Hotel Elephant in the Marktplatz. A huge crowd was there to see the dictator as he made his way from the hotel to the archive. He stepped out of the vestibule and into his black Mercedes which was facing left. He sat down waving to the adoring crowds as the car moved off and turned left into the Frauenstrasse. He would have seen the Goethe House immediately in front of him with its rows of fourteen windows in two tiers and driven slowly past Schillerstrasse on the right and the White Swan restaurant on the left. Then on past the Wielandplatz with its statue of the author, and right down the Sleubenstrasse and first left into the Humboltstrasse. Crossing the Trierstrasse, he would have continued slowly on up the hill to the archive which is at the top of the street on the right. A journey of minutes only.
She was waiting at the door of the villa with a deferential little group of visitors from around the world in a semi-circle behind her. She revelled in the meeting, grinning under her white lace cap while he, also enjoying himself, did a kind of dance in front of her something like, perhaps, the little dance he did in front of that railway carriage at Versailles before accepting a quite different kind of surrender. At least, in the photograph his arms and legs are blurred. A man in the crowd was impressed, ‘So in the olden days might the great mother have greeted her great son. So might a prophet have received a hero, a great man the holy flame of a watchful priestess. No one who saw it will ever forget how the man to whom the whole world looks with the liveliest interest took his leave of the elegant old lady as they both stood in the bright sunshine’. On this occasion Elizabeth had a couple of presents for her mentor; the stick which Nietzsche had used on his walks in the mountains of the Engadine and, just to be consistent, a copy of the anti-semitic petition which Förster had presented to Bismarck 50 years before. Hitler had a very nice present for her too, access to his personal bank account.
Nietzsche had been resurrected and placed on a pedestal in a world he would have hated. Was he laughing somewhere at the way fate had treated him? He unwittingly inspired so much that is second rate, so many littlenesses eating into a corpus still vibrant with the life of the mind. All making a living, raising to the top in the world’s estimation by feeding off a body that refuses to die, that continues to give life, at second hand, to so many who end the lives of so many.
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Today the Hotel Elephant is still there in the Weimar Marktplatz. Not at all a pushy building, it is easy to miss at first glance but, once inside, the pushiness almost hits you in the face. No longer as it was when visited by Goethe’s Lotte whose appraising glance ‘took in the starched mull curtains at the two windows, the gilt-framed console mirror, rather full and tarnished, between them; the two white-covered beds, sharing a little canopy, and the remaining conveniences of the bedchamber. The wall adorned with a copper-plate engraving and the well waxed floor that shone with cleanliness’.
That was in October 1816. In 1937 Fritz Zeickel wrote to the Chancellor to let him know that the hotel was about to fall to the ground. Naturally Hitler ordered a complete rebuild. He called on Hermann Giesler to do the job and gave him fairly detailed instructions. He wanted a hotel that ‘demonstrates our feelings about life’. When the work was finished Hitler expressed satisfaction. You would know none of this today. In one of the corridors are memorabilia and pictures of all the honoured guests in the long history of the building. There are Bach, Goethe and Schiller, Thomas Mann and Von Weizsacker who had other problems. Kohl and Gensher and Vogel and, let’s see, Lilli Palmer. Wagner is there, of course, as everywhere in this story. Do you notice a gap in this list? A certain skating around the edges?
From Weimar all traces of Nazism have been cleared away. Shops selling reproductions of old photographs of the town have hundreds of scenes of the place but among all this nostalgia there is no hint of a swastika on flag or armband. On the balcony of the famous National Theatre are the flagpoles from which the Nazi insignia flew for all those years but are now gone. Perhaps the old people sitting warming themselves in the afternoon sun may remember a thing or two. Perhaps those famous statues of Goethe and Schiller, if they could speak, would have something to say. Incidentally, one of the attractions on its modern stage is ‘Fiddler on the Roof’.
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Resurrections come in peculiar forms. Elizabeth was far from being the only actor in Nietzsche’s posthumous literary world. In 1951 another name was added to the list of books written by Nietzsche but this time, one he had written while mad, after his attack in Turin and while he was in the mental institution in Jena. It is called ‘My Sister and I’. If the story is true, then it is his final book, his last will and testament, and has to take the place of Ecce Homo, itself a book often dismissed because written by a man who was on the verge of madness.
This new volume was published in New York and authenticated by no less a scholar than Dr Walter K. Stewart, ‘an expert on Goethe and nineteenth century German literature,’ and by the noted Nietzsche scholar, A. K. Placzek. How it came to see the light of day is a little too much like a detective mystery, like one of those complicated murders that take place in an Oxford college. A certain Oscar Levy received a communication from a young American journalist in London requesting a meeting to discuss a newly discovered work by the philosopher Nietzsche, a work, moreover, that is as much autobiographical as philosophical. They met the following day but the young man failed to bring the manuscript with him. It was in the hands of an ex-clergyman who was then in Canada where he had an interest in a rubber concern. Not totally inappropriate considering the scandalous nature of the revelations which the document was supposed to contain.
This young man told a fascinating story. He had met the wife of this ex-clergyman who happened to be travelling on the same transatlantic liner to England. Weeks later he was contacted and asked to assist in a life threatening venture involving the woman, something to do with his helping her to return to Canada and which involved threats to his life. In return he was offered the manuscript which would be sent to him just as soon as the woman was safely in Montreal.
And how did this ex-clergyman get his hands on such valuable material. Another story. Soon after his entry into the asylum at Jena, Nietzsche decided to write one last book. Thus, although his faculties seemed to have deserted him because of his inability to make any kind of sense verbally, he could still write. He knew that Elizabeth had suppressed his last work, Ecce Homo, and that his mother was under her thumb (‘for what extraordinary reason is it so frowned on by my family and withheld from publication’) so he didn’t want to entrust the new book to either of them. Instead he chose an inmate of the asylum, a businessman who, he was told, was soon to be discharged. It was this man who had succeeded in smuggling in the pens, paper and ink which Nietzsche had needed to do the writing and who left the place with the manuscript tucked away in his coat and with Nietzsche’s instructions to get it to a publisher who would pay him handsomely for his troubles.
The man forgot both instructions and manuscript except to produce it every now and then and regale his friends with tales of the crazy Herr Professor who thought he was Jesus and Napoleon rolled into one. Finally he took it with him on a business trip to Canada where showed it to the ex-clergyman who was employing him in the rubber trade. On discovering that the man was interested in old books and manuscripts he produced his little treasure and was astonished to be offered a hundred dollars for it.
The ex-clergyman knew more philosophy than the businessman and proceeded to authenticate the manuscript. Already half convinced by the references to Jena and the mad professor, he checked the handwriting against published examples. Nietzsche’s writing is really quite distinctive and he was convinced. He checked the style and the contents and became even more convinced. Even so he kept the manuscript for a whole year before offering it to the young journalist as a reward for helping get his young wife, a treasure of more value to him than any manuscript, back to Montreal. The journalist then approached Oscar Levy to translate the manuscript for him. Levy asked to see the manuscript but his wish was not granted and he returned to New York unsatisfied.
Can you imagine his surprise when, over two years later, the same papers landed on his desk. He translated and published the piece telling us in his introduction that ‘the style is that of Ecce Homo’. All this in 1927. By the way, Levy’s family deny any and all of this. They may have been put off by the nature of the text which contains quantities of soft porn quite un-Nietzsche like, ‘I both loved and resented the wealth of warmth which Elizabeth brought to me in those unexpected hours of the night. I was usually in the midst of a sound sleep when she got into my bed, and thrilling as I found the ministration of her fat little fingers, it also meant that I was kept awake for hours and hours’. And elsewhere, ‘It first happened between Elizabeth and me during the night that our young brother Joseph died, though we had no idea that he was dying when she crept into my bed, pleading that it was cold where she was, and she knew how warm I always was. […] Suddenly I felt Elizabeth’s warm little hands in mine, her hissing little voice was in my ear, and I began feeling warm all over’.
Anyway things go from peculiar to more peculiar. Levy sent his translation to the publisher Samuel Roth, another Jew, who advertised it as forthcoming in the 1928 series of ‘Two Worlds Quarterly’. Roth was so highly thought of by his confrères that a petition was prepared against him with the signatures, amongst others of Lawrence, Hemmingway, Eliot and Mann. Roth had published other books incluuding, ‘I was Hitler’s Doctor, a sequel to ‘Lady Chatterly’s Lover’ and another entitled, ‘Jesus Must Live: An Account of the Persecution of the World by Israel on all the Frontiers of Civilization’ which he had written himself. Sadly, however, his offices were visited by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. They were after James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ but grabbed a quantity of other material including the Nietzsche. This American Society then proceeded to a complete and irreversible burning of the books in exactly the year that such things were going on elsewhere. Roth then, presumably dismayed by such illiterate activities, retired from publishing for some years leaving his documents stored in a warehouse. Much later, after the war and after Oscar Levy was so very conveniently no longer of this world, he returned to publishing and began to take an inventory of the stuff he had stored away. And, yes, he came across ‘the brittle, vermin-eaten carbon copies of the translation’ which had been ‘further mutilated by careless handling’. He set to work to reconstruct the text setting several people to work on it. He even inserted footnotes ‘hastily and without corroboration which caused much misunderstanding’.
As if all of Elizabeth’s efforts had not been enough, we have this other footnote of forgery to deal with alongside hers. This time one which she would not have countenanced. It is perhaps nice to think that she didn’t have a monopoly on recreations of her brother’s image. Which brings us back to the main plot.
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Elizabeth’s health was now failing. In her eighty-ninth year she had an operation on her eye. While recovering in hospital she spent her time re-reading ‘Mein Kampf’, ‘Those deeply strong perceptions and insights into the new creation of the German character took hold of me. I would advise any invalid to immerse himself in this wonderful book and to find strength and courage there to oppose the ordeals of fate’.
By then the Nietzsche Archive was firmly established, along with Bayreuth, as the twin centres of Nazi propaganda. But there remained one aim which Elizabeth had yet to accomplish. She still had to gain real recognition for Förster. She felt that his great service to Germany had gone unrecognised and was determined to correct it. It was now that she started to nag Hitler to recognised the man whose ideals had done so much to shape her own and beg him to raise her dear husband to an honoured place with other Nazi heroes alongside her brother. Of course she succeeded. Hitler agreed that Förster had earned the right to be buried under German soil and sent Uberbahnsturmführer Alfons Sachs or Shacks and gruppenführer Henrik Himmler to visit the grave in the Paraguayan jungle were Förster’s body had been lain to rest nearly fifty years before and sprinkle the holy German soil over it. Like husband, like brother only the husband had never begged to be excused such ceremony. A new marble stone was erected over his body.
Hitler had now granted recognition to both halves of Elizabeth’s existence and raised both of them from the dead to take their places among the heroes of Nazi mythology. How happy she must have been bustling about the archive in her eighties. Her brother was the famous thinker of the ruling class, her husband had been accepted as one of the fathers of their creed and the purity of the Aryan race seemed to be assured for ever. She never saw the things which would have made her really happy the final solution of the Jewish problem, the glorification of the race of blond heroes, the rule of Nazism over almost the whole of Europe, the raising of the Nordic myths to be the music which echoed through the age. We may rub our hands for just a second or two. She didn’t die as happy as she might have died although she did see her nation’s solution to the problem of the Herero tribe in 1904. They were simply wiped out in a sort of practice run. ‘Wrote General Lothar von Trotha, ‘I believe that the nation as such should be annihilated’ and again, ‘I find it most appropriate that the nation should perish’. An officer wrote in his diary that ‘nothing living was to be spared’ and that ‘this dealt with the extermination of the whole tribe’.
She died on November 9th 1935 at the grand old age of eighty-nine. Her body was found fully clothed on her bed by her housekeeper, Frau Balandkenhahn. She had felt tired and had gone to take a nap. Her soul, having dwelt for so long in the Platonic ‘wholesome climate’, having been for so many years ‘in sympathy and harmony with the beauty of reason’, was now freed from the rigours of perception and went wherever it went. From there, maybe, she could have been forced to see the success and collapse of all her hopes. And even, perhaps, their more recent resurrection.
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In July 1945 the Americans had to give Weimar to the Red Army. They did so in the name of the allied troops that had entered the city three months before. On direct orders from Moscow the archive was sealed and remained unopened for nearly 50 years. Fifteen months later some of Elizabeth’s friends and supporters, men who had visited her at the Archive, were hanged in the gymnasium of Nuremberg jail after a trial which had lasted months and had stunned the world. Thirteen shallow steps to the scaffold. Thirteen coils in the knot of the noose. Here they come: Ribbentrop who had a last wish ‘that German unity should remain and that an understanding between East and West should come about, and peace for the world’. Keitel, ‘I call on the Almighty to have mercy on the German people. Over two million went to their deaths before me. I now follow my sons. All for Germany’. Kaltenbrunner who regretted that crimes were committed in which he had no part. Alfred Rosenberg, the intellectual of Nazism, was almost at the point of collapse. Apart from answering to his name he said nothing. When a priest asked if he should pray for him he was told, ‘No, thank you’. Wilhelm Frick remained silent. Hans Frank, dressed in a snappy tweed jacket, told his captors, ‘I am grateful for the mild sentence I have been given. I pray God to receive me mercifully’. Steicher, ‘Heil Hitler. Now I go to God’. Fritz Sauckel, Gauleiter of Thuringia who had read the oration at Elizabeth’s funeral, ‘I die innocent’. Jodl, ‘I salute you, my Germany’. Last Seyss-Inquart limped up to the scaffold, ‘I hope that this execution is the last tragedy of the Second World War’. Tragedy?
Goering had escaped execution by swallowing an ampoule of potassium cyanide earlier in the day. Echoes of other suicides, of Förster and of the führer both of whom he had so admired.
There is no official record of what happened to these eleven bodies. Their last sighting was in two vans with jeep escorts driving in the direction of Fürth where there was an airport. An official communiqué said that they ‘had been cremated and the ashes disposed of’. Some believe that those vans went to Dachau which was an easy drive from Nuremberg and their cargo cremated in the ovens there. After all, even in their final moments, only Kaltenbrunner had shown any awareness that, just perhaps, a crime had been committed.
The communist regime in East Germany fell apart in November 1989 and the ban under which the archive had suffered was lifted. Suddenly the musty old place was opened to public view and the fresh air of a different world gusted through its imposing portals blowing light into dark corners. Here was the second coming of a slice of history which had been killed and interred for half a century. A great hoard of papers were opened to the public and that history could live again. The story of Elizabeth’s rewriting and orchestration of her brother’s work in the service of Europe’s dictators was open to view. The resurrection of this tomb in Weimar revealed the body of Elizabeth’s labours lying in state and waiting for another death, this time at the hand of academics living beyond the outstretched fingers of Nazi ideology.