Nietzsche's Reception and Misreadings in the Twentieth Century

Nietzsche's mental collapse in Turin in January 1889 left him incapacitated for the remaining eleven years of his life, cared for first by his mother, Franziska Nietzsche, until her death in 1897, and thereafter by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who had earlier moved to Paraguay with her husband Bernhard Förster to found the short-lived, explicitly antisemitic and pan-German colony Nueva Germania in 1886, an episode Nietzsche himself viewed with open contempt and derision in his letters. Following her husband's suicide and the colony's collapse, Elisabeth returned to Germany, gained control of Nietzsche's literary estate, and in 1894 founded the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar, where she spent the following decades editing, selectively publishing, and in some cases altering her brother's unpublished notebooks and letters to soften or obscure his explicit, repeatedly stated contempt for antisemitism, German nationalism, and figures such as Richard Wagner's antisemitic circle, in order to fashion an image of Nietzsche more compatible with her own nationalist and racialist sympathies.