The Sister, the Forgery, and the Stolen Philosopher

Adolf Hitler kept a bust of Friedrich Nietzsche in his office. For decades that fact, and the regime's embrace of him, hung over Nietzsche's name like a verdict. Clancy Martin, who has translated Thus Spoke Zarathustra, calls the association what it is: a distortion, and one with a specific author. The man whose philosophy the Nazis claimed had, in Martin's account, "loathed German nationalism and he loathed the emerging National Socialist Party." Understanding how a book that argues against everything the Nazis stood for became their favored text is a story about a sister, a forgery, and the cost of reading a philosopher through his worst interpreters.

The villain of the story is Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the philosopher's sister, and Martin does not soften the family history. Nietzsche, he says, "loathed his sister," who was married to "an anti-Semite by the name of Bernard Forster." Nietzsche himself "despised anti-Semitism," and "he loathed their views." The tragedy is that he collapsed into incapacity in 1889 and lived another eleven years unable to defend his own work, while Elisabeth took control of his archive. She outlived him by decades, and she spent them building a version of her brother that the man himself would have detested.

The Will to Power Was a Forgery

Elisabeth's central act of vandalism was a book Nietzsche never wrote. After his collapse, Elisabeth gathered his unpublished notes and edited them into a volume called The Will to Power, presenting it as a culminating work. Martin, drawing on his own teacher, the Nietzsche scholar Robert C. Solomon, explains why this was so deceptive. Solomon "always said that The Will to Power is like a series of cocktail napkins." These were not finished arguments. They were "random thoughts Nietzsche was jotting down as he was trying to think his way through some really tough stuff." Nietzsche took notes constantly as part of his method, and "there's a reason he didn't publish these things." Elisabeth published them anyway, arranged to suggest conclusions he had never committed to, and the resulting book "became a favorite text of Adolf Hitler's."

The specific idea they stole was the will to power, and Martin says no concept of Nietzsche's has been more confused. The popular image is of Nietzsche glorifying domination, "the will to dominate life or to dominate others." Martin's response is flat: "Nothing could be further from the truth." What Nietzsche actually meant, Martin argues, is the struggle of a person "to create something greater out of herself," the internal labor of self-overcoming. His example is his collaborator John Kaag wrestling a book on Nietzsche into existence through "writing and rewriting and reading and rereading," and through a painful reckoning with himself. That is the will to power. The Nazi reading inverted it, turning an idea about mastering oneself into a license for mastering others.

Zarathustra Against Contempt and Fatherlands

What makes the distortion so perverse is that the text Nietzsche did finish and publish, Zarathustra, argues directly against the things the Nazis claimed him for. Martin points to the very portrait of Zarathustra that opens the book: a saint observes that there is "no contempt in his expression," no disgust or loathing. This matters, Martin says, precisely because the Nazi appropriation led people to imagine "a kind of a contemptuous worldview or a looking down on other human beings from this position of power." The opposite is true. Zarathustra "has nothing but love for his fellow human beings," and comes not to dominate but "to help us remember what is best about ourselves." A philosophy of contempt cannot be built from a book whose hero is defined by its absence.

Nietzsche even wrote the rejection into the text as a direct line, not an implication. In a passage about new tables of values, Zarathustra turns explicitly against nationalism. Martin reads it as Nietzsche disowning, in advance, exactly the movement that would later claim him: "We don't want fatherlands. We want the land of our children." Martin notes that Nietzsche is here repudiating both the National Socialist emphasis on the fatherland and his old friend Richard Wagner's version of the same idea. He saw how dangerous the concept was. He wrote against it in 1883. His sister spent the next four decades, in Martin's telling, burying that line under a forgery.

How to Read Nietzsche Honestly

The lesson Martin draws is about how to read honestly, and it cuts in two directions. The first is simply factual: the Nazi Nietzsche is a manufactured product, and knowing the history of The Will to Power lets a reader set the caricature aside. The second is subtler. Nietzsche believed philosophy should be read through the life and intentions of its author, which means the antidote to the distortion is the same method Nietzsche championed: read what the man actually wrote and finished, attend to what he actually despised, and refuse to let an interpreter, even a family member, speak in his place. What remains, when you strip away Elisabeth's edits and Hitler's bust, is a book that loathed nationalism, rejected antisemitism, and located all real power in the struggle to overcome oneself. The distortion was real and consequential. So is the text that survives it, for anyone willing to read it without the forger's hand on the page.