Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Förster-Nietzsche (10 July 1846 – 8 November 1935) was the sister of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the creator of the Nietzsche Archive in 1894.

Förster-Nietzsche was two years younger than her brother. Their father was a Lutheran pastor in the German village of Röcken bei Lützen. The two children were close during their childhood and early adult years. However, they grew apart in 1885 when Elisabeth married Bernhard Förster, a former high school teacher who had become a prominent German nationalist and antisemite. Friedrich Nietzsche did not attend their wedding.

Förster-Nietzsche and her husband created an unsuccessful colony, Nueva Germania, in Paraguay in 1887. Her husband died of suicide in 1889. Förster-Nietzsche continued to run the colony until she returned to Germany in 1893.

As Sister of Friedrich Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche’s mental collapse occurred in 1889 (he died in 1900), and upon Elisabeth’s return in 1893 she found him an invalid whose published writings were beginning to be read and discussed throughout Europe. Förster-Nietzsche took a leading role in promoting her brother, especially through the publication of a collection of Nietzsche’s fragments under the name of The Will to Power. For her collective work on the Nietzsche archives, she was eventually nominated four times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. After Nietzsche’s death she turned his home into achieve. When Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nietzsche Archive received financial support and publicity from the government, in return for which Förster-Nietzsche bestowed her brother’s considerable prestige on the regime.

In the 1950s it was claimed by Nietzsche’s new editors and translators such as Walter Kaufmann that Nietzsche’s work had been falsely edited by Elisabeth to highlight racist and eugenicist themes, but this account has been the subject of debate in recent scholarship. An alternative theory exonerates Elisabeth and places the distortion of Nietzsche’s works in the hands of the Nazis themselves.

Death-

Förster-Nietzsche died on 8 November 1935. Her funeral in 1935 was attended by Hitler and several high-ranking German officials.

Birth Chart of Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Förster-Nietzsche –