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Case file s114 · Literature and art · 1900
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1900
Friedrich Nietzsche: Nietzsche187a
Friedrich Nietzsche. Friedrich Hermann Hartmann. Public domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Died
25 August 1900
Place
Weimar, Germany
Field
philosopher, author · Literature and writing on the timeline
Legal tradition
German civil law · Civil law
Historical event
Rise of Nazism
Religion
Friedrich Nietzsche: Atheist and agnostic (recorded as 19th-century atheists, German atheists on Wikipedia)
Member of
Bonner Burschenschaft Frankonia (Wikidata)
Literature and artBurned papers and destroyed workIndustry and empireEuropeGermany

Nietzsche's sister took control of his papers while he was insane, published The Will to Power, and Hitler came to her funeral

Friedrich Nietzsche collapsed mentally in 1889. His sister Elisabeth had left for Paraguay in 1887, where she and her husband Bernhard Förster founded a German colony, Nueva Germania; Förster killed himself there on 3 June 1889. She returned in 1893 to find her brother an invalid whose books were starting to be read. She founded the Nietzsche Archive in 1894 and controlled his unpublished work. After he died in 1900 she published a collection of his notebook fragments under the title The Will to Power. Heidegger called her edition "partial, incomplete and arbitrarily ordered." In the 1950s editors and translators including Walter Kaufmann said she had edited the work to stress racist and eugenic themes; recent scholarship disputes how far she did so. After 1933 the archive received government funding, and she lent her brother's name to the regime. Hitler attended her funeral on 8 November 1935. Mazzino Montinari's critical edition of the 1970s replaced hers as the scholarly basis.

What the law took from it

The relative who controls the archive controls the meaning of the work, long after the author can object.

Sources
  1. Wikipedia (English)Encyclopedia

Cite as: celebrity.estate, “Nietzsche's sister took control of his papers while he was insane, published The Will to Power, and Hitler came to her funeral,” story s114, https://www.celebrity.estate/nietzsche-1900, updated 30 October 2026.

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Where this case sits

Literature and artBurned papers and destroyed workIndustry and empireEuropeCivil lawGermany