Nietzsche Archive
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The institution for keeping and publishing Nietzsche's papers and records, founded by his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche in Naumburg in 1894 and moved to Weimar in 1896; from 1897 it was housed in the Villa Silberblick, where the ailing Nietzsche lived. Monopolising the papers, it promoted compilations such as The Will to Power as Nietzsche's main work and forged letters to dress him up as a nationalist; from the 1920s it drew close to Mussolini and the Nazis, and Hitler visited it several times from 1932. The Soviet occupation authorities closed it in 1945, and its holdings later became the basis of the Colli–Montinari critical edition.
In depth
Why did one archive become the centre of Nietzsche's reception?
After his mental collapse in Turin in January 1889 Nietzsche could no longer write until his death in 1900. In those eleven years his name suddenly became famous in the German-speaking world. Who held his papers, what was published and in what order, and how his life was told came to decide "who Nietzsche was". The person who almost monopolised that power was his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and her instrument was the Nietzsche Archive.
Elisabeth had returned to Germany in the autumn of 1893 after the failure of the "pure Germanic" settlement she and her husband, the antisemitic agitator Bernhard Förster, had tried to found in Paraguay. Nietzsche himself had despised this brother-in-law and antisemitism. Taking as models the Goethe and Schiller Archive in Weimar and Cosima Wagner's Bayreuth movement, she set out to collect her brother's records and seize control of their interpretation.
How was the archive founded and run?
On 2 February 1894, her mother's sixty-eighth birthday, Elisabeth unveiled archive rooms fitted out in the family home in Naumburg. She took over the management of the papers from Heinrich Köselitz (Peter Gast) and Franz Overbeck, recovered manuscripts held by others and bought up her brother's letters for large sums. In December 1895 she bought from her mother and the guardian all rights to her brother's writings. The archive moved to Weimar in 1896, and in July 1897 settled in the Villa Silberblick, bought by the Nietzsche admirer Meta von Salis. That summer the ailing Nietzsche, who needed nursing, was moved there too, and he died there in August 1900.
Elisabeth commissioned the Belgian artist Henry van de Velde to remodel the villa and unveiled the new Jugendstil interior on Nietzsche's birthday in 1903. The archive became a base for the "New Weimar" art movement dreamed of by Harry Graf Kessler and others, and organised a kind of cult, showing the sick Nietzsche to guests and selling his portraits and busts. In 1908 a large donation from the Swedish banker Ernest Thiel set up the "Nietzsche Archive Foundation", but real power remained with Elisabeth to the end.
How did the archive change Nietzsche?
The biggest problem was editing. In 1901 the archive had the Horneffer brothers and Köselitz put together The Will to Power from Nietzsche's posthumous notes, and in 1906 Elisabeth and Köselitz issued a heavily altered and enlarged version. The archive promoted this compilation, which arranged 1,067 posthumous fragments by theme under the title of a book Nietzsche had once planned and then abandoned, as his "main prose work"; in the German Wikipedia's words, it had an effect that today looks questionable and distorting of Nietzsche's work. It was a book made by the archive, not a book Nietzsche wrote.
Elisabeth also spread a picture of Nietzsche to her liking. In the archive's official accounts he appeared as a healthy patriot, a loving brother and a Prussian devoted to his fatherland, and to this end she even forged letters of his. Nietzsche's criticism of Germany was presented as the disappointed love of a true patriot, and the "will to power" was given a military sense. Former collaborators such as Rudolf Steiner criticised her publicly from 1900 for not understanding her brother's thought at all, and Overbeck's circle in Basel formed a "counter-archive" against her. Nietzsche scholarship today largely agrees that these criticisms were justified.
How did the archive draw close to fascism and the Nazis?
After the First World War Elisabeth took the side of the opposition to the Weimar Republic. She joined the German National People's Party, defended the "stab-in-the-back" legend and backed Paul von Hindenburg in the presidential election of 1925. From 1923 she courted Oswald Spengler as board member and speaker, riding the current of the Conservative Revolution. From around 1925 she cultivated Benito Mussolini, himself an admirer of Nietzsche, and received financial support from him, and the archive praised fascism as a spiritual movement in Nietzsche's succession.
In early 1932, on the occasion of the German premiere of the play The Hundred Days co-written by Mussolini, Elisabeth met Adolf Hitler for the first time, and Hitler visited the archive several times afterwards. Elisabeth wrote letters welcoming Hitler's accession to power enthusiastically, and Hitler and dignitaries of the Nazi state attended her funeral in 1935. That same year Spengler left the board because of the archive's political tendency. Her cousin Max Oehler then led the archive and spread a Nazi image of Nietzsche, and the regime funded a Nietzsche memorial hall. Yet on Nietzsche's centenary in 1944 all that was left was a half-finished hall and a greeting telegram from Hitler delivered by his stand-in Alfred Rosenberg. Around 1937 archive staff such as Karl Schlechta established internally Elisabeth's forgeries and interventions, but this led to no public discussion.
What became of the archive after the war?
The Soviet military administration, which took over Weimar in July 1945, froze the archive's accounts. Max Oehler was arrested at the beginning of December, the building was soon closed and sealed, and its holdings were confiscated the following year and then returned. In East Germany the foundation survived formally, and for a time the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch was listed on its board. From 1950 the holdings were attached to the Goethe and Schiller Archive, and the foundation was dissolved in 1956.
In the GDR Nietzsche was a practically banned author. Even so, his manuscripts were put in order and opened to Western researchers, and the East German heads of the archive supported the new critical edition published from the 1960s by the Italians Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. The manuscripts that Elisabeth had monopolised and distorted became the basis of the edition that corrected that distortion. Today the Villa Silberblick is a museum of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, and Nietzsche's literary papers were inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2025.