Forgotten Fatherland was published by Macmillan in 1992, Macintyre’s first book. Elisabeth Nietzsche (Friedrich’s sister) married Bernhard Förster, a virulent anti-Semite and Aryan supremacist, in 1885. Together they conceived a plan to found a colony of racially pure Germans in the jungle of Paraguay — far from the “Jewish contamination” of modern Germany.
Nueva Germania was established in 1887. Fourteen German families hacked a settlement out of the Paraguayan forest. The colony was a disaster from the start: the soil was poor, the climate hostile, tropical diseases ravaged the colonists, and Förster’s financial management was fraudulent. He poisoned himself in a San Bernardino hotel room in 1889. Elisabeth returned to Germany, where she would spend the next decades appropriating and distorting her brother’s philosophy to serve the cause of German nationalism and, eventually, Nazism.
Macintyre traveled to Paraguay in the early 1990s and found that Nueva Germania still existed — a small, impoverished community where blond, German-speaking descendants of the original colonists still farmed the land their great-grandparents cleared. The book interweaves the historical narrative with Macintyre’s own journey to find the colony’s remnants.
Collecting Forgotten Fatherland
First edition (Macmillan, London, 1992): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $40–$100
- Signed first: $80–$200