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, t Theres… 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 Förster-Nietzsche married Bernhard Förster, a former high school teacher who had become a prominent German nationalist and antisemite. Nietzsche did not attend their wedding. Förster-Nietzsche and her husband created an unsuccessful colony, Nueva Germania, in Paraguay in 1887. Her husband committed suicide in 1889. Förster-Nietzsche continued to run the colony until she returned to Germany in 1893 where she found her brother to be an invalid whose published writings were beginning to be read and discussed throughout Europe. Adolf Hitler attended her funeral in 1935. In the 1950s, it was claimed by Nietzsche's new editors and translators such as Walter Kaufmann that Nietzsche's work had been edited by Förster-Nietzsche to highlight racist and eugenicist themes, but this account has been the subject of debate in recent scholarship. An alternative theory exonerates Förster-Nietzsche and places the distortion of Nietzsche's works in the hands of the Nazis themselves. Therese Elisabeth Alexandra Nietzsche was born in 1846 to Carl Ludwig Nietzsche and Franziska Nietzsche (née Oehler). She was named after three princesses with whom Carl Ludwig Nietzsche had worked. Carl Ludwig was a Lutheran pastor in the German village of Röcken bei Lützen. Franziska was a rustic. Carl Ludwig died in 1849. Franziska had no prospects and her husband's pension was insufficient. She chose to rely on the charity of Carl Ludwig's mother, Erdmuthe, and the more distinguished prospects which she could open for the children. When remembering her early life, Förster-Nietzsche would suggest that they may have cried Bernhard Förster planned to create a settlement in the New World and had found a site in Paraguay which he thought would be suitable. The couple persuaded fourteen German families to join them in the colony, to be called Nueva Germania, and the group left Germany for South America on 15 February 1887. The colony did not thrive. The German methods of farming were not suitable to the land, illness ran rampant, and transportation to the colony was slow and difficult. Faced with mounting debts, Förster committed suicide by poisoning on 3 June 1889. Four years later, Förster-Nietzsche left the colony forever and returned to Germany. The colony still exists as a district of the San Pedro department. 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. She was first nominated in 1908 by German philosopher Hans Vaihinger of Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. The Nobel Committee acknowledge the significance of her nomination and the publication of a comprehensive biography of her brother, Friedrich, to which they commented: "It contains a wealth of material for knowledge of Nietzsche's life and development, but is reasonably uncritical and anecdotal and partly extremely biased towards Nietzsche and partly biased very biased towards people who have been displeasing to the author." In 1916, she was nominated jointly be Vaihinger and Harald Hjärne, a member of the Swedish Academy. In the deliberations, Nobel Committee member Per Hallström expressed that "the Nietzsche biography in question, which would constitute the actual entry document for the Nobel Prize for [Förster-Nietzsche], can hardly be regarded as anything more than an interesting, but by no means objectively and critically prepared or arranged, collection of works. It can also be questioned whether Nietzsche's person and activities may be considered to represent such a cultural value that is in some way connected to the purpose of the Nobel Foundation." Furthermore, Hallström noted that Vaihinger's proposal "seems to be primarily concerned with awarding the prize to the Nietzsche archive in Weimar." The Swedish Academy though has the authority to award a Nobel Prize to any institution or association', in this case there is hardly any reason to do so. In 1917, she was nominated once again by Vaihinger but the Nobel Committee immediately put her name aside, commenting: "Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche should also now, as [we] advised last year, be left aside, because her purely literary merits, whatever one may think of her activities for the preservation of her brother's memory, are not of any higher order." In 1923, Förster-Nietzsche received her last of the four Nobel nominations from classical philologist Georg Goetz, professor of German literature Ernst Bertram, historian Kurt Breysig and philosopher Hans Vaihinger. Upon receiving the recommendation, the Nobel Committee immediately withdrew her name in creating their shortlist, commenting that "this proposal, which probably originated rather from admiration and piety for Nietzsche, than from an every-higher appreciation for her sister's beautiful biography of him, has not been considered to be worthy of recommendation, – now as before."