Summary

Diski considers the life story of Friedrich and Elisabeth Nietzsche to be “as rich a tale of human relations and mental worlds as any reader or viewer could stomach” in “It Wasn’t Him, It Was Her” (197). Diski explains that Elisabeth was Friedrich’s younger sister and was “the living embodiment of everything the mad philosopher disdained” (197). Diski compares Elisabeth to a small creature who leeches food off of its host. Elisabeth altered the writings of her brother, but they have been restored. Some claim, however, that Friedrich’s name still needs to be cleared. Carol Diethe in Nietzsche’s Sister and the Will to Power believes that Elisabeth’s motives were a mix of an inadequate education and vengeance motivated in part by incestual desires.

Diethe writes and Diski quotes, “What would she have been like...