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They include Elisabeth Nietzsche, the sister of philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and the founder of a racially pure community in the jungles of Paraguay; Adam Worth, a legendary criminal mastermind of the s; and Josiah Harlan, an American who carved out a prominent place for himself in nineteenth-century Afghanistan. Macintyre's first book, Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche , details the life of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth and the ways in which she affected the life and writings of her brother.

As Macintyre explains in the book, Elisabeth not only destroyed Nietzsche's relationship with Lou Andreas Salome, a woman to whom he proposed marriage, but she herself married a rabid anti-Semite named Bernhard Forster. The Forsters traveled to Paraguay in to form an idealistic, "pure" Aryan community, but when it failed and Forster committed suicide, Elisabeth returned to Germany to take care of her brother, who by that time was seriously mentally ill.

Macintyre notes in Forgotten Fatherland that though Friedrich Nietzsche had already published several works of philosophy, he was not yet famous. Under Elisabeth's care—and with her revising his works so that they appeared to embrace fascism and anti-Semitism when originally they did not—Nietzsche's prestige began to increase.

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After his death, but still within the lifetime and influence of Elisabeth, his philosophy was adopted and used by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. Indeed, when Elisabeth died at the age of eighty-nine in , Hitler gave her a state funeral and wept over her casket. In addition to relating these events in Forgotten Fatherland , Macintyre also tells of his own journey to the remains of the Paraguayan colony that Elisabeth and her husband founded.

There, Simon Collier reported in the New York Times Book Review , "a handful of descendants of the original families still survived, still scraped a modest living from the poor soil, still spoke German with a thick Saxon accent and still preserved a residual notion of Aryan supremacy.

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George Steiner, reviewing Forgotten Fatherland in the New Yorker , praised Macintyre for linking these two aspects of Elisabeth Nietzsche's story together, calling it "a sparkling idea" that "yields vivid travel writing and information of a ghostly but fascinating sort. Adam Worth was the son of German-Jewish immigrants who came to America around Worth began his adult life honestly enough, working as a clerk in a store.

His criminal activities began after he enlisted with the Union Army at the outbreak of the Civil War. He fought and was wounded at the Battle of Bull Run , then found a way to be declared dead—freeing him to reenlist many times under assumed names and deserting each time after he collected the thousand dollar enlistment bounty.