On June 3, 1889, a man named Bernhard Förster, who had settled a colony of Germans in deep Paraguay, mixed morphine with strychnine in a hotel room in the Paraguayan city of San Bernardino. He was 46 years old and his project of an Aryan colony with which he intended to Germanize the Guarani territory had just failed.
His widow, Elizabeth, reported that Förster, one of the most notorious anti-Semitic agitators in Germany, had died of natural causes. The newspapers of the time confirmed that he had committed suicide.
Elizabeth was faced with the debts generated by her husband’s racist dream and returned to Germany to take care of her brother Friedrich, who had suffered a mental breakdown in January 1889 and never recovered until his death. Elizabeth Förster, whose maiden name was Nietzsche, went on to take over the editing of the most influential German-language philosophical work of the late 19th century.
Anti-Semitic relations
Friedrich Nietzsche’s post-mortem links to Nazism and anti-Semitism were largely due to Elizabeth, who shared her husband’s racist ideology. Anti-Semitism was spreading across Central European countries in the last decades of the 19th century and permeated even music. Richard Wagner wrote an essay entitled “Judaism in Music,” in which he set out to prove that the Jews had poisoned German music. His operas posed the unity of the various German states in a single powerful political expression and claimed Germanness.
Both Wagner and Nietzsche must have had political relatives of undisguised racist ideology. Eva, Wagner’s daughter, married Houston Stewart Chamberlain, an English philosopher who came to propose Aryan supremacism and rubbed shoulders with the incipient Nazism (he died in 1927 and Hitler attended his funeral); while Elizabeth Nietzsche became Mrs. Bernhard Förster in 1885.
Förster, a schoolteacher born in Saxony, had a few years earlier garnered signatures for Chancellor Bismarck to expel Jews from Germany. His anti-Semitism cost him his teaching post in Berlin. His organization, the German People’s League, was said to be financed by the Hungarian nobility. “When the most degenerate nobility in the world, the Hungarian, belongs to a party, then one can say all is lost,” Nietzsche wrote to his sister.
Nueva Germania is born
They had not yet married when Förster traveled to South America in February 1883. It seemed that he was moving away from Elizabeth, that there would be no wedding and, more importantly for Friedrich, his sister would not join the anti-Semitic cause. The agitator had decided that if Germany did not rid itself of the Jews, then he would create an Aryan Germanic utopia. Even today it is unclear why he considered that a reservoir of Germanness would be located in the Paraguayan jungle.
One thing is certain: Paraguay was still struggling with the consequences of the Triple Alliance war, more than 10 years after its military defeat. It was a decimated country that had lost a large part of its male population and was leasing land to foreigners in order to generate foreign currency.
Förster spent two years in Paraguay, he traveled from one end to the other, studied the climate and studied the alternatives for farming. The chosen place was located 250 kilometers from Asunción, on the Aguaray-Guazú River. The colony, which Förster decided to call Nueva Germania, was to settle there. President Bernardino Caballero approved the project and the seed of disaster was sown in the legal process: Caballero leased the land and Förster announced in Germany that he was selling lots.
By this time, the agitator had gone back for Elizabeth. They married in May 1885 and recruited 14 settler families. The racism of the project implied not only colonizing Paraguayan soil, but also that there would be no contact with the natives. In contrast to the miscegenation of the Spanish conquest and the assimilation of German immigrants in the United States, Förster found it unacceptable to mix with the people of Paraguay.
The only face-to-face meeting between Nietzsche and his brother-in-law took place before the couple’s departure to South America. It was on October 15, 1885, on the philosopher’s birthday, who noted: “Dr. Förster has not been unpleasant to me; he has something kind and noble in him and seems to be perfectly suited for action. I was surprised to see how many things he solved continuously and how easy it was for him; in that aspect I am quite different. His opinions are not exactly to my taste, as is logical.”
Despite his misgivings and Overbeck’s warnings, he contributed money to the colony. Exactly 300 German marks: Elizabeth did not give up hope that her brother would travel to the distant South American country.
Settled in Paraguay
Elizabeth and her husband traveled to Paraguay in February 1886. In fact, the settlers of Nueva Germania were excited with the idea of living from their work on the land, but the scarcity of water did not favor agriculture. There were no good roads either, and the Förster-Nietzsche couple lived the high life in their residence, Försterhof: neither of them tilled the land and they had 2 couples of settlers as servants, who in turn had 8 Paraguayans as laborers.
The racist leader, blinded by the Aryan delirium that his own colonists did not share, did not want to establish links with other colonies.
The disaster had not yet been consummated when Friedrich was sent a gold ring with his name engraved on it. In a letter to his mother, the author of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” made it clear that “I have nothing to do with Förster’s idiosyncrasies, let alone his tendencies.” A year later, his brother-in-law’s correspondence pressured him for a loan of 4,500 German marks to cover the expenses of Nueva Germania.
A Nietzsche on the verge of mental deterioration noted that “I am sane enough to be careful not to get involved in any way with that anti-Semitic enterprise” and refused to help.
The letters to his mother Franziska show a Nietzsche harassed by Förster’s proposal to settle in Nueva Germania. He tells her that because of his racism “I did not want to go to Paraguay” (the sister was telling him in her letters how much she would like him to join the colony) and celebrated that both Förster and Elizabeth were leaving Europe. “Even if I am a bad German, as they say, I am in any event an excellent European.”
By that time, the agitator was showing off to other ideologues of racism and quoted the name of his brother-in-law, to whom he attributed the same ideas. Nietzsche was mentioned alongside the anti-Semitic philosopher Eugen Dühring and lamented in a letter to his mother that his brother-in-law “has, time after time, alienated me from my publisher, from my reputation, from my sister and my friends.”
The decline of the Aryan colony
In early 1889, the utopia of the Aryan colony came to an end. Claims piled up from the settlers for the title deeds they had paid for before leaving Germany. Förster had never been able to register the land the Paraguayan government had leased to him for that very reason. As he had offered land for sale that the Paraguayan government had in fact leased him, he was accused of swindling and the news spread like wildfire, just when he was about to send a second contingent to Nueva Germania.
A defrauded settler published a book with the details of what had happened and it was the coup de grace. A few weeks later, Förster committed suicide. His death occurred two months before an experience diametrically opposed to that of the Aryan colony. On August 14, 1889 the steamer Weser reached the port of Buenos Aires carrying the first Jewish immigrants who settled in Argentina.
Elizabeth returned to Germany, where Friedrich had already lost his sanity and was suffering from progressive paralysis, presumably due to syphilis. Förster’s widow wrote a book in which she traced the panegyric of the Aryan utopia in Guarani land and returned to Nueva Germania in August 1892 to pay off pending debts, which included selling the spacious house where she had lived with her husband. And the plots of land that Förster had reserved for Nietzsche, as payment for the 300 German marks he contributed.
Elizabeth Nietzsche-Förster approached Nazism and Hitler came to greet her in November 1933, in a visit that included a photo of the dictator next to a statue of Nietzsche. The philosopher’s sister died on November 8, 1935, at the age of 89. Hitler attended her funeral. Two months earlier, Nazi Germany had promulgated the Nuremberg Laws, the legal provisions that instituted anti-Semitism and racism. Bernhard Förster’s Aryan dream was coming true in Germany, half a century after his South American adventure.
More than 10,000 kilometers away, in deep Paraguay, Nueva Germania still stands, with the name the couple of fanatics gave to that place in the jungle in 1886. In its more than 650 km2 there are some 7,000 inhabitants who coexist with the rains and the heat typical of a tropical zone. The local economy is based on yerba mate, cotton and sunflower, among other products.