Nineteenth-century German unity heralded a period of rapid industrialisation, technological advancement and economic modernisation. A sense of German exceptionalism or the Sonderweg was prevalent, particularly after the formation of the German Empire in 1871. Despite the scepticism of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, a scramble for colonial territories was unleashed by a mixture of ambitious industrialists and völkisch idealists. The mood of the moment was represented in culture by the “new” music of Wilhelm Richard Wagner while the sense of a special German path to cultural and political nationhood had been previously expressed by philosophers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
It was during this time that Friedrich Nietzsche, a confidant and close friend of Wagner and his wife Cosima, was formulating a new philosophy that, initially at least, supported Wagner’s idealism but later rejected forms of nationalism. Instead, Nietzsche developed a philosophy of individual moral self-development for a world in which God and religion no longer exist. It was Nietzsche who introduced his sister, Elisabeth, to the Wagners, where she acted as governess to their children and as a friend and confidant to Cosima.
In her outstanding biography, I am Dynamite: A Life of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sue Prideaux explains that, in direct contrast to her brother, Elisabeth Nietzsche was an anti-Semitic German nationalist who, in later life, achieved infamy by fraudulently manipulating her brother’s work in support of the Nazis and their twisted ideology. Her work shows how, in a mutually beneficial relationship, Elisabeth was feted by several senior Nazis including Hitler, who attended her funeral in 1935.
Prideaux also details the role Elisabeth played in the establishment of Nueva Germania, a romantic, radical and ruinous experiment in colonial nation-building. During the 1870s Elisabeth’s husband, the awful racist and anti-Semite Bernhard Förster, had had the idea to establish a “racially pure” and “Jew-free” utopia in South America; a place where crops would grow in abundance and healthy lives could be lived after the good Germanic tradition. In 1887, the pair travelled with a group of around six families of mainly impoverished Saxons, who had been persuaded by Elisabeth and the strident Förster to pay them for the privilege of becoming landowners in what was, in reality, an area of fly infested, infertile scrubland in the heart of Paraguay.
Upon arrival in Paraguay, the settlers immediately headed wearily to their designated plots of land, however, Elisabeth, forever selfishly on the lookout for herself, preferred the comparative luxury of the San Bernardino hotel within the previously established German settlement of the same name and with shopping in the capital Asuncion. She only undertook the arduous journey to the new colony once she’d received news that her “lavish” house, the Försterhof, had been completed and her belongings, including of all things a piano, had been installed.
Letters home, somewhat fictitiously, tell of her triumphant arrival at the colony with mounted escort, bands playing and crowds of settlers proclaiming her the queen of the new colony. In reality the Försterhof was an ugly building of no architectural merit, though it was far better than the two roomed stuccoed hovels in which the majority of settlers had to survive.
Before writing his 1992 book Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche (now in a more recent second edition), author, journalist and broadcaster, Ben Macintyre had, in the steps of Elisabeth and the original settlers, journeyed deep into the Paraguayan hinterland. Originally, the settlement could only be reached by enduring a four-day boat trip from the capital Asuncion along the piranha and snake infested Aguaray-Guazú river, before undertaking a weeklong oxen cart or horse ride along frequently overgrown bushland track.
The author provides a travel account from his own journey in parallel with an account of Elisabeth Nietzsche’s own voyage. One of the remarkable insights from this exercise was just how little had changed in certain respects between the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Macintyre recounts the discomfort that must still be endured on a trip down the Aguaray-GauzĂş, with the heat, parasitic insects and fear of falling overboard from a boat seemingly unfit for purpose. He tells us of the cook on the boat that took him along the river, small underdeveloped fourteen-year old boy from an impoverished family, who one night went missing. The captain, a hard-bitten Paraguayan, presumed he had tripped overboard in the darkness and had either swam to shore or drowned. The boat sailed on regardless and a few days later, Macintyre was told, the boy had been found, floating dead in the river having been partially eaten by piranhas. There was no shock or outrage from the crew, just a casual acceptance of the brutality of life and death on the river.
Both Macintyre and Prideaux explain in detail how the settlers soon discovered that the vision they had been mis-sold by the Försters was nothing more than a fraud. The land proved difficult if not impossible to cultivate, and the weather, alternating between blistering heat and torrential rain, was unbearable.
Also, unbeknown to the settlers, Bernhard Förster had only purchased the land on which Nueva Germania was founded after their arrival. After some significant horse-trading, he had eventually struck a deal with the ambiguous but influential Paraguayan General, Bernardino Caballero, whereupon in return for a big discount, Förster had agreed to ensure at least one hundred and ten families would arrive within the year. It is reckoned that only about 14 families arrived during that time and although a few others arrived later, in total around seventy plots of the initial one hundred and twenty remained unsold.
In the colony, families became disillusioned with the weather, the inability to grow crops and the insect borne diseases. Some stayed put learning how to farm the poor land mainly by growing and trading yerba mate, a type of tea popular in South America. However, many settlers slowly drifted away either to more hospitable areas regionally or, if they could afford it, back home to Germany where stories of the poor conditions were beginning to leak out.
Macintyre’s account provided a fascinating account of how, in 1888, the colony was ostensibly rumbled for the fraud that it was. Julius Klingbeil, an Antwerp tailor of German origin, had arrived in the colony and went to pay his respects to the Försters. He noted that whilst the rest of the colony was barely surviving, the Försters lived in a large salon equipped with expensive furniture, stone floors and yes, a piano. At dinner they ate meat and drank alcohol, possessing “a large selection of fine wine and copious liqueurs,” despite being, nominally at least, abstemious vegetarians.
The salacious personal details provided in Klingbeil’s account are fascinating. He said that in Förster he had “expected to meet a man of action” and instead found a “bundle of nerves” who “could not sit still…speaking rarely in monosyllables.” He found Elisabeth “domineering and evil”, he says “she spoke for them both, like a queen and referred to Nueva Germania as their Principality.”
Klingbeil and his wife eventually left the colony and returned to Germany where he catalogued the Forster’s dubious activities in a poorly written but popular short book that revealed the sham of Nueva Germania to the German public. Broken by the scandal and in debt, Bernhard Förster retreated to the San Bernardino hotel where he committed suicide in 1889. Elisabeth, once the queen of all she surveyed, eventually left the colony for good in 1893 leaving behind a handful of poor Germans to fend for themselves.
During Macintyre’s 1991 visit to the area, he met several descendants of these original families. Although they are “dying out” he observes how the characteristics of the blond haired, blue eyed settlers continue to show up in the general population. Locals now refer to the original settlers as the gente perdida or lost people. He heard stories of how Nazi war criminals once came to the area to hide, including uncorroborated tales of Joseph Mengele’s presence. The hardships endured by the settlers and now their descendants were still remembered, and many still harboured a feeling of racial superiority over those who are not descended from the German settlers.
The Försterhof, meanwhile, was by then reduced to a pigsty – a perhaps fitting end for the unsightly hall where Elisabeth Nietzsche played out her völkisch fantasy.
Sue Prideaux, I am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche (2018) is published by Penguin Random House. Ben Macintyre, Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche is published by Bloombsbury (2013, 2nd Edition).
