PART II
Paraguay
The Försters were not the first white people with strong ideals and a foolhardy disregard for danger to make their way to the Americas in search of utopia, or rather, of Eldorado, a land of promise rather than a promised land. The first to sight the continent was Bjarni Herjolfsson who was blown there by mistake and refused to land. He returned to Norway and sold his boat to Leif Ericson who repeated the trip and did land. He found the place wonderful, ‘The land was so fertile that it was unnecessary to store cattle fodder for the winter, for there was no frost and the grass did not wither much’. They even found grapes and named the place Vineland. History forgot them and the continent was not called Leifland. Nor was it called Columboland after the next visitor who landed, sent by those very combined monarchs who expelled the Jews from Spain in the annus mirabilis of 1492. He refused to accept that the place existed and went on trying to find a way round it, probed this way and that, refusing to see the evidence in front of his eyes, that is, that Columboland was not Cathay.
Ericson went to the North, Columbus went to the middle but it was Amerigo Vespucci who went to the South and it was Vespucci who really saw the place for the first time and wrote vividly of a New World. He had been given his education by an uncle and had joined the Medici family bank and worked for them in Seville where one of his tasks was to assist Gianoto Berardi in fitting out the ships which voyaged westward. Vespucci succeeded Berardi and then succeeded Columbus. His affairs got into a mess and he accepted an invitation to captain one of the free voyages to the Indies. He sailed across the ocean, then south off the coast of Brazil and, following the coastline, entered a huge estuary which was later called the River of Silver.
Following the voyagers came the settlers, a string of other conquerors who, fired by stories of immense wealth and by their own brand of religious zeal, stuck little pins topped with European flags all over the map of the continent. This is the eternal story of colonisation, the search for Camelot. Interestingly, there are camelotes in Paraguay. They are little islands which the flood of the great river tugs away from the banks and forces downstream where they finally come to rest in a quite inappropriate environment. Tigers and snakes come ashore in Monte Video or in Buenos Aires and terrify the inhabitants who are unexpectedly scratched or bitten. Perhaps the moral is to stay put. The Försters made the same mistake and landed up where they had no right to be.
………………………………..
Spain’s greatest pilot was Juan Díaz de Solis. He came to the New World in 1508 with Vicente Yañez Pinzón. They sailed on past the mouth of the River of silver without even noticing that it was there. Five years later King Ferdinand provided de Solis with three frigates and on this voyage the estuary was located and named Rio de Solis. He sailed up the river and mapped it, sending out a longboat to poke about along its shoreline. The savages persuaded him ashore and he followed them into a clearing in the forest where they cut him down and ate him. The expedition, now leaderless, returned to Spain leaving one of the frigates stranded near the island of Santa Catherina. The eighteen survivors found refuge on the island and learned Guariní, the local language, during their enforced stay there. One of this group was Aleixo Garcia, a Portuguese adventurer, who was the first white man to make his way up the Rio Paraguay.
Aleixo left Santa Catherina for home with only three or four followers but was later sent by Charles I with four ships and six hundred men to follow the route of Magellan and find the riches of the Orient. They moved westwards, found the falls of Iguassú, crossed the River Paraná and entered Paraguay. They made an alliance with the native Guaranís and travelled on, following the golden setting sun to the gold of the Incas. The White King, Huana Cápac, fought off the army with great vigour and they had to give up their hopes of territory and make do with the silver which was plentiful and which they looted. On the return journey they were murdered by the Guaranís. Garcia had been the first white man to see the great falls, the first to enter Paraguay, the first to make an alliance with the Guaraní, the first to cross the centre of the continent and the first to ford the Chaco and see any part of the great empire of the Incas. He was also the first to die because of the silver. The first but not the last.
News of the silver reached the east coast and the ears of another adventurer, Sebastian Cabot. He sailed up the rivers as far as Peru and, on his return found the natives who had murdered Garcia carrying his silver. He it was who named the river Rio de la Plata. Charles V eventually laid claim to the entire area to stop it falling into the hands of the Portuguese and appointed one Martínez de Irala, as governor. Irala set up his capital in Asunción. Ideal. Paraguay was located at the head of the great river system that flowed down to the coast from the Andes, the mountain chain which was made entirely of silver. Simply dig up the mountains and carry them back to the Holy Roman Emperor. Irala, unlike later settlers, didn’t let notions of racial purity worry him too much. In his last will and testament he writes, ‘I say and declare and confess that I have and God has given me in this province certain daughters and sons, who are; Diego Martínez de Irala and Antonio de Irala and Doña Ginebra de Irala, children of myself and Maria my servant; and Doña Isabel de Irala, daughter of Agueda my servant; and Doña Ursula de Irala, daughter of Leonora my servant; and Martín Pérez de Irala, son of Scolastica my servant and …’ In this way were the nations mixed and Irala got the title of ‘Father of the Nation’.
………………………………..
The Jesuits came in on the coat-tails of the conquistadores. The first Bishop struggled into Asunción in 1556 and in 1588 three Jesuits arrived with the express purpose of converting the Guaraní. They did this, of course, by setting them to work. Their produce (Yerba Mate, cotton, tobacco, hides and wood) was sold abroad to great profit for the church. Soon enough the lay conquerors wanted a cut of all this cheap labour and eventually managed to kick the Jesuits out of the country and grab it for themselves. Thus did colonisation take its course.
But Paraguay was lucky. The Jesuits had been forced to leave by decree before the middle of the eighteenth century and the route across the Chaco to the silver mines had proved too difficult. The Guaraní were untrainable and relapsed into their natural indolence and their own religion. Buenos Aires took over from Asunción and the place returned to its natural state. A return to Eden rather than an advance to the millennia. Even today Paraguay is the only country in South America which is bilingual and has a literature in its own original language. A German wrote, ‘The community which comprised the early white population of Paraguay was essentially of a daredevil order, otherwise it would never have penetrated to that remote spot’. This is just as true of the New Germans as is was of the old Spaniards. Its isolation also made it easier for dictators to rule there well into the second half of the twentieth century.
………………………………..
The story of dictators runs naturally on from the story of voyagers and colonisers, all of them searching for Camelots of one kind or another. This new story starts with Dr José Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia who was first to make himself dictator for life and held the title of El Supremo. He was glorified by Carlyle along with other heroes of the continent. These were Bolivar, ‘the Washington of Columbia’, Iturbide, ‘the Napoleon of Mexico’ and General San Martin, whose portrait Carlyle had seen ‘hung between those of Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington’. This ‘lean iron Francia’ is a ‘remarkable human individual’. At Francia’s funeral, Reverend Manuel Perez took as his text, ‘The Lord raised up a Saviour for the children of Israel, who delivered them’.
Next came the father and son team of Carlos Antonio and Fransisco Solano López. Lopez Père quickly made himself the biggest landowner in the area and saw that helping the country grow rich would help him grow rich. He is thus called enlightened. His son took up the succession but was not so enlightened. His military engineer, George Thompson, described him as ‘a monster without parallel’ who ‘is short but has a commanding presence […] is fond of military finery, especially in his staff, and has a somewhat peculiar strut when walking’. He was quickly brought down by initiating a war against all of his powerful neighbours at the same time, a war on three fronts. Ignacio Gonzalez eulogised him as follows, ‘A whole Race (sic) was incarnate in him, a youthful, artistic and courageous Race, who knew how to snatch from the claws of death the secret of Immortality’.
Lopez was followed in his turn by half a century of chaos - thirty-two presidents and one triumvirate. This chaos was broken by the coup led by Colonel Rafael Franco in 1936. Just as another Franco, Fransisco, was leading his own coup back in Europe. The key document of his rule is Decree number 152 which in part states that his regime ‘is of the same character as the totalitarian transformations occurring in contemporary Europe’. He was followed, after two further coups d’état, by General Estigarronoa who put all power into the hands of the executive which he headed in order to be able to ‘deal at a moment’s notice with social and economic problems’. Power was legalised in the hands of the President for the first time. Constitutionally, parliament ‘would collaborate in matters concerned with legislation’ and the executive would ‘act within the law’. But, Well! After arranging for absolute power under the constitution Estigarronoa died in a plane crash and the cabinet chose General Higinio Morinígo to succeed him. He immediately took advantage of his predecessor’s good work, crushed the usual series of coups d’état against him and surprised everyone by making himself supremo. Of course, he allied himself with the pro-axis powers who were established in Buenos Aires and encouraged German firms, propagandists and spies to do what they liked in the country. He survived by declaring war on the axis powers in plenty of time to be of real help to the allies, that is, in February 1945. Eventually Morinigo was forced out of the country but was soon followed by another General, this time called Alfredo Stroessner, a happy mixture of Spanish and German. He kept going for half a century more.
………………………………..
This story of conquerors and supremos in Paraguay fitted more or less uncomfortably with another style of colonisation in which ideals also played their part. In 1872 a special loan for Paraguay was negotiated in England to a group of farmers from Lincolnshire to settle near Asunción. Instead of farmers, however, the committee rounded up eight hundred ‘needy artisans off the streets of London’ and despatched them instead. No preparations had been made and, inevitably, over one hundred and fifty of them died of hunger and exposure. The survivors eventually made their way to Buenos Aires. Only two families stayed the course.
Another scheme was called ‘New Australia’. This was the brainchild of William Lane, a journalist from England who had made his home in Queensland. After the catastrophic collapse of a strike called by the Australian Labour Federation, thousands of workers found themselves with no means of livelihood and Lane suggested that they could set up a labour utopia all their own in Paraguay. He persuaded the government there to grant nearly half a million acres to the New Australia Co-operative Settlement Association. The socialist-minded settlers gave all their property to the association and pledged to stay teetotal in the hope of ‘showing the world that even [..] workers can live a life worth living’. The first 250 sailed from Sydney to Villarrica and began to construct a settlement. However, some of them succumbed to the local drink, Caña, and were kicked out by Lane. They were followed by a number of others who succumbed to the hard work. There were many grumbles. One of these was that the women ‘were positively afraid to face the nocturnal music in their connubial tents’. A second batch of immigrants arrived but the dissension in Nueva Australia was impossible to control and Lane moved away to begin another colony in Cosmé. Co-operative ideals were eventually abandoned and the immigrants bought their own land. The settlement fell apart although there are still many descendants in the area. There is no evidence the Försters knew of these earlier attempts at utopianism.
………………………………..
Isolation was the name of the game. Cut off from the rest of the continent, Paraguay changed little and this explains how the tiny racist colony of Germans founded by Bernhard and Elizabeth could live hidden away in the jungle for more than half a century. Their little utopia, their New Germany, which would never suffer from the canker of Jewish influence, trickled on forgotten by the world it had left behind.
They had chosen only those who they considered to be pure Arians, ‘We will breed an Arian master-race here in the forests of South America. I will lead you to a new fatherland. The old Germany is corrupt but our New Germany will last forever’. She was somewhat of a prophet as the little colony remains there today but its posthumous existence is not quite as she had dreamt it. Things are never as simple as idealism paints them.
This is what really happened.
Elizabeth met Bernhard at Bayreuth where he was attracted by Wagner’s political writings rather than by his music. He had been trying to get into the Wagner circle for some time but had been ignored by Wagner. He and Elizabeth, however, had much in common. Both had Lutheran pastors as father’s and both moved in the same circles. Both had widowed mothers who lived in Naumberg and knew each other. After the first of the first night’s and the other two which followed, the Försters, mother and son, paid a visit to the Nietzsches, mother and daughter, who were at home to them in Naumberg. They talked about the tragic fall of Germany at the hands of the Jews and the possibility of a renaissance of the German spirit. Later Nietzsche received a letter from his sister, ‘It was a real feast to listen to someone who speaks our language’. A proto-attempt at the royal plural and not the last. Elizabeth was ready for Bernhard’s simple remedies and drank them up with a will.
Thus were Bernhard and Elizabeth drawn to each other by their views. Theirs was a true meeting of minds. Elizabeth was well into her thirties by then and had already refused more than enough suitable suitors to cause her mother to worry. Förster was, like the madman of Nietzsche’s fable, a type whose time had not yet come but would, later, without him. A time, in fact, which seems to return eternally. He was 32 and a confirmed and quite fanatical anti-semite and pseudo-intellectual racist. He had been sucked into the Wagner cult and slavishly swallowed all Wagner’s ideology without even chewing it. He was impressed by Bayreuth and the maestro. He wrote endless pamphlets echoing Wagner’s arguments which were anyway echoes of echoes. These ideas were his infallible guide to all the problems from which Germany was suffering and all the solutions to them. The problems were materialism and the worship of money for which the Jews and the Jesuits were responsible. The solution was the purification of the race which would free the blond blue-eyed Aryan hero to be himself and get rid of the virus which was staining his potential.
………………………………..
Wagner’s subtle comments about the Jews began as early as 1850 when he wrote ‘Judaism in Music’. He took his cue from good old Luther, ‘Why is there an involuntary revulsion which is awakened by the person and character of the Jew? We deceive ourselves if we classify as bad manners any frank reference to our natural antipathy to the Jewish character […] In the present state of things the Jew is more than free - he dominates and, as long as money continues to be the power which brings all our efforts to nothing, he will continue so to do’. Not so much an aberration this, although his future father in law, Franz Liszt was horrified by it. Förster lapped it up.
Förster was a professional in the Jew baiting business. How did he go about it? This is how. He had emerged from an inn with a friend after drinking too much and they got into a tram. He then started to rant at some of the passengers whom he took for Jews. He pointed them out one at a time, mocking their semitic features in sham Yiddish and railing against the Jews, the Jewish press and Jewish business. His fellow passengers took objection and some of them, led by a Jewish businessman, manhandled him and his friend off the tram the better to argue on the pavement. This businessman began to take down the names of Förster and others with the intention of reporting them to the police. Förster’s friend objected, ‘But you’re only a Jew’, he shouted with the result that the businessman smashed him in the face. This resulted in general fisticuffs which were noticed by a passing policeman who dragged them all off to the police station. Förster’s defence was that he was an Aryan by descent and that should be enough. He was, however, taken to court, fined ninety marks and reprimanded. The incident made him more of a figure than he had been before among certain sections of the community.
It was after this public brawl that he lost his teaching job, the authorities deciding that a man who started scuffles in public was an unsuitable example for the young.
Out of work, he had to look for some other occupation. His new-found notoriety enabled him to launch a petition which he presented to Bismarck. This petition called for the restriction of Jewish immigration and the cleansing of Jews from all positions of authority and influence. It even contained the suggestion that all German Jews should be made to register so that this demand could be more easily effected and further influxes of Jews be controlled. The petition managed to collect 267,000 signatures although it must be said that one person who refused to sign was Wagner. It may be asked why. Was this evidence of a lapse in his hatred of the Jews? Maybe at that time he needed the services of his many Jewish collaborators. The maestro wrote to one of them that ‘I have nothing whatever to do with the current anti-semitic movements’. Note that crucial ‘current’. The fact was that the ‘current movements’, those of Treitschke and Dühring or of Stöcker, were not radical enough for the maestro who no longer thought of the Jews as a racial threat but rather as the symbols and agents of degeneration in German life. Elizabeth, on the other hand, hardly thinking at all, was in this up to her elbows, toiling round Naumberg collecting signatures. Bismarck turned a blind eye to the petition but this didn’t stop Förster and his colleagues founding the ‘German Peoples’ Party’ which managed to attract over six thousand supporters to its first meeting. Only by joining together ‘can we defeat the Jewish plague’. She didn’t know of Wagner’s opposition which never became public knowledge. Indeed, Förster never questioned anything coming from the Wagner oracle and he took Cosima as his symbol of the potential inherent in German womanhood which is exactly what she took herself to be even though she was illegitimate and an adulteress.
Förster latched on to almost all the expected tenets. He was against vivisection and inoculation. He supported homeopathy and the sanctity of the soil. He was a vegetarian. Familiar, all of these notions? He wrote a pamphlet on Jewry and German art and used as a frontispiece Dürer’s ‘Knight Death and the Devil’. The Jews were ‘besmirching German art with gold’ and ‘whoever becomes a traitor to the most holy German volk’ should be ‘hanged on a bare tree’.
Of course, you would expect Nietzsche to dislike his brother-in-law, ‘This accursed anti-semitism is the cause of a radical break between me and my sister’. The two men met only once, at the celebration in Naumberg of Nietzsche’s 41st birthday. They talked about sex and agreed that great men should be able to control their libidos and be masters of their senses. A bit sad really, Nietzsche on the recoil from his obsession with Lou Salomé and Förster newly married. But well.
Before leaving on his first trip to the Americas Cosima wrote that Wagner was alarmed at the plan and ‘has no great confidence in it’. Förster, perhaps unluckily as things turned out, never saw the letter. Within the week Wagner was dead.
………………………………..
For Elizabeth, Bernhard was the man of action which Nietzsche would never be, ‘I find Fritz more and more unsympathetic. I wish he shared Förster’s views. Förster has ideas that will make men better and happier if they are promoted and carried out. Some day Förster will be praised as one of the best of Germans and a benefactor of his people’. How right she turned out to be! The comparison between the two men was apparent in everything. Elizabeth was now a mature woman who was looking into the abyss of spinsterdom and it was obvious to Förster that she would be an ideal partner in his colonial schemes. So, although they were probably never in love with each other, they both saw the advantages of a merger.
In 1885, on Wagner’s birthday, May 22nd, Elizabeth married Bernhard. Nietzsche spent the day at the Lido in Venice. Lo and behold, Dürer’s etching ‘Night, Death and the Devil’ turned up again. Nietzsche (conspicuously absent from the wedding) sent it as a present. Förster, turning Nietzsche’s intention on its head, saw it as representing the German hero going into battle against the Jewish demon. Actually Dürer had painted it with a book of Erasmus in mind, one of his most popular texts called ‘The Handbook of the Christian Knight’. In a letter about the woodcut Dürer had written, ‘Oh Erasmus of Rotterdam when wilt thou take thy stand? Hark thou knight of Christ, ride forth at the side of Christ our Lord, protect the truth, obtain the martyr’s crown’. This was probably not in the mind of Förster as he rode forth to the new world. It was certainly not in Erasmus’ thoughts at all.
Earlier Nietzsche had written, ‘Just such a Dürer knight was our Schopenhauer, lacking all hope yet willing the truth. There has been no other such as he’.
………………………………..
Oh for a paradise free of Jews where a new Germany could be built on those good old virtues of heroic vegetarianism and Aryanism. This was Förster’s dream and he constructed it on the back of a popular movement in the Germany of the time where hundreds of Societies bent on colonisation were being formed. The dream was millennial. It was founded on the conviction that the inhabitants of this new land were none other than the ten lost tribes of Israel whose conversion would lead to the end of the present era of misery and death and usher in the second coming.
To go to a country free of Jews and hunt up the lost ten tribes (all presumably Jewish) and convert them to anti-semitism. Thus to bring on the millennium, clean and Judenfrei (which meant much the same thing). Now there was an ideal worthy of a man like Förster and his helpmate! And Nietzsche knew what he thought of that, ‘once again there appears that lust for power which, in times gone by, was inflamed by the belief that one was in possession of the truth and which bore such beautiful names that from then on one could venture to be inhuman with a good conscience (to burn Jews, heretics and good books and terminate entire higher cultures such as those of Peru and Mexico)’.
Of course the continent was as little Deutschfrei as it was Judenfrei. The place was swarming with both nations who were getting on pretty well together. But then Förster wasn’t one to let mere facts sway his opinions. The time was still some way off when the thought would enter German minds that they could live Judenfrei at home, so off they went in their thousands to colonise other places.
In 1880 Wagner published a booklet on ‘Religion and Art’. In section three he suggests that the degeneration of the human race has been brought about by its departure from its natural food. Thus ‘its regeneration will depend upon renouncing a diet of meat’ just as in American prisons where ‘the greatest criminals have been transformed into the most gentle and upright of men by a wisely planned botanic diet’. He suggests ‘a sensibly executed transmigration to those quarters of our globe the rich fertility of which is adequate to support the present population of every country in the world, that is to say, the South American peninsular itself’. In such a racially pure German colony Jews would be banned and the place would be German, vegetarian, Teutonic and Lutheran. A Utopia in the midst of the burgeoning jungle which would provide all the food that they would need. Förster seized on Wagner’s rantings as the verification of his dreams. After looking around he came to the conclusion that Paraguay was really the only place left and in 1883 he set off alone across the ocean to find a suitable site.
………………………………..
The couple worked hard to advance their ideals. Their propaganda began to have its effect and, by their first wedding anniversary, they had got together a band of pioneer settlers. These were either desperately poor or racist and anti-semitic or simply naive but one thing they all were was unequivocally Aryan. On February 15th 1887 the little band of colonists, consisting of fourteen families, clambered up the gangplank at Hamburg docks to board the steamship ‘Uruguay’. Large crowds had gathered to see them off. But there was one face that was not gazing up and waving. Nietzsche couldn’t bear to see his sister leave Germany, ‘I have lost my sister. We are separated irrevocably. The convictions by which my brother-in-law is prepared to live and die are even more alien to me than Paraguay’. Wagner’s telegram was short and to the point. It read ‘Have a good trip’. However, in spite of the maestro’s best wishes, their journey across the Atlantic was terrible. It took nearly five weeks. The boat was overcrowded and the weather very hot. They left the steamer at Montevideo and piled into a smelly, unstable river boat that took them up the Rio Parana to Asunción. More heat and danger and thick jungle on either side. At Asunción Elizabeth and her husband left the party which carried on up the Rio Paraguay to the north. They finally struggled out of the boat onto dry land and watched the lonely vessel chug away leaving them high and not so very dry in the midst of the jungle. They looked around them with disbelief.
‘Nueva Germania’, one hundred and fifty miles to the north of Asunción, was certainly new. It had never had any population to speak of and had been totally deserted for some time. It didn’t take the new colonists long to realise that things were going to be far from easy. As is so very often the case, the difference between the propaganda and the reality was dramatic. Being mostly townspeople they would have had some difficulty in adapting to any kind of country life but were quite unprepared for the cloud of problems which faced them in their new jungle setting.
Diseases for which they were unprepared and for which there was no cure spread remorselessly through the group, none of whom had the immunity of the local population. The swarms of sub-tropical insects proved fatal on more than one occasion. There were also deaths from fleas, worms and lice. On top of this, few of the colonists had any knowledge of farming and were unable to cope with the soil which was like clay, too solid to get a plough through without strenuous effort. The only real crop they were able to grow was a sturdy root called manioc. This formed almost their entire botanic diet.
Meanwhile Elizabeth and Förster were at Asunción, living somewhat more comfortably in a hotel. Elizabeth only came to join the colonists when they had finished the construction of a house suitable to her position. ‘Försterhof’, her large colonial mansion, stood out in the jungle setting. It had a huge salon and a suite of other rooms. The whole was furnished well and conformed to the best taste of the time. It had a high roof and stone floors. There was even a piano. Furniture was shipped in from Europe and labour from miles around. In her letters home, Elizabeth boasted of the number of servants she had in the house.
When she arrived, her new Germans came down to the jetty to greet her, ‘May God grant that all future colonists look as decent as the ones standing there. They all have such honest faces. Here in the primal forest we are feasting on compassion, heroic self-denial, Christianity and Aryanism. Accompanied by the strains of ‘Deutchland Uber Alles’, I finally set foot on the soil of the New Germany. With a speech of welcome one colonist raised his glass and shouted “Long live the mother of the colony” which pleased my heart’.
Although, for most of the colonists, day to day existence was a rigorous fight to stay alive, Elizabeth wrote with her usual verve, ‘What an opportunity we are offering German workers who are withering away in poverty, sickness and despair in many parts of the old fatherland. What an idyllic picture this makes. Nothing is alien. No. Everything is homely and German’. Förster advised the new colonists to bring with them ‘Courage and resignation, strength and fortitude. Moral fibre from the old fatherland to bestow upon the next generation’.
Imagine the two of them, walking there among the fronds, seeking the shadows to shelter them from the relentless truth of the midday sun, burning, burning. Surrounded by one thing and yet imagining, yearning for something quite different. Paradoxes. Impossible to return to Germany as the money had all run out. Stuck in a wilderness of rats, snakes and goodness knows what else, they were condemned by Elizabeth’s determination to lead an idyllic and idealistic existence.
It was then that Förster started to call her Eli for short. Which is, of course, one of the names of God and attached as a coda to the names of the archangels. Also, appropriately, the name of the man who first made himself judge over Israel.
………………………………..
But the dream had begun to collapse almost immediately. Early fervour had already been cooled by the horrors of the journey and the place itself offered little relief. The colonists had been carefully prepared for something quite different. They were ready enough, even eager, to work to achieve an ideal but, struggle as they might, they could hardly produce enough to survive. It wasn’t long before they began to turn against the Försters. Elizabeth was cold and aloof and clearly more concerned with her reputation in Germany than she was with the colonists. Dear Bernhard was hardly ever there. He spent his time in Asunción desperately despatching letters pleading for more loans and contributions to pay off the huge sums he had borrowed from the Paraguayan government to keep the colony running. Every now and then he would appear without warning, stay for a few days, and then disappear again.
The colony was clearly up against it. Some of the colonists were leaving and any new ones who arrived, attracted by Elizabeth’s imaginative articles in the German press, were rapidly disillusioned. And what about the ability to deceive which seems to have come so easily to her? As she looked around her, did she really see what she was putting down in her letters? And later, did she really believe, as she slaved over her editions of her brother’s books and reinvented his philosophy, that she was ‘completing his work’? Her lust for power transformed the world she saw and heard, the very taste and smell of it. It had to be as she wanted it to be and so it was. The resurrection of corpses.
Förster had written failure into the agreement he had signed with the Paraguayan government on 17th November 1886. He had accepted a lease for a mere two years and agreed that the land would only become the property of the colonists if they could produce 140 families by the end of the period. If not, then the lease would end and the land return to the government. On top of this he would be obliged to give back to the colonists all the costs they had incurred as well as the money they had paid him for the land on the assumption that they would eventually own it. Förster, having the optimism of the fanatic, perhaps genuinely thought all this was possible. They managed the 40 but the 100 escaped them. And even some of the 40 had given up. Förster was in debt up to his eyeballs. He went on dreaming until one of the colonists took matters into his own hands. This man was Julius Klingbeil. He came, saw and was conquered by the inhospitable environment and rapidly realised that the Försters were taking everyone for a ride. He returned, like so many others, to Germany but, unlike the rest, didn’t quietly vanish back into the undergrowth. He produced a book, ‘Revelations Concerning Bernhard Förster’s Colony New Germany’, which went into great detail about the questionable goings-on in ‘Nueva Germania’. He accused Förster of stealing the colonists’ cash, of telling them lies and acting as a kind of tyrant insisting that the poor colonists buy everything they needed through him at higher prices than they could buy them elsewhere and live in shacks while the Försters, man and wife, acted like petty lordlings and lived in a grand house full of all the luxuries which they could bring out of Germany or buy in the Americas. He was less severe on Förster than on his wife who, he alleged, lorded it over her husband in much the same way as he lorded it over the colonists. And as they lorded it over the poor natives. Caste once again. Nietzsche wrote to Overbeck, ‘Things in Paraguay are as bad as they could be. The Germans tempted over there are rebelling and claiming their money back and there is none. There have already been acts of violence. I fear the worst’.
Klingbeil’s book was condemned as a libel in the ‘Bayreuther Blatter’ but this hardly effected the disastrous situation which was now common knowledge back in the fatherland. Förster’s stream of funds, already shallow, finally dried up altogether. This was the beginning of the end for Förster. By the closing months of 1889, he had left ‘Nueva Germania’ for the last time and gone to ground at the Hotel del Lago near Asunción where he was regularly more drunk than alive. In a note to Elizabeth he wrote, ‘What will become of us?’ On the morning of June 3rd the maid who opened the door to his bedroom was hit by a strong chemical stench and soon spotted the rapidly stiffening corpse on the bed. Förster had poisoned himself with a lethal mixture of strychnine and morphine which he may have downed while still effected by a long evening at the bar which was only the last of a six week bout of drinking.
………………………………..
Elizabeth would never admit that her husband had been a failure. She began to resurrect him within hours of his death. Rushing to Asunción, she managed to persuade a Paraguayan medic to sign a death certificate that gave the cause of death as ‘a nervous attack’. Her version was that his death had been a tragedy for the colony and that ‘if Förster had not died so young, the colony would have been all that he planned - that, with his notable gifts for colonising, he would have achieved everything that he had hoped to accomplish for the glory of Germany’. She later recalled that her husband had spent his last hours in the company of a Spanish priest, presumably in converse about matters philosophical, when he ‘suddenly got up from his chair saying he felt ill and faint and telling the priest that he thought he was getting a nervous fever’. He then sat down again holding his head in one hand and pressing the other to his heart. After what seemed like a recovery, he lay down to sleep. Sadly his condition worsened and the fatal attack came on the night of 3rd June. She wrote that ‘false friends and the schemes of his enemies had broken his heart’. Thus it was that such a valuable life ended. He had become ‘a hero of battles worthy of Valhalla, whose face is an icon of the true Christ united with the pure German race, who fell on a foreign field for his belief in the German spirit’.
To escape the Jews Förster had gone to Eldorado, and run out of money, had glimpsed Utopia and had run out of dreams. Suicide was his replacement therapy. Of a fairly drastic kind. His problem was that he went to a continent that had already been comprehensively raped of its wealth and made unerringly for the one part of it where the sticky clay had never contained any precious metal in the first place. Also, had he only but known it, he went to a continent that had its fair share of Jews. They had made their way there four hundred years earlier to escape the terrible persecutions of the inquisition back in their European homelands where they had been forcibly christianised. These conversos escaped to the New World to rid themselves of ever present further persecution. Amongst other things, they were the traders, the wheeler-dealers of the New World. It was they who made the place tick. The fact that the inquisition followed them didn’t deter this influx. Quite possibly, some of the conquistadors were themselves conversos. It may even have been that Aleixo Garcia himself, the man who opened up the heart of the continent to another cycle of conversion of its hidden Jews, of the last remaining remnants of the lost ten tribes, was himself a Jew.
Förster’s death was the second piece of bad news to reach Elizabeth within days. She had just received word that her brother’s mind had gone and that he had been taken to the asylum at Jena. It is not only in mathematics that two minuses make a plus. Things in the colony were getting dangerous. Her colonists were writing to the ‘Chemnitz Colonial Society’ with a stream of complaints most of them directed against their mentor. The society decided that the colony would be best served by the removal of Elizabeth. Her husband’s death and the news of her brother’s madness gave her the excuse she so desperately needed and she stayed on just long enough to rearrange her husband’s suicide and then took the boat out, leaving her followers to fend for themselves as best they could .
She moved quite naturally from one fantasy to another, ‘I must now bid farewell to colonial affairs. Now another great task demands all my life’s time and energy. The care of my dear and only brother, the philosopher Nietzsche, the protection of his works and the description of his life and thought’. When she arrived at Naumberg station Nietzsche was waiting to greet her. He had been brought there by his mother and when Elizabeth alighted from the train, the limp figure was pushed gently forward to meet the sister he no longer recognised.