Nietzsche's Sister Founded an Aryan Colony in Paraguay

In the department of San Pedro, Paraguay, some two hundred and fifty kilometers from Asunción, there is a farming town called Nueva Germania. Today it is a humble place of yerba mate fields and brick kilns where people speak Guaraní, Spanish and remnants of German, and where surnames like Fischer and Kück appear among the local farmers. Few visitors would suspect its birth certificate: Nueva Germania was founded in the 1880s as a laboratory of Aryan “racial purity” — by Germany's most strident antisemitic agitator and his wife, who carried an uncomfortably famous surname: Elisabeth Nietzsche, sister of the philosopher.

The wedding Friedrich refused to attend

Bernhard Förster was a former Berlin schoolteacher famous for antisemitic campaigns so virulent they cost him his teaching career. Elisabeth, Friedrich Nietzsche's younger and devoted sister, married him in 1885 — and the philosopher, disgusted, did not attend the wedding. Nietzsche's correspondence leaves no room for doubt: he despised his brother-in-law's antisemitism, mocked the Paraguayan venture, and ultimately broke with his sister over it. This detail matters enormously, because the 20th century would take charge of inverting the roles, as we shall see.

Förster had a dream that today reads like a warning: since Germany was “contaminated”, he would found on another continent a colony of pure German blood that would germinate far from Jews and from modernity. He chose Paraguay, which after the War of the Triple Alliance had lost a huge share of its population and welcomed settlers with open arms. In 1886 the first Saxon families sailed from Hamburg — a handful at first, fourteen in all —, and in 1887 Nueva Germania was officially founded on the banks of the Aguaray-Guazú river.

The jungle doesn't read pamphlets

The tropics proceeded to dismantle racial theory with their usual efficiency. European crops failed; the colonists, poor farmers recruited with inflated promises, discovered that the promised lands were tangled in debts and paperwork; the climate, the insects and disease did the rest. The colony meant to demonstrate Germanic superiority couldn't even bring in a harvest. Three years after the founding, drowning in debt and failure, Bernhard Förster poisoned himself at the Hotel del Lago in San Bernardino, in June 1889. Elisabeth, faithful to her lifelong style, dressed the suicide up as a “nervous attack” and kept the fiction of the Aryan paradise alive a while longer before abandoning the colonists to their fate and returning to Germany in 1893.

Elisabeth's second project was worse

And here this story becomes truly important. Back home, Elisabeth found her brother incapacitated by the mental collapse he had suffered in 1889, and took total control of his work: she founded the Nietzsche Archive, managed his manuscripts and edited his posthumous papers with the same honesty with which she had managed Nueva Germania. Out of her scissors came a Nietzsche tailored to the rankest nationalism — the philosopher who despised antisemitism, posthumously converted into its patron saint. When Elisabeth died in 1935, laden with honors, Hitler himself attended her funeral. Friedrich, who had refused to attend the wedding, could not refuse the Third Reich's visits to his archive.

Nueva Germania, meanwhile, followed its own path, which is the best possible epilogue: the descendants of the “pure” colonists intermarried with Paraguayans, adopted Guaraní and yerba mate, and today live off the land like any rural community in the country, light-years from the founders' ideology. This blog has already told the story of German Venezuela and that of Panamanian Scotland; the moral of the trilogy is consistent: the Americas have a long tradition of digesting European delusions and turning them into ordinary towns. The Paraguayan jungle swallowed the Aryan experiment in a single generation. The truly dangerous thing about that marriage was never the colony — it was the editor.