The southern countries of South America. Photo by Getty Images

By Benjamin Ivry
14 August 2024

A country without Jews is like blintzes without sour cream. That is the conclusion that one draws from People and Identities in Nueva Germaniaa new book by anthropologist Jonatan Kurzwelly about a 19th-century model for a Jew-free world.

Nueva Germania, a district in Paraguay, was founded in 1887 as a German settlement by the teacher and anti-Semitic activist Bernhard Förster and his wife Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the philosopher’s sister. Their goal was to create an area of ​​Germanic development far from the influence of European Jews.

The colony still exists today in a different form and was so ultra-German that there were even rumors that it gave shelter to the notorious Nazi war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele after World War II, although historians consider this unlikely.

The whole idea came from that source of Jew-hatred, the composer Richard Wagner, with whom the Försters associated in Bayreuth. Wagner advocated the founding of a vegetarian community in South America, where the German spirit could flourish unhindered by Jews, whom Förster denounced as “parasites of the German body.”

Förster had tried to stop what he considered to be the devastating emigration of Jews from Eastern Europe to Germany. He organized a petition to Chancellor Otto von Bismarck warning of the spread of Judaism and calling for a ban or restriction of further Jewish immigration. He also proposed banning all Jews from positions of political power.

German university students strongly supported Förster’s proposals and signed hundreds of thousands of petitions approving these concepts. Förster appears to have had few actual encounters with Jews, apart from a vague scuffle with an unnamed Jewish man on a Berlin tram, of which no precise details are known.

Rather than living in a Germany where one could encounter Jews on public transport, Förster preferred to let German Jews “die alone in their vanity,” he proclaimed. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in particular, who had already broken with Wagner because of his anti-Jewish writings, was no friend of Förster’s views.

Nietzsche wrote to Elisabeth in 1887 after his sister informed him that an anti-Semitic article had been published quoting his philosophical fiction So said Zarathustra.

“Those damn dirty anti-Semitic idiots should stay away from my ideals!! I have already suffered so much because our family name is mixed with this (anti-Jewish) movement through your marriage! You have lost all reason and all thoughtfulness in the last six years.”

Nietzsche then let Elisabeth know that if Förster’s plan failed, he would “be happy about the failure of an (anti-Semitic) enterprise and would feel all the more pity for you, since you have committed yourself to such a cause out of duty and love.”

The philosopher believed that the only positive side of the whole mishegas was that “as a result, anti-Semites will be forced to leave Germany.”

As if teasing his sister, he added that he increasingly wished that the Jews would “come to power” in Europe so that they would no longer have to assert themselves as an oppressed, disadvantaged minority. In a sarcastic aside, Nietzsche remarked that any German who considered himself better than a Jew simply because he was a Christian was either a ridiculous figure or belonged “in a madhouse.”

Nietzsche processed these impressions in his philosophical works such as Beyond good and evil, The book denounces the “anti-Jewish stupidity” of the Germans and at the same time praises the Jews as “without doubt the strongest, purest and toughest race living in Europe today. They know how to thrive even under the worst conditions.”

Nietzsche even went so far as to say that the Jews could control Europe if they wanted to, but they evidently had no desire to do so. Could the philosopher have been thinking of his brother-in-law’s colony when he added that for the assimilation of the Jews in Europe that they desired, it might be “practical and appropriate” to expel the anti-Semitic hooligans from Germany?

Elisabeth was not convinced by her brother’s rhetoric and wrote to her mother to express her disappointment. She argued that her husband Förster had only tried to “make people better and happier”. She was confident that one day her husband would be “praised as one of the best German men and benefactors”.

Förster bought cheap land on credit and moved to Paraguay with a dozen like-minded German families. Förster had chosen the country because it was an impoverished country that was not “infected with Judaism.” He had not foreseen that the hot, humid climate, malaria, parasites and snakes would make the German colonists in the cities uncomfortable.

Farming was unproductive, debts mounted, and the Försters were forced to sell some of their furniture and other possessions, although their standard of living was still better than that of their German pioneer colleagues. Eventually, Förster died in a hotel room after taking alcohol, morphine, and strychnine. There has been some debate about whether his death was accidental or deliberate.

In 1893, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche returned to Europe to care for her now ailing brother. Kurzwelly reports that Nueva Germania continued to exist, but its existence was linked to legends about its origins as an anti-Semitic utopia.

Historians argue about the extent to which Förster-Nietzsche became a Nazi and attempted to retroactively Nazify her brother’s work. She was undoubtedly a German nationalist and anti-Semite, but she never officially joined the Nazi Party.

Her biographer, Carol Diethe, claims that Förster-Nietzsche was merely an opportunistic, occasional Jew-hater who saw anti-Semitism as a means of gaining personal status and prestige for herself and her deceased brother. However, an earlier biographer, Ben Macintyre, claimed that Förster-Nietzsche fully approved of the posthumous Nazification of her brother’s works.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, the Nietzsche Archive received financial support from the government, and Förster-Nietzsche’s funeral in 1935 was attended by a weeping Hitler and other high-ranking Nazis.

But Jonatan Kurzwelly dismisses as “gossip” the idea that Josef Mengele, who conducted deadly experiments on prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp, may have been hiding in the colony in the 1950s. “Several elderly people” in Nueva Germania “tell stories about” an unnamed Nazi war criminal who stayed in the town for several months after the war, but Kurzwelly was “unable to ascertain the identity (of the Nazi).”

He quotes a current resident who considers Nueva Germania not the first proto-Nazi racist experiment, but the “first failed Proto-Nazi experiment.”

Today, ethnic concerns have disappeared and the descendants of a German Jew, Max Stern, who reportedly moved to Nueva Germania after falling in love with an Aryan woman whose family had moved there, live in harmony with their neighbors. Max Stern was allegedly secretive about his Jewish roots until so much time had passed that few, if any, Nueva Germanians seemed to care.

The lesson from Kurzwelly’s book might be that Jew-hatred, like all human feelings, fades over time. This is a far more optimistic conclusion than the portrait of Nueva Germania drawn by journalist Ben Macintyre three decades ago, who criticized its inhabitants, the descendants of Teutonic anti-Semites, as the product of “intermixture to the point of genetic deterioration.”