Nueva Germania

About

Nueva Germania was founded in 1886 by Bernhard Förster and his wife, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Both dedicated bigots and anti-Semites, the couple had latched on to Richard Wagner’s idea to migrate to South America to create Aryan utopias. Reality quickly overcame the colonists ideas of Aryan supremacy, with most of the impoverished settlers dying from disease and starvation. Seeing his dream fail, Förster committed suicide in 1889, while Förster-Nietzsche stayed a few years longer before returning to Germany to corrupt her brother’s work. Since then, the settlement has eked out an agricultural existence, primarily by cultivating yerba mate, and slowly integrated into the local landscape. Many of the residents still have blonde hair and blue eyes with German names, but they predominantly speak the indigenous Guaraní language with a smattering of German or Spanish.