Nueva Germania (New Germania, German: Neugermanien/Neues Deutschland) is a districtofSan Pedro DepartmentinParaguay. It was founded as a German settlement on 23 August 1887 by Bernhard Förster, a German nationalist to create a model community in the New World, demonstrating the supremacy of German culture and society. In 1889, Förster committed suicide after the settlement's initial failure.
The climate is tropical, with abundant rains, a maximum temperature of about 35 °C, a minimum of 10 °C and an average of 23 °C, with a humidity of 80%. Precipitation exceeds 1300 millimeters, especially in summer.
Nueva Germania was founded in 1886 on the banks of the Aguaray-Guazú River, about 250 kilometres from Asunción by five, later fourteen, largely impoverished families from Saxony.[1] Led by Bernhard Förster and his wife, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, sister of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche[2] the German colonists emigrated to the Paraguayan rainforest to put to practice utopian ideas about the superiority of the Aryan race. It was the declared dream of Förster to create an area of Germanic development, far from the influence of Jews, whom he reviled.[3] It was one of several closed German communities in Paraguay.[4][5][6]
The colony's development was hampered by the harshness of the environment, a lack of proper supplies and an overconfidence of the colonist's own supposed Aryan supremacy.[7]
Most settlers soon died of starvation and disease. Those who survived malaria and the sand-flea infections rushed to flee Nueva Germania. Those who stayed, convinced of their founder's teachings, married among themselves so as to preserve the racial stock.[citation needed]
Förster, who had negotiated the town's titles of property with General Bernardino Caballero, committed suicide only 3 years later in 1889 in the city of San Bernardino after abandoning the settlers.[8][9]Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche returned to Germany 4 years after his death in 1893.
According to Gerard L. Posner, writing in Mengele: The Complete Story, Josef Mengele, a major German war criminal, spent some time in Nueva Germania while he was a fugitive after World War II.[10] However, the evidence that Mengele ever passed through is shaky at best.[11]
Nueva Germania became a quiet community in San Pedro, dedicated to agriculture and specializing in the cultivation of yerba mate. Beginning in 2004, American conductor David Woodard embarked on a series of expeditions to the settlement.[12][13][14] As of 2013, pockets of German culture remained, and most of the population in the area still spoke a mixture of German and Guaraní.[15]
The General Directorate of Statistics, Polls and Census has reported the following:
In 1992 the district had 17,148 inhabitants, the majority of whom lived in the town of Santa Rosa del Aguaray. In 2002 Santa Rosa del Aguaray became a municipality in its own right. Consequently, the District of Nueva Germania lost most of its population and territory, though it retained the Mennonite colony Rio Verde to the north of Santa Rosa del Aguaray.
The population is mostly rural and occupied in agricultural activities.
The projected net population by gender for 2002 was 4,335 inhabitants (2,323 men and 2,012 women).
As of 2002, about 10% of Nueva Germania's inhabitants were of mainly German origin.[1]
^Fischer-Treuenfeld, Richard Friedrich Eberhard von[in German] (1904). El Chaco y el litigio de límites entre el Paraguay y Bolivia (The Chaco and the boundary dispute between Paraguay and Bolivia) (in Spanish). Tip. la Tarde. Richard Friedrich Eberhard von Fischer-Treuenfeld (7 February 1835, Thorn, East Prussia - 29 December 1907, Dresden)
Ben Macintyre, Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche, New York: Farrar Straus Giroux 1992, reissued as Forgotten Fatherland: The True Story of Nietzsche's Sister and Her Lost Aryan Colony, Broadway 2011 ISBN0307886441ISBN978-0307886446
Kraus, Daniela, Bernhard und Elisabeth Försters Nueva Germania in Paraguay. Eine antisemitische Utopie. PhD Thesis. University of Vienna. 1999
Kurzwelly, Jonatan. Being German and Being Paraguayan in Nueva Germania: Arguing for “Contextual Epistemic Permissibility” and “Methodological Complementarity.” PhD Thesis. University of St Andrews. 2017
Kurzwelly, Jonatan (2019), "Being German, Paraguayan and Germanino: Exploring the Relation Between Social and Personal Identity" in Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research, 2/2019. doi:10.1080/15283488.2019.1604348
Paraguay
