![]() ![]() “My family didn’t want us to, but we always got together with the workers and learned,” he says. Haundeschild recalls that he only had two years of schooling in German and that he learned Guaraní “with the farm employees” who worked for his father. Eventually, the Paraguayan bush ended up colonizing them, out of necessity and circumstance. “My mother did not allow us to speak Guaraní at home and did not want us to mix with another race,” she says. Lidia lives with her husband, Hugo Haundeschild, near the house where she was born 49 years ago in a rural area on the outskirts of Nueva Germania.įischer and Haundeschild form one of the few families - “no more than 15″ - that have not yet mixed with Paraguayan blood. They had a small vegetable garden and some animals,” she says. My grandmother said they got off somewhere in the bush they had to survive in any way they could. The youngest died on the trip and was thrown into the sea. “She came with her dad, her mom and four siblings. She speaks quickly in Spanish peppered with Guaraní, Paraguay’s second official language. “My grandmother was four years old when she arrived from Germany on the Föster ship,” says Lidia Fischer, as she folds the freshly laundered clothes of her eight children on a table. Santi CarneriĪmong those who had little choice but to remain in Nueva Germania were the Fischers. They didn’t stay because they liked the place they stayed because they couldn’t go back.” Coffee mugs bearing images of Elisabeth Nietzsche and her husband Bernhard Förster, at the Germania Inn. Some of them adapted and they are the families that are still here now. They thought they were going to come and make money with the yerba mate and wood, but they didn’t have the skills to do it. “But everything became an uphill struggle for them. “They cut down the bush, made lumber and followed the European tradition of construction,” Benítez says. The hot, humid climate, malaria, parasites, and snakes wreaked havoc among these urban families laden with young children. Any notion of an Aryan utopia was extinguished as soon as they set foot on land. A dozen German families seduced by a new life embarked in Hamburg, crossed the Atlantic, traveled up the Paraná River from Argentina and landed on the banks of the Aguaray-Guazú River, almost 300 kilometers (186 miles) northwest of Asunción. One of the buyers, on credit, was Förster,” says Benítez. The government of Bernardino Caballero sold public land at very low prices. “After the War of the Triple Alliance, Paraguay was forced to pay reparations to Brazil and Argentina. To Förster, Paraguay appeared to be an ideal location. Nietzsche’s sister and Förster “came by boat with a group of Germans interested not only in the land, but also in preserving Aryan culture and ideology.” They had been convinced by a friend, the composer Richard Wagner, who, imbued with the anti-Semitic sentiment of the time, proposed the construction of new Germany far from Europe, close to nature, vegan and, needless to say, without Jews. With the distance of an outsider, he has reconstructed the history of this town of 6,000 inhabitants. He came here for work, fell in love, got married and stayed. Santi Carneriīenítez runs a veterinary practice and has lived in Nueva Germania for more than 30 years. A cemetery on the outskirts of Nueva Germania where families of the descendants of the first settlers are buried. Like so many other inhabitants of Nueva Germania, he carried in his blood the result of a failure: an Aryan supremacist experiment undertaken in 1870 in this secluded spot in South America by Elisabeth Nietzsche, sister of the German philosopher, and her husband, Bernhard Förster. Pupa was the son of a German mother and a Paraguayan father. Underneath, in brackets, is a nickname: “Pupa.” “He was my friend,” says Benítez. Carlos Benítez stops in front of one in particular: “Alberto Kück,” reads the inscription on the black marble. On the tombstones are the surnames of the dead: Schütt, Flaskamp, Hähner, Schubert, Haudenschild, Fischer. In the middle of the Paraguayan bush, set on red earth and surrounded by vegetation, there is a Lutheran cemetery. ![]()
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