Rebuilding a Neuwa Germania

7/28/2019 Rebuilding a Neuwa Germania

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Rebuilding a neuwa germania

In the late 19th century, a handful of German families settledin a remote jungle of Paraguay, where they intended tocreate a racially pure utopian settlement called NuevaGermania.

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The experiment was a colossal failure.

The settlers were unprepared for the devastating diseasesand other hardships of jungle life, and their descendants --some of whom intermarried with the darker-skinned locals --are among the poorest people in one of the poorestcountries in South America.

But now they have an unlikely champion: a Wagner-lovingSan Francisco composer who is mounting a determined

crusade to rebuild the Aryan dream and has soughtassistance from Vice President Dick Cheney, two U.S.philanthropic groups, a Southern California town council, BayArea artists, and a U.S. filmmaker best known for theunderground movie "Scorpio Rising" and the book"Hollywood Babylon."

"As an artist who is fed up with much of the pretentiousnonsense that has come to define Western culture, I amdrawn to the idea of an Aryan vacuum in the middle of the

jungle," says David Woodard, who lives on Mount Davidsonand studied musical composition at the San FranciscoConservatory of Music.

Woodard, who is also the musical director of the Los AngelesChamber Group, a 14-member ensemble that specializes inplaying at memorial services, insists he is not a white
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supremacist, but rather a man driven by a vision of hismusical hero that happened to bear fruit in a patch of landlocated about 120 miles north of Asuncion, the capital ofParaguay.

"Nueva Germania represents an aesthetic sanctuaryconceived by Wagner; a place where Aryans could peaceablygo to experience life and pursue the advancement ofGermanic culture," he said. The Germans currentlypopulating Nueva Germania number about 100 families,most descended from the original colonists, who arrived in1886.

Among the pioneers was Elisabeth Nietzsche-Foerster --

sister of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche -- who sailed toParaguay with 14 German families to start a socialist, veganutopia along the Aguaraya River. She got the idea afterreading an 1880 essay by Richard Wagner called "Religionand Art," in which the composer ranted against Germany's1871 emancipation of the Jews.

But the colonists were unable to get crops to grow, andmany fell victim to malaria, tuberculosis, snakebites andsand fleas. After two years, Nietzsche-Foerster's husband, anotorious anti-Semitic propagandist named BernhardFoerster, committed suicide by swallowing poison after adrinking binge. His widow returned to Germany in 1893.

Today, the Nietzsche-Foerster home in Nueva Germania liesin ruins, the original Lutheran church and the German schoolhave been closed for more than a decade, while the German-speaking descendants barely eke out a living as subsistencefarmers.

Woodard, born and raised in Santa Barbara, is a thin manwith stooped shoulders who favors large, dark sunglasses.Now in his mid-30s, he also manufactures replicas of apsychedelic contraption called a Dreamachine, a motorizedcylinder that spins and creates a strobe effect. Invented in1959 by the Beat writer Brion Gysin, it is supposed to paint


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pictures inside the viewer's head. Woodard says his clientshave included rockers Kurt Cobain, Iggy Pop and Beck.

When Woodard first visited Nueva Germania last year, hefound most of its residents living in tin-roofed adobe homeswith no indoor plumbing, electricity or telephones. Thechildren walk seven miles to the nearest Spanish-languageschool.

Still, Woodard found that some have not given up on theidea of a racially pure homeland and prefer to marry theircousins rather than non- German Paraguayans.

Compelled by what he had witnessed, Woodard, on his

return to San Francisco, wrote a seven-minute anthem called"Our Jungle Holy Land" and managed to get several Bay Areaartists to participate.

"I thought it was an intriguing project, a bizarre thing of acolony of Germanic people in the jungle," said Kimarie Torre,a San Francisco soprano who sings on the recording. "I knowthis colony was started as an Aryan nation, but I saw themusic as an homage to their country."

Woodard says he first learned of Nueva Germania afterreading "Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for ElisabethNietzsche," a 1992 book by a London Times journalist, BenMacIntyre.

As a part-time resident of the Los Angeles County town ofJuniper Hills, Woodard tried to convince fellow councilmembers to take advantage of a unique opportunity tobecome a sister city to a town "conceived by a master

composer. " Council members in the small town of 500nestled in the foothills on the north side of the San GabrielMountains decided to consider the request in 2003, councilminutes show.

In December 2003, the council removed Woodard for failureto attend meetings and for "pursuing his own agenda"


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regarding Nueva Germania, according to council treasurerDave Reichel.

"He told us it was a quaint town with a musical background.We knew nothing of an Aryan utopia or Nietzsche," recalledReichel. "If we had known, I am 100 percent sure wewouldn't have messed with that."

Reichel said the council was dismayed to later find a link toNueva Germania and the mention of a sister city alliance onthe community's Web site, www.juniperhills.net, whichWoodard developed.

The link includes a recording of "Our Jungle Holy Land,"

which "celebrates our sister city project with NuevaGermania," as well as a written response from the office ofVice President Dick Cheney. "The Vice President was pleasedto learn of your community's interest in establishing sistercity status with Nueva Germania" reads the letter.

The mention of a sister city alliance on the Juniper Hills Website has attracted at least two U.S. philanthropic groups.

Dr. Larry Nichter, who heads a Huntington Beach (Orange

County) group that sends plastic surgeons to poor ThirdWorld communities to help those suffering from physicaldeformities, sent a letter to the White House last March thatread: "The Plasticos Foundation is delighted to support and

join Juniper Hills' sister city project with Nueva Germania,Paraguay. We are concerned about severe phenotypicmutations accrued over 125 years of inbreeding and theprofound effects these are likely to have on the daily life ofNueva Germania's inhabitants."

Reached at his office, Nichter said he is still waiting for moreinformation before sending a team to Paraguay. "We are onhold, but this incredible history fascinates me," he said.

Woodard also contacted the Kansas-based humanitariangroup Heart to Heart International, which donated $12,500
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of medicines to Nueva Germania. The group's officials, whentold, were surprised to learn that no sister city relationshipexists.

"David Woodard's application described their needs and thesister city project," said Dan Neal, the group's internationalprogram manager. "That's how it came about."

The Juniper Hills town council is now trying to distance itselffrom both Woodard and Nueva Germania. Council PresidentVance Pomeroy said the town has created a new Web site --www.juniperhills-ca.org -- and will ask the InternetCorporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, whichassigns domain names, to shut down the original Web site.

Woodard is certainly no stranger to eccentric undertakings --and potentially unpopular causes.

In 2001, Woodard wrote and conducted a 12-minute piececalled "Ave atque Vale" -- which he called "Onward, ValiantSoldier" in English, although the direct translation is "Hailand Farewell" -- for Timothy McVeigh on the eve of hisexecution near the Terre Haute, Ind., federal prison wherethe convicted perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing,

which killed 168 people, 19 of them children, wasincarcerated.

After being denied permission to perform the piece at theprison, Woodard played it at a nearby Roman Catholicchurch 12 hours before the execution.

"McVeigh was portrayed as this insane, dangerous personwho had no basis or reason," Woodard said, "but that omits

the importance of his ultimate motivation -- to stem the riseof the inappropriate actions of the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol,Tobacco and Firearms) and the FBI."

Woodard has also been commissioned by Exit, a Swiss right-to-die group, to orchestrate the "Bach-like pastoral pieces"written by Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the controversial Michigan
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doctor who is serving 10 to 25 years in prison on chargesconnected with assisted suicide.

And the San Francisco musician-entrepreneur continues hisSouth American crusade.

Early next month, he will return to Nueva Germania withAmerican filmmaker Kenneth Anger, director of the 1963 cultfavorite, "Scorpio Rising," and author of the best seller"Hollywood Babylon." Prominent Swiss novelist ChristianKracht will accompany them.

"I shall be assembling ideas for an historical Swiss novel,"Kracht said in an e-mail message from Nepal, where he

publishes a German-language magazine. Woodard said hasalso bought Elizabeth Nietzsche-Foerster's old property withthe intention of building a "scaled-down version" of theBayreuth Festival House, an opera house designed byWagner in 1876. "I know it sounds absurd, but there are a lotof Wagner fans, and with satellite Internet connection andWeb casting, I could use this historic land to compose andrecord music," he said.

He also says he is planning to build a "Dreamachine factory"

on the site where Josef Mengele, the infamous Auschwitzconcentration camp doctor who was responsible for thedeaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews and other Nazivictims, once lived while hiding out after World War II.

The devices, which cost between $500 and $6,000 each,would bring badly needed employment for "disillusionedAryan youths," he says. "We have a chance to helpCaucasians in the middle of the jungle. I would like to see

this unlikely concept go someplace positive, and not crumbleinto a lost subculture, " he said.

"With the reopening of the school, church and building of anopera house, the spirit of these people would have a newlight. It would please me to see a light at the end of thetunnel after 125 years."


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Kultur, Jammed

Paraguays holdout German colony

by Graeme Wood

Published in theApril 2008 issue. BUY ISSUE

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nueva germaniaIn a grubby plastic chair in front of his familys shack, a shirtless

Wilhelm Fischer swats blackflies from his face between sips of yerba mat tea. Hes

boasting in perfect German about the hardscrabble years he spent clearing enough land toeke out a living raising chickens and cows. This was all forest, he says proudly,

pointing to the grassy paddock beyond the barbed wire. He leans down and whispers

something to his daughter, Berta, in the local creole. But she and her mother, Delia

Domnguez, a Guarani Indian cheesemonger, speak excellent German as well. Like Willi,Delia has barely left the steamy Paraguayan hamlet of their birth, but she longs for the

hills of Saxony, the snow-covered banks of the Elbe the land of her husbands gullibleancestors.

Fischers forebears came to Paraguay more than a century ago at the cajoling of Elisabeth

Nietzsche, the sister of the philosopher, and her husband, Bernhard Frster. Late-nineteenth-century Europe had grown too fond of Jews for the Frsters extreme anti-
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Semitic tastes, so they decided to found a new, pure Aryan society. In 1887, the couple

lured fourteen like- minded families across the Atlantic and up the Aguaray River, into

territory inhabited by a few Indians and a truly astonishing variety of biting insects.Though wholly ignorant of South America, Frster had decided this was where they

would preserve theirKultur: Paraguay had the soil, and German farmers would provide

the blood.

It was a blind date on a civilizational scale, and it failed utterly. Within a couple of years,

a quarter of the Nueva Germanians had fled or died of lockjaw. Elisabeth eventuallyreturned to Germany, and her husband, now a hunted man among the colonists,

swallowed strychnine in a hotel outside Asuncin in 1889. Hitler, an admirer, later

ordered a bag of real German dirt scattered on Bernhards grave.

Nueva Germania lost more settlers over the next hundred years some to other

Paraguayan colonies, some to Europe, and some to the Russian front in the Second World

War. But others stayed, learned Spanish and Guarani, married Paraguayans, and

eventually figured out how to grow manioc and mat. Teutonic culture has survivedmostly in wispy memories. Seor Neumann, the owner of the towns only restaurant with

a glass door to seal out the heat and mosquitoes, speaks no German and doesnt knowwhat Oktoberfest is. Seor Kck, an old farmer, tells me the town celebrates one German

festival, but it turns out to be Semana Santa (Holy Week).

The Fischer clan, however, lives in Tacuruty, a neighbourhood of about a dozen families

who have held fiercely to their German roots. (Tacuruty is what the Guarani call theubiquitous anthills big red dirt cairns, in country and town alike, as if to remind you

that humans are only guests of the insects here.) Willi has the bristly facial hair of aPrussian aristocrat, and though he spends all day working in the sun his complexion

resembles Boris Beckers. To the Frsters, he might have seemed a prime specimen of

the Aryan bermensch except that he fell in love with Delia.


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Delia, whose skin is caf au lait, slurps Willis mat while he speaks, then passes it back

to him. The pair, who met in Nueva Germanias tiny high school, weathered disapproval

from both Paraguayans and Germans, who dont want the cultures to mix, she says.

Some Germans say the Paraguayans are animals, that they have no shame, and thefeeling is mutual, according to Delia. Nevertheless, she and Willi married eight years

ago, and she now lives in Tacuruty with their daughter and the extended Fischer family.

She smiles defiantly and says shes proud she can cough out the harsh German gutturals the first Guarani in town to learn, according to her mother-in-law and that Berta,

who peeks around mummys legs clutching a blond doll, will speak German, Spanish,

and Guarani.

Some Germans, even some of the older ones, seem resigned to the Paraguayans finally

appropriating the German language as their own and integrating themselves into the

community. Eighty-one-year-old mother of nine Rosa Haudenschild, whose father wasborn in Nueva Germania barely a year after the colonys founding, says reduced numbers

have occasionally forced Germans to seek out Mennonites to marry, or Paraguayans.

Sometimes there are problems in such marriages, she says. But sometimes there are

problems with the Germans.

Delias attempts to prove her Germanness are showing mixed results. She brags that thefamily eats German food, but shes never heard of schnitzel. She sometimes listens to

German music Johann Strauss, the Frsters Euro-pop and they dance German

dances, she says, like the waltz, and the paso doble.

Between sentences, Delia gulps in air, a troubling sign in a community where


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consumption vies for victims with leprosy and sandfly fever. Shes more concerned about

health and poverty than about the Aryan dreams of Willis predecessors. She shows off

the telephone-book-sized block of grimy white cheese shes selling. The money she getsfor it will constitute a big part of the familys dollar-a-day income.

All the families that had their papers in order have long since left the colony, according tothe Fischers. They themselves tried decades ago to return to Germany, but the embassy

required them to prove their heritage. Having no documents, the Fischers were turned

away, ironically, for not being German enough. Delia is the only member of the familywho still wants to move to the fatherland. Eduard, her sixty-four-year-old father-in-law,

vows to stay put with her and his German son. A slightly alarming, aggressive paranoia

flashes behind his thick glasses as he surveys his familysLebensraum, marked off withbarbed wire and guarded by two mean hounds. He is content, because no strangers orbandits can come on his property. We are all Fischers here.

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Rebuilding a Neuwa Germania