In his parting speech to the small crowd which assembled to bid the colonists farewell at Hamburg docks, Förster had announced that he was going to Paraguay ‘partly to complete and partly to prepare the purchase of land for colonial purposes’: he was being, strictly speaking, honest, because the first, last and most crucial problem with the planned colonisation of Paraguayan lands was that neither Bernhard nor Elisabeth Förster owned any.
An area had been chosen for the colony about 150 miles north of Asunción covering some 600 square kilometres. The locals called the area Campo Cassaccia, and it had once been sparsely populated. But now, thanks to the war, it was all but deserted: two-thirds was forest but one-third, said Förster, was fertile farming land. Most of Campo Cassacia seems to have been the property of a rich, flamboyant Paraguayan called Cirilio Solalinde, and his asking price was steep – 175,000 marks, way beyond anything Förster or Elisabeth could raise. It took months of negotiations, during which the fourteen peasant families they had brought from Germany idled their time away in Asunción, before the Försters managed to strike a triangular land deal involving Förster, Solalinde and the Paraguayan government. The government would pay 80,000 marks to Solalinde, who would then hand over 40,000 acres to Förster; in return Förster had to make a down payment to the government of just 2,000 marks. It seemed a simple and, from the Försters’ point of view, excellent arrangement. But, as with every Paraguayan deal, there was a snag: at least 140 German families had to be settled on the property within two years, or the money must be paid back and the land forfeited. Förster, convinced that people would arrive in droves once the colony had been established, happily signed his life away on 23 November, fully eight months after the colonists had disembarked. He began selling off parcels of land, despite the fact that the Paraguayan government still had legal title to it. Förster, who had always excoriated the Jews for using credit to finagle honest Germans into buying things they didn’t own, now started doing exactly that.
To raise still more cash, Förster and Elisabeth set about soliciting donations and loans from friends and relatives in Europe. One supporter was Julius Cyriax, a committed German Wagnerian known to Förster from the Bayreuth days, now resident in London. A chemist by profession, he made a living by dealing in ‘surgical instruments and appliances, glassware, confectionery, patent medicines, medical books and shop fittings and every description of druggist’s sundries’. As the sole proprietor of Rossiter’s Hair Restorer and author of such best-selling titles as Deep Petrissage of the Abdomen as an Aid to the Diagnosis of Tapeworm and Mechanical Stimulation of the Coccygeal Ganglion, Cyriax seems to have been a man of means; at any rate, he was generous when it came to sending money to Förster. ‘I shall have to remain in your debt for a while’, wrote Förster, ‘but in a few years’ time I hope to be able to pay you back.’ He never did. Other contributors to Nueva Germania included Förster’s four siblings and Franziska Nietzsche, two of Elisabeth’s girlfriends from Naumburg and even her elderly nursemaid Alwine. The only close relative who steadfastly refused to invest in the colony was Friedrich Nietzsche. Before the couple left for Paraguay, he had responded amusingly to his sister’s ‘jolly suggestion’ that he put up some money, ‘if it would encourage your husband to come round to a good opinion of your hopeless, loafer brother and the good European and the anti-anti-Semites’. To his sister’s suggestion that a portion of land be named Friedrichsheim after him, he responded that it should be called ‘Llamaland’ instead.
Once in Paraguay, Elisabeth made further attempts to tap into her brother’s minimal resources. Nietzsche felt guilty at the repeated demands or, rather, angry for being made to feel guilty when he turned them down. Knowing his views on anti-Semitism, she now tried to play down the colony’s racism, but her brother was rightly unconvinced. In June he wrote to her:
You say that New Germany is not anti-Semitic, but I know for certain that the colonisation project has a decidedly anti-Semitic character from seeing the ‘correspondence sheet’ that is sent out in secret and only to reliable members of the party. (I hope my brother-in-law does not give it to you to read! It becomes ever more unpleasant.)… Oh, my good Llama, how have you come to fall into such a misadventure … for if I know my dear sister, she would rather die than leave her project in the lurch. But that is Nietzschean!
He also feared his Basle pension might be cut off by the ‘economic and skilful’ university authorities if they discovered he was a South American landowner, and he cited the advice of his old friend from Basle, Franz Overbeck, who considered the whole project a dangerous gamble. Elisabeth was furious and promptly revealed her true colours: she decided that Overbeck, who was an atheist church historian, but a Protestant by birth, was in actuality a Jew. His race explained everything. Later she wrote to her mother: ‘I hear that Overbeck is a Jew; that speaks volumes and I believe it.’
While Elisabeth stayed in Asunción, fulminating against her brother’s stinginess and his inability to make his mind up without deferring to a Jew, Förster and an advance band of settlers had taken the journey north and began to clear the forest to make way for a town, to be christened Försterrode. Throughout 1887 work went ahead on Elisabeth’s mansion. From the beginning she had dreamed of a large house of her own. ‘Just think how grand it would sound’, she had written to Förster, ‘Förster of Försterhof.’
The effort of constructing a building on the scale Elisabeth had in mind was clearly considerable. It began to tell on Förster, who (though he was only forty-three) wrote to Cyriax, ‘I am getting old and very tired. Once the house is finished, then the continuation of our work will be assured. Then I too will be able to rest.’ The strain and the climate were affecting the resilient Elisabeth too: ‘the few years I have been married have aged me by ten years’, she told her mother. ‘If the last few years haven’t given me grey hairs then I won’t ever get them.’ Elisabeth suffered from homesickness, and Förster from some seriously bad temper. ‘I hope that unquiet Bernhard is not making life too hard for our Lissen’, Franziska Nietzsche wrote to her son. But they could not have returned to Germany, even if they had wanted to. Before leaving, it seems, Förster had publicly accused a government minister of having Jewish ancestry and had been sued in absentia. If he set foot in Germany, Franziska reported, he would probably be arrested.
In March 1888, a grand inauguration ceremony was held at the colony and the Försters finally took possession of their mansion. The occasion swelled equally Elisabeth’s head and her prose style, and she wrote an effusive letter to her mother:
In front of every farm house we passed, people stood festively dressed, presented me with flowers and cigars, and handed me their babies for my benediction. Suddenly, eight splendid horsemen appeared. They were our New Germans who had come to greet us; among them were Herr Erck and other leading colonists. They brought Bern’s favourite horse, beautifully decorated with black, white and red rosettes, which he mounted at once. That was only the first reception and we were still not in our own country. You ought to have seen the procession: first the wagon, then the riders, and then the long train of people. Now we reached the Aguaryaumí, which borders on our property. We were not received with a cannon salute, but cheerful gunshots rang out as we approached and a charming small wagon appeared, decorated with palm leaves like a green arbour and carrying a small red throne. All very pretty. Here I embraced my dear Frau Erck and Herr Erck made a solemn speech of welcome since I had never been here before. Then the procession moved to the port of Aguarya-guazu, the commercial centre of the colony with the store and immigrant house.
Here the first triumphal arch had been erected and the official reception took place. We sat in the centre of a marvellously shady square, and three very beautiful girls appeared, the oldest, about 15, was almost a lady; she was pretty as a picture and the beauty of the colony. She recited a charming poem of welcome that her father had written and gave us flowers. Then we ate breakfast while the populace feasted on wine and cumin.
In fact one of the colonists became so drunk that he fell in the river and drowned. The Paraguayans unsentimentally named the harbour Kaú, Guaraní for drunkard. That incident Elisabeth omitted, but her breathless description went on:
The wives of the colonists who had been brought together brewed coffee, and our New Germans sat together under a beautifully shady tree … they all had such open and honest German faces. Then Herr Enzweiler, a very industrious and capable colonist, made a speech of welcome, raised his glass and shouted ‘Long live the Mother of the Colony’, which pleased my heart … accompanied by the sounds of ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’ we drove and rode to our house.
There then followed another series of triumphal arches, flowers, solemn good wishes and thanks to God for her good fortune and the size of her domestic staff – twenty peons, cooks and servants. Leaving aside Elisabeth’s impressive capacity for exaggeration and her understandable desire to dispel her mother’s reservations about the whole project, one thing is certain: at the age of forty-two, Elisabeth was finally someone to be reckoned with in her own right, the wife of a brave pioneer, mistress of a large mansion, mother of an Aryan colony and Queen of a potential new Germany. The descriptions are all her own.
Back in Europe, Nietzsche made no attempt to hide what he felt about Germany, old or new: ‘I have no respect left for present-day Germany … it represents the most stupid, the most depraved, the most mendacious form of the “German spirit” that ever was.’ And he was more convinced than ever that he wanted ‘nothing whatever to do with this anti-Semitic undertaking’ by his sister, let alone underwrite his brother-in-law’s growing overdraft at a Naumburg bank. He repeatedly told her that ten horses would not drag him to Paraguay, adding sadly, ‘indeed, I’m already a sort of immigrant, I also have my Gran’ Chaco…’. Once again he felt his own psychological wilderness closing in.
He drafted a letter to his sister suggesting that every anti-Semite be packed off to Paraguay and outlining his reasons for refusing to invest in the scheme: ‘My position is financially insecure, and yours has not been proven. But above all our wishes and our interests do not coincide insofar as your project is an anti-Semitic one. If Dr Förster’s project succeeds, then I will be happy on your behalf and as far as I can, I will ignore the fact that it is the triumph of a movement which I reject. If it fails I shall rejoice in the death of an anti-Semitic project …’ But he was none the less impressed when he heard Elisabeth’s inflated description of her own eminence, and he boasted to his friends that Elisabeth’s house had become a social centre of the country, and that his relations were now among the largest landowners in Paraguay with property the size of a small princedom. Her reception was worthy of a priest, he told her – a somewhat backhanded compliment in his case.
He could afford to be generous, because he too had achieved a breakthrough. At the beginning of 1888, Nietzsche received a letter from Georg Brandes, the prominent Danish critic, who admired his work for its ‘aristocratic radicalism’. Nietzsche, delighted, wrote back saying it was ‘the shrewdest comment on me I have so far read’. It was also practically the only comment for many years. Since Nietzsche had abandoned Bayreuth, he had written the greatest part of his oeuvre: Daybreak, The Gay Science, Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil and Genealogy of Morals. The works had attracted little or no attention, and some had seen the public light of day only because he had published them at his own expense. But when Brandes began to lecture in Copenhagen on him, it gave rise to a renewed burst of self-confidence in the forty-three-year-old philosopher, confidence which, as his mind began to disintegrate under the strain of disease, found expression in a combination of astonishing hubris, euphoria and, for a time, apparently improved health. He confided to friends: ‘Between ourselves … it is not inconceivable that I am the foremost philosopher of the era, perhaps even more than that, a bridge between two millennia, decisive and doom-laden.’ To Elisabeth he wrote as ‘Your brother, now quite a famous person’.
Elisabeth, as was her wont, promptly put him in his place. ‘Personally I would have wished you another apostle than Mr Brandes; he has peeked in too many pots and eaten from too many plates … I cannot suppress a well-meant piece of advice. Avoid a personal meeting, exchange pleasantries with him by correspondence, but do not look at him too closely.’ Brandes, of course, was Jewish. Nietzsche was enraged. Once again Elisabeth was trying to bring him down at the moment of his greatest triumph. He drafted but never sent a letter breaking off all contact with his sister: ‘It is time we said goodbye. I see every word you ever said to me ten times more clearly now … You have no conception of what it means to be closely related to the man and the destiny in whom the question of millennia has been resolved – quite literally I hold the future of humanity in the palm of my hand.’
Elisabeth had little time for her brother’s delusions of grandeur since she had plenty of her own. She and Förster bombarded Germany with reports of the colony’s excellent progress; their thinly veiled propaganda found a willing home in the pages of Hans von Wolzogen’s Bayreuther Blätter and a variety of other colonial newspapers. Förster wrote: ‘We are dreaming of a rebirth of our race … when the axe resounds in the primordial forest, when we clear the underbrush with the sweat of our brow to prepare the fertile soil for cultivation, when we dig trenches to drain stagnant water – how far all these activities seem from the sacred hill of Bayreuth. But we feel in our hearts that it is precisely this kind of work that makes us the spiritual heirs of Richard Wagner.’ Elisabeth’s declarations were still more plangent. A piece entitled ‘A Sunday in Nueva Germania’ appeared in the Bayreuther Blätter in late 1888:
After supper we sit in the garden and look into the distance … there are fields, gilded with red from the evening sun on both sides of the river, interspersed with fields of lowing cattle. What a peaceful, happy picture this affords, nothing is alien. No, everything is homely … you dear Bayreuth friends, have you perhaps solved the puzzle in your way? Do you realise that the only fruitful spirit of colonisation has emanated from Bayreuth? … but now, other noises reach us on the soft currents of the evening breeze; the singing of German men reaches us from a garden a little way off. How the jungle trees must wonder at these strange new sounds wafting through the treetops. For twenty years deep silence has ruled here [Elisabeth seemed to have assumed that the Indians were not only biologically inferior, but mute], but now there is this strange new life. The song is ‘I don’t know why, but I’m so sad’, which the German sings when he is particularly happy. They are singing in the distance with love and pride and yearning. Up into the star-studded southern night sky, into the mysterious gloom of the jungle: ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles, über alles in der Welt.’
Both Elisabeth and Förster spoke of the triumphant first sailing of the ship Hermann, which would transport colonists from the river to the colony, and of the railway that would surely soon be built, connecting Nueva Germania to the outside world. It was a place where simple Paraguayan servants rushed to do a white man’s bidding, where the food fell from the trees and where Germans, tired of the economic vicissitudes of life in the Fatherland, could find ‘a healthy climate, cheap food and pleasant surroundings’.
This was, of course, the purest fantasy. The climate was usually roasting, the heat broken only by the irregular but torrential rain which drowned animals, ripped up fences, poured through straw roofs and made travel all but impossible. The downpours brought with them swarms of fat malarial mosquitoes. The burrowing sandfly, the picá, was a constant menace; it bored into your feet and, if left untreated, the wound rapidly went septic. The earth was thick and glutinous, virtually unploughable and resistant to most kinds of crops. Every mouthful had to be fought for.
Förster had insisted that the colony’s buildings, except in the tiny town of Försterrode, be built at least a mile apart, the better to cultivate homely German virtues in solitude. The result was crushing depression, made worse by Förster’s overbearing attitude. He would ride around the colony on a white horse and insisted that other colonists dismount when he passed. If the German workers sang ‘I’m so sad’, that was because they had every reason to be: two years after arriving in Paraguay, many were still living in communal mudbrick houses, little more than shacks, sodden, smelly and unhygienic. The only completed house was Elisabeth’s beloved Försterhof. At first the settlers ignored the siesta, working all day; but when they began to drop from heat exhaustion, they quickly adopted the Paraguayan habit, refined over centuries, of sleeping through the afternoon when the sun was overhead. Roads were left unbuilt since every available hour was spent trying to coax crops from the red earth or to fatten up the few livestock; in spite of the torrential rain, clean water was in short supply. Wells had to be dug to depths of 100 feet before reaching water, and they quickly ran dry. While Elisabeth opined on the childlike, biddable qualities of her Paraguayan peons, many of the other colonists found them lazy and disrespectful. Fights began to break out between the races which Elisabeth had to break up, though she would ‘rather have spent time on ideological matters’.
She was well aware that discontent was brewing, but for the time being she was content to enjoy her newfound eminence. When an aristocratic Mecklenburg family, the von Maltzans, responded to the propaganda barrage and agreed to join the enterprise, she was delighted. Baron Hermann von Maltzan was a well-known African explorer and colonial figure, and persuading his family to come to Paraguay had been a remarkable coup. Elisabeth shared her brother’s reservations regarding the peasant stock of New Germany, but with the Maltzans she could hold tea parties and coffee mornings on the verandah of her large house – Naumburg on the Aguarya-umí.
Early in 1887, the Försters had met General Osborne, the former American Ambassador to Argentina, an entrepreneur and optimist. He was negotiating with the Paraguayan government to build a railway line which would run from the mouth of the Rio de la Plata to Panama, through Bolivia and Peru. If it was ever built, he assured the Försters, it would pass through or very near to New Germany. When he left, the courteous General expressed a profound hope that he would one day travel by train to visit ‘the little Queen of Nueva Germania’. Elisabeth was delighted with the title, and began to assume an ever more regal air. Even in later life she always referred to New Germany as her ‘princedom’. Her husband was also dreaming ever larger and more impossible dreams. As Nietzsche reported, he had become so important in the affairs of the country that he thought he might even become the next President of the Paraguayan Republic; ‘you can imagine what a strain it is for Förster and me not to deal with each other as enemies’, he added. Förster’s stock at home appeared to be rising too, as a result of his fictional descriptions of life in the colony. By October 1888, he claimed that the colony contained a baker, a shoemaker, three carpenters, two smiths and a sawmill owner. Opportunities remained, he said, for a tailor, a tanner, a plumber, a brewer and a cigar maker. A school was being built, and plans were being made to raise funds to pay for a pastor. Although some Germans had been tempted by his glowing descriptions and had come to join the original fourteen families that had travelled on the Uruguay, others had actually left. ‘There have been settlers who didn’t realise what it would be like here’, Förster admitted cautiously. They didn’t realise because he hadn’t told them. He assured his readers that most of the settlers were German, and that the majority were Protestant. The full complement of settlers should be in place by the end of 1888: ‘If we make a start here, the truly German way, we are going to expand our colony in this propitious climate for hundreds of miles in every direction, justifying the prophetic name we have chosen for it.’
In the first two years, forty families made the trip to Nueva Germania. Of these, a quarter had quit by July 1888, leaving seventy of the hundred town plots unsold. Title to the land depended on finding 110 families in less than a year. Förster wrote to General Bernardino Caballero, the man whom he sought to replace as President of Paraguay, on 24 September 1888 to ask for help. Stressing the President’s reputation as a defender of progressive ideas and citing a number of witnesses to the colony’s progress, he admitted that: ‘The colony’s management is in a little difficulty since it has spent more than was previously calculated. It was impossible, of course, to calculate exact expenditure beforehand for such a great and important work and it is well known, from experience in the colony of San Bernadino, that expenses are high in a new colony.’ Thousands of pesos had already been spent, he said, on providing for the new colonists’ needs and still more on ‘literary propaganda in Europe in support of Paraguayan colonisation’. But he maintained an optimistic tone: ‘For all this, my colony is doing well and there is no doubt I will be paid back for all my work and expenses … A well-led colony will always be a good business and the capital spent on such a project will yield a considerable profit after the third year. In order to allow others to share in these profits, I’m thinking of forming a union or company with sufficient capital to broaden the base of the business … I have already spoken to some important men in Asunción who have assured me they will go into this enterprise with me and share in the profits. This is the reason why I come to you, General, to ask your advice and invite you to participate in this venture.’ The letter did not, apparently, elicit a reply.
If Elisabeth realised the dangers of the situation, she did not say so. Förster certainly did realise. He had promised to refund the price of their land to any colonists who chose to leave, as well as to pay compensation for any improvements to it. Since the only capital he had was what he had collected from the colonists in the first place (which had now been spent), the only alternative was to borrow. He spent more and more time away in Asunción, searching for creditors, or feverishly writing to Germany for more funds and in particular to Max Schubert, the industrialist who ran the Chemnitz Colonial Society, and who had supported Förster from the start.
In 1888 Förster’s nemesis arrived in the small and rather unprepossessing shape of one Julius Klingbeil. Elisabeth was later to accuse this man of being a ‘filthy little egotist’, a possible kidnapper, a liar, a smuggler and a lunatic probably sent by the Jesuits to destroy her colony. He was, of course, nothing of the sort but in reality a barely literate Antwerp tailor of German peasant origin, who came to Paraguay to improve his health. He had read Förster’s descriptions of Paraguay in his advertising pamphlet and found the idea irresistible, particularly as he shared Förster’s anti-Semitism. He arrived in March with his wife and ten companions, having already made a down payment on a plot of land. Klingbeil may have been a simple man, but it took him no time at all to realise that he, along with every other colonist, was the victim of a major fraud.
When he appeared to pay his respects at Försterhof he was led into a large salon, equipped with expensive furniture. Nothing was missing to make life comfortable: a large couch, comfortable chairs, a piano, stone floors and curtained doors. On the wall was Förster’s favourite Goethean motto in gilt lettering: ‘Over all obstacles, stand your ground.’ At dinner the nominally abstemious Försters provided a large selection of excellent wines and copious liqueurs. Having seen Förster’s picture, Klingbeil had expected to meet a man of action, full of good intentions and heroic ideals. What he found was a bundle of nerves. Förster could not sit still, but shifted around continually, speaking only rarely and then in monosyllables. The eyes that had stared forcefully from Förster’s portrait trembled constantly and he could never look you in the eye. He seemed, thought Klingbeil, quite insane; but cunning too. Could this be the same man who had written such uplifting books, and who enjoyed such a reputation at home in Germany? But if Förster was a pathetic mixture of cowardice and ambition, his wife was worse. She was just as ambitious, but with quite extraordinary energy. She would have been admirable, he later reflected, had she not used her heroic talents for such evil ends. It was horrible to see her dominating her husband, who seemed to have no idea about the colony’s future at all and deferred to her constantly. She spoke for both of them, like a queen, and even referred to communal Nueva Germania as ‘their’ principality. She was a tiny woman in expensive and elegant clothes; it was almost amusing to see her twittering around the room, hands, mouth and feet all moving at once. Time and again she steered the conversation back to money, boasting of the colony’s success and pretending that the plots of land were selling fast.
Klingbeil and his wife went to bed, exhausted and infuriated by Frau Förster’s interminable and mostly nonsensical chatter. They realised they would never make their fortunes here, but perhaps they could enjoy a modest life in Nueva Germania, even if Förster himself was so disappointing. They almost felt sorry for him – what a miserable life he must lead with that dreadful woman. But pity soon turned to scorn. The Försters complemented each other perfectly, her bravado compensated for his weakness. She did all the administrative work, bullying and cajoling the colonists into submission, while Förster did little except travel to Asunción and write long, mendacious reports for colonial newspapers in an attempt to gather yet more gullible recruits. Over the ensuing months, Klingbeil gradually realised the extent of the deception. The Försters lived in a large mansion, while the colonists survived in pathetic huts living off strange and horrible food, more degraded than the lowest peasant in Germany. A vegetarian, Klingbeil had been attracted to the colony by Förster’s descriptions of a beautiful land bursting with fruit and vegetables. He was shocked to discover that the Försters now ate meat, though Förster had stated clearly that ‘the people of New Germany will not indulge in the foul and disease-inducing consumption of meat…’. The unfortunate colonists who had believed him and stuck to their dietary principles found themselves surviving on corn, rice and beans. Milk and cheese were sold, but at extortionate prices from the colony’s only shop – which belonged, of course, to Förster. In fact, trade of every type was monopolised by the founder and his wife to prevent any capitalist ‘Jewish customs’ from creeping into the community, and every colonist had to sign a contract saying they would do no business within the boundaries of the colony. Klingbeil complained bitterly about the climate, which was the opposite of what had been promised. It was constantly hot and very humid; when it rained it was impossible either to work or to leave the settlement for weeks on end.
Förster claimed to speak French and Greek, but could not speak either. He had even lied about the ‘remarkable industry’ of the Paraguayan women. The men did all the work, Klingbeil complained, including cooking and cleaning, and the women never washed but lay around smoking cigars and eating the lice off their bodies. As if to prove the point, Frau Förster had tried to enlist Klingbeil’s wife to do her housekeeping. Klingbeil had refused, saying they were a large group with only one woman to cook, and they needed her themselves, whereupon Frau Förster became extremely angry and accused the new arrival of being unhelpful. Klingbeil was outraged.
Himself a volatile character, the little Antwerp tailor lasted only a few months before he came into terminal conflict with the domineering self-styled Queen of the colony. He went to complain about the state of their housing and announced his decision to leave. Elisabeth was furious, weeping with rage, and accusing Klingbeil of causing all the colony’s problems. ‘There have been enough lies’, he replied, before he remounted and rode home to his miserable shack. That day, he packed his few belongings and rode out of the colony for ever.
Klingbeil’s fury lasted all the way back to Germany, where he heaped his resentment and a catalogue of the Försters’ dubious activities into a 160-page book. Apologising for his lack of literary style, he said his motives were to act as a warning against fraudulent demagogues like Förster, who pretended to be patriotic but were just rogues and exploiters of the poor. ‘I have been reproached for trusting too much to Bernhard Förster, but his propaganda for the colony in Paraguay led me into misery’, he wrote. ‘My experiences and the experiences of other German emigrants to Paraguay are so sad and such a bad example that I feel obliged, for reasons of conscience, to tell the whole truth to the people.’ No other nation would even consider colonising such a pitiful country, he concluded, and the government should intervene immediately.
Julius Klingbeil’s Revelations Concerning Bernhard Förster’s Colony New Germany was published in Leipzig at the end of 1889. It demonstrated to the whole of Germany what had been known only to a few lost and bewildered German peasants in the heart of the Paraguayan jungle: that the new Aryan republic was a sham, and the Försters were arrogant swindlers. It raised a storm.
Nietzsche had already written with some glee to Overbeck that ‘in Paraguay things are as bad as they can be. The Germans, who were lured over there, are in rebellion and demand their money back – and there is none. Acts of violence have already occurred. I fear the worst.’ The news that, instead of being thought of as Aryan champions, they were being reviled in the liberal press as rank criminals affected Elisabeth and Bernhard Förster in different ways. She had no intention of reading such a dreadful book, she said, and immediately went on the offensive, attacking Klingbeil in the pages of the Bayreuther Blätter, which still remained open to her. She alternated between flattering her husband’s old anti-Semitic allies and criticising them for their lack of support.
Oh you anti-Semites, is that your loyalty, your courage, shamefully to abandon one of your most ideal leaders? … Anti-Semitism has above all a positive aspect: the urge to deepen and ennoble the true German characteristics; it is motivated by the urge to create or renew institutions which strengthen true Germanness in an idealistic or economic sense and protect it from foreign influences … What is my husband fighting for here and now? Is it not true Germanness? And the goal? Is it not to create a new German place as a substitute for the old? … Let anti-Semitism prove through action, here in Nueva Germania, that it aims to create something in the true German tradition.
The situation in New Germany was improving rapidly, she claimed: the railway was sure to be built soon, and the steamship Hermann was opening the colony to the outside world and ‘bringing the German flag to new territories’. (She neglected to mention that the Hermann was far too small for regular commercial use and had had to be sold, or that another expensive boat, the Esperanza, had been too large to get up the Aguarya-umí in the first place.)
A few ‘loyal’ colonists were persuaded, or more probably browbeaten, into writing letters in support of the colony’s founders: Bernhard Förster was honest and reliable, they said, and Elisabeth had baked cakes for the children at Christmas. Some attacked Klingbeil on the founders’ behalf: he had ripped off the Indians by selling them bad wooden carvings; he was lazy; he had tried to get through customs without paying duty on equipment for distilling schnapps; he was a Catholic or, worse, a Jesuit. But next to Klingbeil’s denunciations, the counter-accusations looked pale, and the whole unedifying rumpus was having a bad effect both in the colony and in Germany. The hitherto solid Max Schubert of the Chemnitz Colonial Society began having doubts about the Försters’ honesty; he threatened to withhold in Germany funds which had been donated to the colony until the situation was clarified. Even the faithful Cyriax seems to have stopped sending money; his contribution to helping the colony was the advice that Förster should try manufacturing chocolate and exporting it to London, or selling Paraguayan handicrafts to the South Kensington Museum. Meanwhile Förster was already paying crippling interest on loans from Paraguayan banks, while casting around for a way to pay off the debts incurred on the Hermann.
Although Förster had roundly denounced Klingbeil and had called for an official investigation to clear his name, psychologically fragile at the best of times he had started to crack. He spent almost no time in New Germany, but became a regular at the Hotel del Lago in San Bernadino, the German colony just outside Asunción. He began to drink heavily, in an attempt to calm his nerves and the crippling headaches they brought on, while he sent ever more desperate entreaties back to Germany.
Elisabeth, now running the colony single-handed, sent him encouraging letters as he languished in deepening gloom, miles downriver in the comfort of a brand-new hotel. ‘My dear heart-Bern’, she wrote, ‘Your depression worries me. Please calm yourself.
Although I admit the situation is precarious, I don’t think Max Schubert is such a crook … if they are honourable, everything will be all right and you have no cause to worry … many problems are coming to a head now: the Klingbeil book and the Chemnitz affair. But things will get better.’ To add to her woes, Elisabeth was now suffering from a serious eye infection, and in April one of Paraguay’s periodic revolutions broke out, with fighting nearby at San Pedro. She made light of it, saying that Paraguayans would never dare attack a group of Germans and she gave short shrift to a couple of government officers who asked permission to take their troops through New Germany in pursuit of the rebels. The colony, she told them, was under the protection of the German flag, and she was proud when they said they had heard of Bismarck. Her fortitude would have been remarkable in any event; it was the more so because news had reached her some time before of another calamity five thousand miles away in Italy.
Throughout the time Elisabeth was away, Nietzsche’s mood swings had become ever more extreme. At times he would long for death, knowing that the dark shadow behind his chair he had felt as a boy was growing longer: ‘With me a catastrophe is being prepared. I know its name, but I will not pronounce it.’ What he did pronounce, though, was a ringing curse on the house of Wagner. In The Case of Wagner (1888) he repudiated all connection with the man he had once adored, calling him ‘one of my diseases’, whose followers persist in ‘chewing the cud of moral and religious absurdities until they choke’. In Twilight of the Idols (1889), a study in decadence and decay, he examined ‘What the Germans lack.’ He wrote: ‘The Germans – once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, politics devours all serious things – Deutschland, Deutschland über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy … nowhere else are the two great European narcotics, alcohol and Christianity, so viciously abused. Lately even a third has been added, one which is capable by itself of completely obstructing all delicate and audacious flexibility of spirit: music, our constipated, constipating German music – How much dreary heaviness, lameness, dampness, sloppiness. How much beer there is in the German intellect!’
By the end of 1888 and now living in Turin, his spirits reached tempo fortissimo and the disease took a final grip on his mind. He felt ten years younger as he walked the streets, the people seemed to stare at him in awe. At night in his pensione he would play the piano for hours. Mostly he played Wagner. On his forty-fourth birthday he began work on Ecce Homo, an autobiography boiling with grand ideas and self-praise. In ‘Why I Am Destiny’, the results of the death of God, of a world released from the false straitjacket of Christian morality, are laid terrifyingly bare: ‘When truth starts battling with the lies of millennia, we shall have convulsions, a spasm of earthquakes, a displacement of mountains and valleys such as no one has dreamed of.’ He began to correspond with August Strindberg; the two writers appeared to be drifting into insanity in tandem.
That Christmas, his mood of elation reached a crescendo. ‘In two months’ time I shall be the foremost name on earth’, he wrote; his health was excellent, his appetite unimpaired and his fame assured. If his books were still unread except by a few Scandinavian intellectuals, well, that was a sign of other people’s (particularly German) stupidity and his own greatness. Suddenly he believed he had political power, and his anti-German feelings came to a head. ‘I have ordered a convocation of princes in Rome’, he wrote to Strindberg. ‘I want to have the young Kaiser shot.’ He signed himself Nietzsche Caesar. Strindberg replied, ‘I want, I want to be mad’, and ended, ‘Meanwhile it is a joy to be mad.’
On 3 January, Nietzsche took his customary walk through the streets of Turin. At the Piazza Carlo Alberto, he came across a cabman savagely beating his old horse. Nietzsche threw his arms around the animal’s neck and collapsed weeping to the ground. A crowd gathered, including his landlord, who had him carried back to his pensione; eventually he regained consciousness, but never his sanity. He penned a furious flurry of insane letters, to the King of Italy, the Vatican and various friends. Signing himself Dionysus or ‘The Crucified’, he inveighed against the Reich, Germany and anti-Semites: ‘I have just seized possession of my kingdom, and am throwing the pope into prison and having Wilhelm, Bismarck and Stöcker [Förster’s friend] shot.’ In another letter he finally declared love to Cosima Wagner, addressing her as ‘Ariadne’. When Overbeck received a letter saying ‘I have just had all anti-Semites shot’, he hurried to Turin to find his friend and bring him home.
Elisabeth was understandably upset by the news of her brother’s collapse and wondered whether she should go back and tend to him. But in conjunction with her sisterly concern, she also began the long process of reinventing her own relationship with him. ‘He never said an unkind word to me’, she decided. Instead of being a bad-tempered burden with a taste for Jewish company, she started to turn him back into the idolised figure of her childhood. The myth-making had begun.
Förster was too wrapped up in his own problems to spare much of a thought for a brother-in-law he had never liked and who had heartily disliked him. ‘Bernhard does not show the slightest sympathy for my grief’, Elisabeth told her mother. While stressing that she was still a good wife, she concluded that her husband was impossibly selfish and that without her help his colonial project would have been a disaster long before. If she only had the money, she would leave Paraguay at once. There had never been much love in their marriage. They shared a set of beliefs: in God, Wagner, Germany and anti-Semitism, but both were too egocentric to share much else. Förster had used Elisabeth as a passport to the inner circle of Bayreuth and, perhaps, had recognised in her a character far more robust than his own. Elisabeth believed that the path to success was by hitching her wagon to the right man and following him to glory. In the context of her times, she may have been right. But the sort of man she chose was an accurate reflection of the sort of woman she was. Förster had appeared in her life at the time when her brother had apparently failed her; at some point during her first three years in Paraguay she must have realised that her husband was failing her too. But to the qualities of stubbornness and fortitude should be added loyalty. Elisabeth never withdrew.
Just before their wedding anniversary on 22 May she wrote to Förster, still languishing at the Hotel del Lago and nearing the end of a six-week drinking binge: ‘Don’t worry about this terrible Klingbeil book, I won’t read it if you don’t want me to. I don’t care a fig for all this, if only our dear Fritz would recover, then he could write a hundred such books in reply. I’m so lonely in the evenings, and I wish you would come back now … Everything will get better … I’m sad that we shall spend our wedding anniversary apart.’ He probably never read it. On 2 June he wrote Elisabeth another letter, gravid with self-pity: ‘I am in a bad way’, he wailed. ‘When will things improve?’ At eight o’clock the next morning, a terrified maid discovered Förster lying dead in his room at the Hotel del Lago.
Elisabeth rushed to San Bernadino. Although distraught she acted quickly, persuading a Paraguayan doctor to sign a death certificate confirming her own diagnosis: that her forty-six-year-old husband had died of a ‘nervous attack’ brought on by the slanders of his enemies and the trials of his chosen duty. She later reconstructed the last hours of his life as proof that he had died a martyr for his people, like the Wagnerian heroes he aspired to emulate. A Spanish Evangelical priest, she said, had been talking with Förster the night before his death when her husband ‘suddenly rose from his couch saying that he felt faint and unwell, and exclaimed “I think I am getting nerve fever.” He sat down on a chair, by the bed, one hand behind his head and the other pressed to his heart. Later he lay down to sleep, having apparently recovered from the feverish attack … but on 3 June, the condition of the invalid deteriorated considerably until the fatal attack, which was confirmed as quickly as possible by the doctor.’ She agreed with the director of the San Bernadino colony, one Herr Schaerer, when he pronounced that ‘the false friends and the intrigues of enemies have bored into his heart’. Whereas the noble Förster had lived by his Christian beliefs, he had found only doubt, suspicion and human wickedness all around him. ‘This one discovery – set against all the hopes and potential success of his ideal – broke the heart of this brave man, and prematurely ended this hopeful, this extraordinarily valuable life.’
What Elisabeth did not know, or chose to ignore, was that her husband had written a letter to Max Schubert the night before he died. Schubert’s strange behaviour, he said, had driven him to bankruptcy; as a ‘last request’ he begged the director of the Colonial Society not to abandon New Germany. His hands were clearly shaking as he wrote: ‘My body and mind have reached the stage where I assume I shall shortly be relieved of my heavy burden … perhaps the deserving enterprise I have started will prosper better without me.’ After sealing the letter, Förster had poisoned himself, using a deadly cocktail of strychnine and morphine. Elisabeth kept the phial of poison found by his bedside as a grisly souvenir and later made the mistake of showing it to one of the colonists, Herr Chagga. There is further evidence that Elisabeth’s story of ‘death by nerves’ was a lie. Some time before, Förster had confided to a German doctor in Asunción, Dr Jaensch, that ‘he and his wife would simply take poison if the colonial project failed’. He had completed half of the threat. His suicide note clearly indicated that it was not remorse or an admission of guilt that drove him to kill himself – any more than it was guilt which caused Hermann Goering to bite on a cyanide capsule in Nuremberg jail fifty-seven years later. Neither admitted they were wrong, but both accepted they had lost.
In 1881 Förster wrote of Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil in The Relationship between Modern Jewry and German Art: ‘the artist leaves us in no doubt that he will achieve his aims … when he dies he will submit nobly and gloriously and the philosophical calm will not leave him even in the worst throes of death’. Förster may well have believed his end was a glorious one. He was buried in the German cemetery overlooking San Bernadino and the still blue waters of the Ypacarai Lake; the German proprietor of the hotel reluctantly agreed to accept some land in New Germany as payment for Förster’s large bar bill.
The colony’s ‘loyalists’, led by Oscar Erck, wrote Elisabeth a letter of condolence: Förster, they said, ‘not only led us to our new home, but was also in every respect a warm friend and adviser. We, the undersigned, offer you, dear lady, our most deeply felt sympathy. The magnanimity of his character and the greatness of the ideals which he realised here will ensure that the noble spirit of the deceased will be honoured for many generations. May the Almighty give you special strength to carry such a loss with resignation.’ It was signed by fifty-three people, rather less than half the colony.
The Wagnerite Hans Paul von Wolzogen wrote a poem to the fallen Förster, the hero of Valhalla, which appeared in the Bayreuther Blätter. It ended:
Do not call him defeated
because German strength is broken,
an eagle with a broken wing
under a blue foreign sky;
at the silent grave
grieve only for German devotion,
For joy rules at Valhalla.
He also suggested that Förster’s body be returned to New Germany and a memorial be erected to him, representative of his noble ideals. More immediately, he urged his readers to contribute money to a Bernhard Förster Foundation to ‘enable colonists without means to settle in the colony’ and ‘build a little Christian house of God in Försterrode’. Wolzogen’s fund-raising talents were on a par with his poetry: in three years, he collected a grand total of 36.30 marks – approximately enough to buy half a dozen spades.
While Wolzogen’s panegyric boosted Elisabeth’s reputation in Bayreuth as the widow of a great Wagnerian martyr – an image she encouraged by dressing in black for the rest of her life – it hardly improved her financial position. Elisabeth had admitted there were debts to pay on her husband’s estate, but maintained that he had left the colony ‘in excellent order’; exactly the reverse was true, and though she valiantly fought off creditors and sued her detractors, she was quite unable to raise more cash; Klingbeil’s Revelations were still fresh in the memory. Even among the most dedicated colonists there was mounting dissatisfaction that after four years they still had no legal title to the land.
In 1890, the colonising venture was bought out by a hastily formed corporation of businessmen, the Sociedad Colonizadora Nueva Germania en el Paraguay, consisting of two Germans, an Italian, a Spaniard, an Englishman and a Dane. As far as Elisabeth was concerned it was an interim measure, and the idea that the colony might be under the permanent control of non-Germans was intolerable. New Germany belonged to her, and it was only a matter of time before she made enough money to get it back. At the end of the year she departed for Germany, there to persuade the citizens of the Fatherland to rally to her cause. She would save the colony, build the church that was so urgently needed for the spiritual welfare of her colonists and clear her husband’s name. She left Oscar Erck behind as temporary administrator.
Elisabeth’s almost pathological concern that Nueva Germania should survive combined with another obsession to persuade her that she must return home. The news of her brother was alarming. It was not the least of Elisabeth’s failings that she considered herself conversant with medical matters, although she had no expertise whatever; she had convinced herself that Nietzsche was suffering from chloride poisoning, a result of the heavy sleeping draughts he had taken throughout the latter part of his life; his health, she decided, had also been impaired by a Javanese narcotic he had been given by a Dutchman in 1884. Much later, she was to spin another, still more fantastic explanation for Nietzsche’s collapse: someone, she said, had been writing Nietzsche anonymous letters saying that her husband had written a scathing article about Zarathustra to appear in an anti-Semitic newspaper. A letter from Nietzsche, she said, had been found in her dead husband’s effects, in which her brother ‘bitterly reproached my husband with having stolen away and corrupted the sister who was his most loyal disciple’. The letter, she claimed, ended with a threat: ‘I take one sleeping draught after another to deaden the pain, and for all that I cannot sleep. Today I will take such a dose that I lose my wits.’ This letter (which has not been found and almost certainly never existed) thus confirmed Elisabeth’s diagnosis and made Elisabeth herself a central, though blameless, factor in his martyrdom. Her description of her brother’s mental crisis is a crude reflection of the heroic end she had already invented for her husband, a lonely figure driven to distraction by the intrigues of enemies. ‘The whole letter sounded like the last wail of his tortured soul’, she later wrote, ‘the bow snapped, the hero broke down – during the last days of 1888 a paralytic stroke overtook our loved one, and crippled that incomparable brain for ever.’
Soon after his dramatic collapse in Turin, Nietzsche was taken to the lunatic asylum at Jena, not far from the Nietzsche home in Naumburg. He strode into the clinic like a nobleman, thanked the startled attendants for the magnificence of his reception and said that his wife, Cosima Wagner, had brought him there.
Although his mother would have preferred to nurse him at home, his state was too unpredictable to be without constant supervision. He was silent much of the time, brooding behind his moustache, now grown to vast proportions, the right side sprouting white hairs; but then he would break into loud lamentations, followed by rage and occasionally violence. His mother lacked the money for the most expensive treatment: he was diagnosed as suffering from ‘paralytic psychic disturbance’, and registered as ‘Patient, second class’. Wearing the demeaning institutional hat of the asylum, he called himself the Kaiser and the Duke of Cumberland; he smashed windows and complained of headaches; the warder he accused of being Bismarck.
In his calmer moments he would play the piano or crouch tearfully in corners. ‘I am dead because I am stupid, I am stupid because I am dead’, he would repeat over and over again, a madman’s mantra. His endless, meaningless chattering sometimes carried on through the night. It was while he was in this state that he is supposed to have written My Sister and I. Occasionally he did seem lucid – so much so that at least two of his friends believed his madness to be feigned – but his memory ended abruptly in 1888: of the previous two years of his life he remembered nothing.
After fourteen months of anxious pressure from his mother, the asylum authorities declared him officially incurable and in May 1890 he was released to return with her to Naumburg. He seemed calmer, but was still unpredictable: he had been at home a short time when a policeman had to prevent him from undressing in the street; after that he went out only rarely, and then always under his mother’s watchful eye.
He was waiting at the railway station in Naumburg when Elisabeth’s train pulled up, just before Christmas 1890, holding tightly to his mother’s arm and standing erect ‘like a Prussian soldier’. For perhaps the first time in his life, Nietzsche did as his mother told him. He certainly recognised his sister and seemed content when she read him passages from Zarathustra. But, through his madness, a bitter memory of Elisabeth seems to have filtered. Although his handwriting was all but illegible now, he left a few semi-coherent jottings which betray outright hostility towards his sister, evidenced in a cruel mimicry of her self-inflating tendencies. One of these scraps appears to read ‘As mother of the colony, I still have so much to do for the country. That is the main pleasure for Fritz I am monstrously good. I do not know whether I am leaving my husband’s work in the lurch.’ So far from leaving her husband in the lurch, Elisabeth was working hard to turn him into a martyr.
It took her just five months to compile Bernhard Förster’s Colony New Germany in Paraguay, which was published in the spring of 1891. The book included newspaper articles and reviews written from and about the colony since its founding. It was highly selective and was intended to serve a number of purposes: most importantly it appealed for funds to maintain the colony and build a much-needed church there; it rebutted Klingbeil’s accusations and painted Förster (and by association Elisabeth) in a dazzling light. Förster was ‘a battling hero worthy of Valhalla, in the image of whose face the true Christ is united with the real German race, who has fallen on a foreign field for his belief in the German spirit’; Elisabeth was a ‘brokenhearted woman’ fighting to save his reputation from the slanders of liberal (read Jewish) journalists – Elisabeth was careful to play down her anti-Semitism, which had, albeit briefly, become rather unfashionable. She even went so far as to claim that her husband had latterly renounced his racism, which was patently untrue.
Desperate to entice more colonists, Elisabeth happily repeated most of the old fictions: ‘The climate of Paraguay is like paradise to me, and on this visit to Germany I view the weather here with a shake of my head’, the local food was excellent and cheap (‘The palm hearts taste like lobster’) and the colonists were uniformly healthy and happy. People had died, it was true, but they were mostly drunks anyway. She poured scorn on the dangers from wild animals. There were virtually no snakes left, she said, and the mosquitoes were almost benign. The greatest danger was from the ‘colony tiger, which creeps into the huts of new settlers and frightens the poor souls with humming and sniffing, but always turns out to be just a good old ox’. Practically the worst thing she had to say about Paraguay was that the heat sometimes made it hard to stiffen cream adequately and it was advisable to bring a couple of pretty polished commodes, as ‘we don’t pay much attention to our toilette there and the conventional observances’. It was her most extravagant piece of creative writing so far.
Even Elisabeth can have had few illusions about how the book, with its manifold inaccuracies, would be received by some of the more unhappy colonists she had left behind, many of whom were anything but delighted that she was coming back. Perhaps that was why she delayed her return to Paraguay by six months. But there was another reason too.
At the time of his collapse, Nietzsche’s work was known only to a handful of friends and a few far-sighted intellectuals like Georg Brandes. The sane Nietzsche had made great efforts to publicise himself and his work, all of which had failed; but, insane, he was becoming worthy of public attention. ‘To vegetate on’, wrote Nietzsche, ‘in cowardly dependence on physicians and medicaments after the meaning of life, the right to life, has been lost, ought to entail the profound contempt of society.’ In Nietzsche’s case society did exactly the reverse. Newspaper articles began to appear on the mad philosopher of Naumburg – even Lou (now Andreas-) Salomé, to Elisabeth’s intense irritation, began reminiscing in print about the great mind she had known. Ironically, this voyeuristic interest in Nietzsche’s disability brought the first stirrings of popular interest in his work. As Nietzsche’s friends had feared she might, Elisabeth decided to involve herself, even though she had no legal right to do so.
Nietzsche left behind a vast quantity of unpublished written material, box after box of notes and jottings, aphorisms, laborious copies of excerpts from other books, sayings, ideas and notions. That was how he wrote: incessantly, therapeutically scribbling on loose pieces of paper as his ideas took shape. Nietzsche’s Nachlass, his unpublished literary legacy, contains both the profound and the mundane, the precious and the pointless; some of it he had no doubt intended to keep or incorporate into later writings, some he had merely not bothered to throw away. There were also a number of completed works which had yet to appear in print.
Elisabeth’s first foray into editorialising Nietzsche was an attempt to suppress the publication of Zarathustra IV, because it contained passages she considered sacrilegious. She told her mother that she feared they might be prosecuted under the blasphemy laws; in fact, she probably just didn’t like what the book said. Eventually she relented; but it was an instructive, and for Nietzsche’s more perspicacious friends a jarring, moment. Before finally departing for Paraguay in July 1892, she arranged for the publication of a cheap edition of Nietzsche’s works, the first of many. Peter Gast, Nietzsche’s faithful friend and the only one who could read his impossible handwriting, was left to start editing the Nachlass, while Franziska tended to his physical remains. But it is clear that already Elisabeth had every intention of keeping her own control over both of them.
Elisabeth returned to New Germany in August 1892, to be greeted enthusiastically by Oscar Erck and her other supporters. She told them the good news: the Imperial High Prussian Synod had agreed to send a pastor at its own expense and pay his salary for two years, and they were going, she had decided, to set up a distillery for making sugar-cane spirit for local consumption. Somewhere along the way Elisabeth had forgotten her objections to alcohol. Some viewed her return with foreboding. George Streckfus, a colonist, wrote to Max Schubert of the Chemnitz Colonial Society a few months after Elisabeth had returned: ‘I do not think Germany has cured Frau Förster of her sickness, almost amounting to megalomania; on the contrary, she appears to be even more domineering and deluded … equally I do not think a caña distillery is a blessing for New Germany.’ His remarks were reinforced by a still more hostile report from one Fritz Neumann, a key member of the community. There was neither running water nor roads, he said, those who had tried to settle in the forest had been driven out by nature, and the undergrowth had already suffocated their collapsed huts and abandoned plantations. Förster’s project had been an unmitigated disaster. It was sinful to have brought people here in the first place, but trying to persuade others to follow suit was a crime. The Goethean exhortation to ‘stand your ground’ so beloved of Förster rang hollow after his suicide, of which every colonist was now fully aware.
Disillusionment was widespread and, while Elisabeth continued to claim victory over the forest, the colonists trickled away in ever greater numbers. One wrote: ‘if there is not an improvement by next year to the impossible situation here, I will have to think of moving on, though God knows where I will go. The world is large, and it would be madness to stay in this place for years when God seems to have abandoned it. If I sacrifice myself now, I will only regret later that I did not leave sooner … if I had the money, I would go today, but that is the chain which binds so many here to misery.’ Elisabeth launched herself, with customary ferocity, into a campaign against Neumann, but this time it was a losing battle. Max Schubert had continued as director of the Chemnitz Colonial Society and now received a steady stream of letters from both sides. On 18 July 1892, another colonist, Walter Glitza, had sent a particularly worrying letter: ‘the favourable letters you get are all fabricated’, he said. ‘There is not a single colonist who is content with his lot, and who can blame them, for the life is miserable here.’ Who, then, was forging the other letters? Suspicion necessarily pointed to Elisabeth and her henchman, Oscar Erck.
The coup de grâce was administered by a popular colonist called Paul Ullrichs, whom Elisabeth had slandered in print. Max Schubert printed his riposte in the Colonial Society Newsletter, with an apology for its strong language but the excuse that ‘truth and not delicacy of feeling must now guide our actions’, and concluded, ‘The first condition for any improvement in New Germany is the removal of Frau Förster.’ Elisabeth, one step ahead as always, had already decided to cut her losses. By careful planning, she contrived to turn an undignified rout into a face-saving retreat. Franziska Nietzsche, bovine and biddable as ever, agreed to send her daughter a telegram saying that Nietzsche’s illness had worsened and requesting her daughter’s immediate return. Elisabeth promptly sold her house and her land and left Paraguay for ever. Though a pack of enraged colonists, in lynch mob mood, bayed at her heels, she walked out of New Germany – she did not run.
In August 1893, she sailed from Asunción, which had hardly changed in the intervening years, although now the finishing touches were being put to the Presidential Palace which President Lopez had begun. It was only by a matter of weeks that she missed the grand ceremonial opening by President Gonzalez and an exhibition of Paraguayan national projects. Her valedictory message to the colony appeared much later in, of course, the Bayreuther Blätter. She looked back over her time in Paraguay and made a last appeal for financial help. She was delighted to be able to announce that a German colonial company, the Hermann Society, had agreed to buy the land from the Sociedad Colonizadora Nueva Germania, which could not have been expected to maintain its pure German character since it consisted largely of foreigners. She had done her best, she said, to complete the work her dear departed husband had begun, ‘but how insignificant is the feeble strength of a woman’ in the struggle against ‘dishonest individuals who had confused public opinion’. The Hermann Society could be relied on to maintain the colony’s essential German character and, having removed undesirable elements, the settlement was now enjoying a new lease of life. She appealed to her supporters to buy shares to ensure that the colony was firmly and finally in German hands. Her motivation was pure love, she said, for the ideals of her husband and for the colony, her adopted child – the ‘love of a mother who can no longer care for her child but is deeply concerned to know that it is in truly good hands … I must now bid farewell to colonial affairs’, the appeal ended, ‘another great life’s task now commands all my time and energy: the care of my dear and only brother, the philosopher Nietzsche, the protection of his works and the description of his life and thought.’
The article was written in January 1895, and signed Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Elisabeth was known by many names; as a child she had been Lisbeth, Lichen or Llama; in Paraguay and the pages of the Bayreuther Blätter she had always been known as Eli Förster. Her brother had even teased her about the name. ‘My dear Llama’, he had written in 1885, ‘I shall I think have the right to call you by that name because your husband calls you by another name (a Hebrew one) which is quite a miracle for an old anti-Semite. Eli means “my God”, and probably in a special case, “my Goddess”.’ By court order she now changed her name, thus linking Nietzsche’s name to a man whose views and personality he had despised. And, having grafted Förster’s name on to Nietzsche’s, she now set about doing the same thing with his ideas.
See notes on Chapter VI: Elisabeth In Llamaland