I stood in the middle of Försterhof, Elisabeth’s great mansion, and watched a couple of piglets wrestling across the tiles of what was once her dining room. Nothing was left but some posts of quebracho wood which had supported the verandah roof, riddled with termite holes. You could make out the avenue of orange trees she had planted leading to the house, now twisted and overgrown. The mandioca was growing wild where the vegetable patch had been, and the jungle had rioted over her garden, quickly taking over the land painfully cleared by her ‘childlike’ peons. ‘Only the palm trees silhouetted against the red glow of the night sky remind us that we are not in our old dear German home’, she had boasted. The palm trees were still there. ‘I never imagined it to be half so magnificent’, she had told her mother. ‘Everything is marvellous. Everything looks so professional and grandiose … before falling asleep I lie in bed wondering how we got the money for such a grand enterprise. God must have blessed it … we own a magnificent property, a large house, five small ranchos and three medium-sized ones. We have hundreds of head of cattle, eight horses; we own a store with six thousand marks’ worth of stores; we pay an official administrator, an agricultural administrator, a storekeeper, a land surveyor and an agent who escorts colonists from San Pedro. Besides we employ twenty peons, servants, cooks etc … It is God’s blessing on honest work.’ Look on my works, ye mighty.
Someone with a long memory has carefully stencilled on to a tin board ‘Luisa N. de Förster’, and hung it from a post where the muddy track runs down to the river. I doubt if the painter knew what the ‘N’ stood for.
When Elisabeth had left Paraguay for the last time in 1892, she sold Försterhof to a Baron von Frankenberg-Lüttwitz, and from him it passed to Alfredo Neumann. Alfredo was a bad farmer, and he in turn was forced to sell the house to an Italian–Paraguayan family which came to the colony after the war. It was still the grandest building in the colony, appropriately, since the new owner, Dr Risso, was not only a medical doctor but an important local caudillo in the Colorado Party. The family was proud of the heavy old furniture they had bought with the house, Elisabeth’s piano and the daunting engraving of an angular German knight which hung on the wall.
Risso had an annoying habit of lecturing the colonists about the benefits of the Colorado Party, and he made few friends. The Germans paid scant attention to the complexities of Paraguayan politics, but when they did they considered themselves Liberales; their Paraguayan workers tended to be Colorados. Not that anyone, except Risso, was too sure of the difference, but politics was something you inherited and were proud of, like the colour of your skin and eyes. Indio Risso, his son, was just eight years old in the Revolution of 1947. The Liberales had already taken San Pedro and were advancing on Nueva Germania, working their way along the river towards the town and shooting anyone who tried to stop them. When they were a few miles away, and you could hear the gunfire down by the Aguarya-guazu, Dr Risso packed his young family into a cart and fled into the forest. The rebels arrived a few hours later and set up their headquarters in Elisabeth’s house. It was two weeks before they were driven off by Colorado troops, in a pitched battle through the settlement. When they headed back to San Pedro, they took everything of value – pictures, furniture, crockery; the rest they smashed or burned on a bonfire next to the well. They fired their rifles through the roof, and tried to set fire to the house but the walls were too thick. Somewhere in Paraguay there must be a house with a Dürer engraving on the wall and a gilt-edged Goethean motto, ‘Over all obstacles, stand your ground’. Or perhaps the rebels, like Eliza Lynch, just pitched their loot into the river.
Old Risso came back from the forest and patched up the roof. He replaced the glass windows with wooden shutters and climbed down the well to take out the dead animals. The only piece of furniture left intact was Elisabeth’s dressing table, which the invading Liberales had moved to an outhouse and then forgotten to take with them. The glass had been smashed, and the sight depressed him, so Dr Risso had left it there, and the chickens laid eggs in the drawers. It is still there.
Rain and heat had seeped into the old house as Indio Risso grew up, and the thatch began to give off a strange smell. Then, a few years ago, the walls began to bulge and one of the beams holding up the roof turned to termite dust. Risso decided to move out and build a new house behind the old one, and the pigs moved in. There was a high wind the very next year, and the verandah collapsed, killing a chicken. Risso took out the sound timbers and used them to build a shed.
The next day I ate watermelon in Tacarutý with toothless, hearty old Magdalena Fischer, under a yuyra pyta tree. It had great yellow flowers, like candles, which smelled strong and sweet. She was seventy-four now, but remembered Försterhof well: ‘He would say that about the Liberales, Risso would, he’s a Colorado. It’s the Colorados that did all the killing and raping. People we had known for years, our neighbours, all Paraguayans, just came and took everything.’ Magdalena and her young family had also hidden in the forest until the fighting was over. ‘All the Germans are Liberales’, she said and rocked back on her chair to look out over the little Tacarutý valley. It seemed rather beautiful suddenly, in the hazy afternoon sun. You could just see the river from here, and the forest behind it. Her nephew was herding the cow home; you could hear him talking to it in German. Elisabeth had told her colonists: ‘You will tear yourselves with bleeding hearts from your native soil, from the land which you have loved and which has nourished you. You are certainly not leaving through any thoughtless desire for change, but for a higher faith. Loyalty to the beliefs and customs of your fathers. Come to us, you are warmly welcome; plant your ideals, your steadfastness in this distant beautiful land, which you can rule as your own land, with nothing but God and justice above you.’
Magdalena said she wouldn’t go back to Germany now, even if she had the money. The saddest thing, she said, and her pink face fell, was finding the right people for her children to marry. She had wanted them to marry Germans but there weren’t enough around. She had to send them to the Mennonite colony downriver to find suitable white partners. The old Alsatian yawned and licked her bare feet. ‘The Paraguayans are lazy, they have no idea of how to work or save money. That is the main difference between us. They are a faithless people. Until the Revolution, none of the Germans married Paraguayans but now some are leaving the old ways.’ She pointed through the trees to where her brother and sister-in-law and two children had built houses, identical two-roomed huts. ‘We are dying out, the pure Germans, but they still call this area costa Fischer. At Christmas and weddings, we play German songs and dance the old way.’ There was defiance in her voice.
She talked of the war in Europe and how they had closed the German school in Nueva Germania because Hitler had lost.
‘Sure, everything was “Heil Hitler”’, she giggled suddenly; it was something you did, like supporting the Liberales. It didn’t mean much. After the war, some of the men who had gone to fight in Europe came back. Some, like Martin Schmidt and the Neumann lads, never did. And others came too. In the 1950s, a man calling himself Brandt came to the colony selling agricultural equipment. Magda remembered him well. He stayed with her brother-in-law, Robert Fischer. He was a doctor too, and used to travel around the montes tending the poor German families; he was very good with the children. But he kept to himself and you didn’t inquire too closely. In those years a lot of people came and went. Then, after about 1960, he didn’t come any more. They hadn’t even heard of Josef Mengele then, so how could they know who he really was? It wasn’t until much later that they realised Herr Brandt’s real identity. Magdalena Fischer is adamant about that.
Mengele was forty-eight when he applied for and was granted Paraguayan citizenship. He found a welcoming home in Paraguay, where the fascist sympathies which already ran high in parts of the German community were kept alive by an influx of escaping Nazis. Paraguay could boast the first Nazi Party to be formed in South America, in 1932, and the last to be dissolved, in 1946. It was only with reluctance that the Paraguayan government had declared war on Hitler, three months before the Allied victory. ‘The Axis powers will know full well what Paraguay’s real sentiments are and will take them into account when they finally triumph’, the Paraguayan foreign minister optimistically assured the German community.
Mengele’s anti-Semitism never dimmed in all his years of exile, nor his belief that through genetic engineering the characteristics of the Aryan race could be maintained. The unspeakable cruelties he had visited on thousands of inmates of Auschwitz had been carried out in the name of racial purity. Perhaps that was what brought him to Nueva Germania, where those ideas of breeding and genetic manipulation had been in action, haphazardly, for half a century. The war over, die Spinne, as the Germans called it, the spider’s web of Nazi sympathisers in South America, protected Mengele in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, for thirty-three years. Journalists, bounty hunters and professional Nazi trackers were convinced that Mengele was still in hiding somewhere in Paraguay. The Mengele-hunting industry provided much-needed foreign capital for the country, for the Mengele myth was almost the only thing Europeans could tell you about Paraguay. His powers of escape became legendary; for some he was a symbol of resistance, and the stories multiplied: he was Stroessner’s personal physician; he lived surrounded by bodyguards in the Chaco; he used to drive into Asunción in his limousine and bang his revolver on the bar of his favourite club. In fact he was living in a Brazilian backwater, a fractious old neurotic, having left Paraguay some time in the early 1960s. He died in a swimming accident in 1979 and in 1985 his body was exhumed and positively identified by an international team of experts. That ended the myth, briefly; most of the Nazihunters went home, or elsewhere, but a few stayed on because they didn’t know how to do anything else. Then, in 1991, one of those experts said that the body dug up from Embu graveyard in São Paulo might not have been Mengele’s. The evidence was, he said, inconclusive. And the myth began again.
In Nueva Germania, Hermann Stern owns a shop which sells yerba and machine parts. This is his story: ‘In 1979 a man called Friedrich Ilg came to the colony. He was about seventy years old with grey hair and one of his front teeth was missing. He said he had been a Luftwaffe pilot. He was very Nazi and was always saying that Hitler had been misunderstood. He talked about Josef Mengele and he said that Mengele was just doing his job. We became friends. I would travel to Asunción now and then for supplies, and I would pick up money for Ilg sent from Germany to a bank in Asunción. He had bought himself a little plot and he worked hard on it. But he was depressed here, a very nervous man. I was the only one he talked to. He never seemed to sleep – even at three or four in the morning you could see a candle burning in his hut. He had hundreds of medical books which he read all the time. In return for collecting the money he gave me a Polaroid camera, but he would never let me take a photograph of him. But I took one anyway.’
Hermann handed over a faded snapshot, blurred and indistinct, of an old white-haired man, twisting his head away, trying to get out of the shot. ‘Things started to go wrong when I sold Ilg some machinery. He accused me of charging too much for it and refused to pay. He got angrier and angrier, then one day he appeared at my house with a pistol and called me a Jew and threatened to kill me. He said Stern was a Jewish surname.’ Hermann was surprised. No one had called him a Jew before and, frankly, he wasn’t exactly sure what a Jew was because he had never met one. Hermann’s grandfather had been just seventeen when he joined Bernhard Förster on the steamer in Hamburg. He was a carpenter from Frankfurt, that was all Hermann knew for sure. Grandfather Stern had trapped parrots in the forest which he trained to speak and then sent back downriver to be sold in Germany. He kept hundreds of them in cages behind his house. When Hermann’s father was about fifteen, old Stern had decided to go gold prospecting in the forest. Some said he had found the lost treasure of President Lopez. He returned about three months later, looking worn and frightened; a week after that he left again and never came back. The other Germans thought he must have caught yellow fever or fallen in a river or died of snakebite. But the older ones said he had found the lost gold, and his Paraguayan peons had killed him for it. He hadn’t said anything about being Jewish. ‘There is a saying here in Paraguay, “un negocio buen judeo”, a right Jewish shopkeeper, so maybe I am Jewish’, Hermann laughed. ‘The pastor thinks that my grandfather slipped on to the boat without telling Förster he was Jewish.’ Hermann keeps a picture of Bernhard Förster on his wall.
Friedrich Ilg was convinced that Stern, the Jewish shopkeeper, was persecuting him. He became angrier and more depressed. ‘After that he was completely loco. He would run up the road without any clothes on waving his pistol and shouting “Heil Hitler!” and “Who is Friedrich Ilg?” Some Germans took him to the lunatic asylum in Asunción, and soon after that one of them came back saying he was a friend of Ilg’s. He took away all his books and other bits and pieces, and nailed planks across the door.’ In July 1985, Ilg killed himself. ‘He threw himself under a bus, the number 30, outside the Victoria cinema in Asunción. There was an article on the front page of the newspaper the day after it happened, and then nothing else, not a word. I thought that was strange at the time.’
It wasn’t until a year later that Hermann saw an early photograph of Josef Mengele in a newspaper article about the exhumation of a body thought to be that of the Auschwitz doctor. Stern recognised his erstwhile neighbour and began to do his own investigations. The German Embassy had no record of a Friedrich Ilg entering the country, but that wasn’t so surprising, since thousands of Germans had slipped into the country under false names. ‘This Ilg used to hold his knife in a particular way when he ate, like a pencil. They say Mengele used to eat that way too.’ The corpse dug up in Brazil had been buried in 1979, the year Friedrich Ilg arrived in Nueva Germania. If that body was not Mengele’s, might he not have taken refuge back in Paraguay having carefully faked his own death? After years of fruitless searching, he might reasonably have thought that Paraguay was the last place the bounty hunters or Mossad would now look. Hermann showed me the tumbledown hut, two rooms and a hearth, where he said Mengele had lived for six years. It smelled of decay; I hoped Mengele had gone mad in such a place. ‘That man was Mengele, I know it’, said Hermann Stern.
‘Ilg was a Nazi all right’, said Magdalena Fischer, ‘but he wasn’t Mengele. Mengele was shorter than that, and he had a gap between his teeth. He came here in 1959 or 1960. He was rather strange. Whenever you gave him a meal he would put some in his pocket for later.’
‘That old Doctor Risso, he was Mengele’, said someone else.
‘Oh yes, he was here’, said Gonzalez at the municipality, ‘he looked after the Germans in the montes.’
Everyone had their own Mengele story. They wanted him to have been here. No one ever talked about what he had done. Perhaps no one knew.
One evening a little German boy ran into Gregoria’s bar, sent by his mother, Frau Küke, to tell me that my country was at war. By climbing on top of the chicken coop, I found I could pick up the BBC World Service on my short-wave radio. Above the sound of the cicadas and the whistling interference, I could just hear the translation of Saddam Hussein’s latest speech: the anti-Semitic rhetoric sounded familiar, and the Scud missiles had, it seems, been landing in Tel Aviv for over a month.
I had been in Nueva Germania too long. A month of Gregoria’s weighty cooking, of mandioca with every meal, of night raids by mosquitoes and heat that made the blood thunder in your head. It had rained only twice; violent electrical storms had exploded overhead, bringing down sheets of water so heavy that the chickens had come running for cover in my bedroom. Avalo said there was usually much more rain, and he worried for his crops. Gregoria said it was the ozone layer. In the heat of the day, ever concerned, she would periodically stagger with another bucket of water, in which the larvae wriggled, over to where I lay panting under her orange tree. I would trickle it deliciously over my head and down my back. It was tepid, but felt momentarily freezing. My gums had begun to turn a delicate ochre, and every morning involved a minute search for evidence of polverino bugs, whose eggs, a faint rash of yellow under the skin, I would daub with disinfectant. The mosquito net seemed to make no difference; putting on the insect repellent at night meant peeling the coarse pillow from my face in the morning. Gregoria produced some forest herbs to go with my yerba maté, which I had taken to again. She said it would ease the stomach cramps.
Most days I would wake at first light and trek off in the cool dawn to a different part of the colony, a different family of Germans, as I tried to piece together their history. In accordance with Förster’s original directions, the houses were widely dispersed, at least a mile between each tiny settlement, and I spent much of the day on horseback. Seven or eight of the original fourteen families which had accompanied Elisabeth and Bernhard Förster were still here, I calculated, mostly in Tacarutý. I carried with me a photocopy of Elisabeth’s list of colonists, in her angular handwriting: Fischer, Schubert, Stern, Schütte, Halke, Küke, Hähner, Schweikhart. There was no trace of the aristocratic Maltzans, who must have left soon after Elisabeth, nor of the Ercks.
They were a strange people, these remnants of Elisabeth’s racial experiment, hospitable but distant. Initial uncertainty usually turned to wary acceptance, although some became tight-lipped and strained when I asked too many questions. One hot afternoon I went to the Schweikhart hut, deep in the forest. The Schweikhart brothers were gaunt-looking men who had not looked up when I had greeted them on the track a few days before. ‘Their accent is so strong, even I don’t understand a word they say’, Dr Schubert had warned me. I had called out at the door, but there was no answer; a fire was burning with some meat stew over it and a battered Lutheran Bible lay open on the table, but the room when I entered was empty. The brothers must have seen me coming and had vanished. I could hear someone moving in a back room behind a tattered curtain: old Frau Schweikhart, another Fischer before her marriage. ‘She is very old, very ill, very sad,’ Dr Schubert had said. ‘I doubt she will talk to you.’ I didn’t want to draw the curtain, and slipped away again.
Usually it was the older people who wanted to talk, who stared most avidly at my garish postcards of Berlin and wrestled with their memories to recall what their parents and grandparents had told them. I played them my tapes of Wagner and they smiled, but it meant nothing. I listened in their musty adobe huts while they told me about a Germany I couldn’t recognise and they had never seen; a few proudly showed me tattered passports. They talked of the economic crisis which had driven their ancestors from Europe as if it had happened last year. They had been promised a paradise, they said, where you didn’t have to pay for your hunting and the food grew on trees and the river teemed with edible fish. Förster they remembered as an arrogant man; their grandfathers had been ready to beat him up for swindling them, they said, but he had killed himself first. But of Elisabeth the memories were always kinder: ‘A brave woman’, they said, ‘and beautiful.’ Her charm was horribly enduring.
You could easily miss their little houses, the walls as red as the earth, thatched with greying rushes, tucked away on the forest’s edge along narrow tracks. They remained what their ancestors had been, nineteenth-century German peasants, even poorer now than they had been then. In a hundred years they had made little impact on the countryside. Their fields were neat, but pitifully small; you could almost sense the forest biding its time. These were the ‘spiritual heirs of Richard Wagner’, clinging to their language and religion like a raft which was sinking under them. The young were drifting away, they said. Some of the youngsters didn’t even care about the German language any more, preferring to speak Guaraní. The pastor, a young energetic German with piercing eyes, sent by the Evangelical Church, said it was their religion that had kept the community together for so long. ‘God gave them the strength.’
But it was something else too. Often, after some beer from Gregoria’s bar, they spoke loftily of the Paraguayans; a stupid people, they said, lazy and feckless. A few migrant Paraguayans came to Tacarutý at harvest time, but they didn’t live there. None of the Germans could afford to employ Paraguayan workers all the time; ‘and anyway,’ said Heini Schütte, ‘you can’t trust them.’ The old ones of Tacarutý, as the pastor called them, held tight to a belief that they were, in some way they couldn’t describe, not just different, but chosen, holier. A querulous little vein of anger sometimes ran through their voices when they talked of their dark-skinned neighbours. It was racism of a sort, not the political racism that had motivated the founders, but something more visceral. In the absence of any Jews, anti-Semitism had quickly withered, as had the other motivating principles of Elisabeth’s colony; but their residue could be felt in a few fossilised and now quite meaningless ideals. ‘We eat vegetables’, Magda told me proudly, ‘but the Paraguayans only eat meat.’ She couldn’t remember why.
Much later I found the headstone over Bernhard Förster’s grave in San Bernadino, partly overgrown and beginning to crumble, in a cemetery overhung with Spanish moss. Weeds were growing in the soil Hitler had sent from Germany, and a cracked vase held some dead flowers. The cemetery keeper, old Max Hermann, said people still came to visit it sometimes, to lay flowers. Förster had never doubted that his ideas were right or that his suicide was honourable. ‘Here lies with God’, reads the headstone, ‘Bernhard Förster, founder of the colony Nueva Germania’. Förster died full of anger, but without shame. ‘He clings firmly out of defiance to a cause which he has seen through – but he calls it “loyalty”’, said Förster’s brother-in-law, of man in general. But he also said, ‘An anti-Semite is not made more decent because he lies on principle.’
Like Förster, Elisabeth never questioned herself or her opinions, nor acknowledged the forgeries she had carried out or the lies she had told. Even Mengele, in the last solitary years of his life, denied that he had ever hurt anybody. He told his son that, when he had stood at the Auschwitz railhead, deciding which Jews should live, which should die and which should be used for his obscene experiments, he had actually been saving lives. He may even have convinced himself of his innocence. Nietzsche described a familiar process. ‘“I have done that,” says my memory. “I cannot have done that” – says my pride, and remains adamant. At last – memory yields’, since ‘the hypocrite who always plays one and the same role finally ceases to be a hypocrite … if one obstinately and for a long time wants to appear something it is in the end hard for him to be anything else.’ And I remembered another grave, one I had seen in Asunción: the mausoleum where the remains of Madame Eliza Lynch, transported back from Paris in 1964 by President Stroessner, had been laid amid pomp and false praise. A statue on top of her tomb depicts Eliza, spade in hand, having just buried her lover, the dictator, on a riverbank; a plaque pays tribute to a woman who ‘with self-sacrifice supported the greatest hero of Paraguay, Francisco Solano Lopez, until Cerro Corá’. From the ferocious look in her marble face, you can tell that she, too, was untroubled by conscience.
In Independencia, a more recent German colony not far from Asunción, I met Rolf Richter. On his wall hung pictures of Hitler, Adenauer and a tiny print of Goethe in a field of daisies. A pigeon-chested seventy-year-old, Richter had fought first on the Russian Front, and had been injured and finally captured by American forces at Nancy. He had joined the Foreign Legion after his release. Full of anger at his wartime treatment and humiliated by life in post-war Germany, he came to Paraguay in 1953 on a boat from Amsterdam, the Cordoba. Richter hated that ship – it was just like the one that had taken him away as a prisoner from France. An amateur photographer, his curling snaps show the war of a ‘loyal’ believer.
‘You see this one’, he said. ‘It was in Warsaw. This sign says “No Jews on the sidewalk”. These are Polish Jewish girls, walking on the sidewalk just before they pushed me off. They were trying to provoke me.’ He feels vindicated by that photograph. These days he farms a little, but mostly he collects pornography and foreign magazines, out of which he cuts evidence of the Jewish conspiracy. He has assembled his clippings in scrap books, neatly filed on wooden bookshelves, now so numerous they covered the wall of his hut. ‘I can show you all sorts of things, but you probably don’t want to see. People can’t bear the truth.’ Nietzsche had thought the same, I said, had he read any of his books? ‘Nietzsche was a great philosopher’, he replied, ‘except about religion, he didn’t understand that. Otherwise he was very good.’ Richter showed me a poem he had written and framed, a poem to tell me how uninterested he was in changing his beliefs:
YOU should feel comfortable here
I am not wretched in my house, ‘the house of all things’,
only the master.
YOU are political –
I too.
YOU have another opinion.
I respect it.
YOU may express it – but not on my toes.
I thank you
I had thought I would find men like Richter in Nueva Germania, but I did not. He hated on account of his race, where they merely feared for it.
In my last few days in the settlement, I often found myself at the house of Pablo Flascam, grandson of one of the first settlers, Emil Schubert, a musician. The Flascams always received me kindly, squeezing out some fresh grapefruit juice and talking for hours; sometimes Walter played the Mennonite Waltz on his squeeze box. But each visit was painful. Frau Flascam’s eyes were always red with crying, and her husband carried a revolver in a holster even when he was drinking. A few weeks before, four masked men had come to the house at dusk and killed their twenty-three-year-old son. They had shot him repeatedly in the head. ‘Paraguayans, I’m sure of it’, said Pablo, ‘banditos, drug smugglers or something like that.’ He looked very tired. ‘I have told the police, but they will do nothing, they are Paraguayans too. It was better under Stroessner. He was German, and he looked after the Germans.’ Gonzalez at the municipality shrugged. ‘Maybe the boy saw them planting marijuana in the forest. What can we do?’ I thought of Ector’s death. The bandits and the river and the hookworm don’t discriminate between races. But it wasn’t the bandits who threatened their ideals and their community, it was the unanticipated biological legacy of those ideals.
Dr Schubert took me around his garden, where he grew every kind of vegetable. ‘If you treat the plants right, you can grow anything here’, he said, pointing to some out-of-place aubergines. ‘It’s a mystery to me why the first settlers had such problems. But you have to tend them constantly. If you leave them the jungle quickly overruns everything. It’s the same with people. The Germans are caught in a trap. They know they cannot go back to a country they would never understand, but they are determined to maintain their cultural independence. They are inbred, and it is getting worse. You can already see the effects. I try to tell them. I say, “Look at the way you breed animals,” and they nod and carry on as before. They can’t help it.’ Child mortality was increasing, he said, a number of the younger people had severe mental as well as physical problems, and there were clear patterns of hereditary disability. The pastor was now refusing to marry couples who were related, but the German families were now so biologically enmeshed you couldn’t tell who was related to whom. It was most noticeable in the youngest children. A slack, bespittled jaw here, there a drooping eye. A few were obviously retarded, but most were just slow, the gears of heredity grinding, as cousin married cousin, as the handful of old, ‘pure’ German families lived off their dwindling genetic capital.
The text books are firm: ‘Fairly recent isolation of a small section of a population with consequent inbreeding, such as can occur when a group emigrates to a country with different social and religious customs, will result in a higher incidence of recessive genetic disease than in the original parent population.’ The fourteen peasant families who travelled on the steamer Uruguay held in their genetic makeup, as do all of us, a number of deleterious genes. ‘Such genes are usually recessive. Under a system of random mating such as exists in most civilised countries, the accident of marriage sometimes brings such recessive genes together, which will then express themselves to some degree in the offspring issuing from such a union.’ In the case of marriage between cousins, the likelihood of both partners being heterozygotes, carrying one copy of the recessive gene inherited from mutual grandparents, and thus of an accident occurring, is obviously far higher; first cousins carry one-eighth of their genes in common. With every generation that intermarries, the likelihood of a manifestation of deleterious genes grows.
Take albinism, the congenital lack of pigmentation which results in abnormally white skin and red eyes. Roughly speaking, one person in fifty is heterozygous for this condition (that is they carry, but do not manifest, the recessive gene associated with albinism); so the chances of marrying someone with a similar gene at random is 1/50 × 1/50 = 1/2,500. The expectation among offspring is one in four, so the frequency of albinos in the population is 1/10,000. (Actually it is rather less frequent than that.) The mathematics for cousins is very different. If an individual marries a cousin, his chance of being heterozygous for albinism is 1/50, but the chance of her also being heterozygous is 1/8, thus 1/50 × 1/8 = 1/400, more than six times more likely. If an albino marries a cousin, there is a 1/4 chance that she carries the recessive gene for albinism, and that they will have equal numbers of albinos and children carrying the recessive gene. If two albinos have children and are related, they will have albino children. Among the San Blaz Indians of Peru, albinos are not permitted to marry.
Dr Schubert said there were no albinos in Nueva Germania, yet.
The idea of breeding human beings is an old one; Plato suggested the breeding of a race, by controlling human variability. Elisabeth and Bernhard Förster’s attempt to create a pure-blooded German colony was unscientific in the extreme, but it carried at its centre the fiction of all racism – that racial traits can be characterised as ‘better’ and ‘worse’, and that the ‘valuable’ traits can be preserved by breeding. They could not know it, but preserving ‘valued’ traits could work only if they could have plotted the genetic inheritance of each individual, for otherwise how could they know which harmful traits were being bred along with the ones they valued?
In 1839 Charles Darwin, the ‘father of evolution’, married his first cousin, Emma Wedgwood – both were of impeccable intellectual and social pedigree. They had ten children: some of Darwin’s children were people of marked scientific ability, and three were members of the Royal Society; but most were also sickly and delicate, three died as infants, and the last child, Charles Waring Darwin, was mentally deficient and died aged two without ever learning to walk or talk.
Was this the end of Elisabeth Nietzsche’s pure Aryan colony, a tribe becoming more blonde and blue-eyed with every generation, but simultaneously degenerating? In the four or five generations since the first colonists had arrived, the families had so interbred that they had even begun to look the same; perhaps that was because so many of the founders had come from the same part of Germany, or was the effect of the environment and nutrition; one physical type, tall, with high cheekbones, blue eyes and fair hair, seemed gradually to be predominating, just as the Saxon accent brought by the majority of the original settlers had subsumed other local German dialects.
If you take two mice and breed them, and then inbreed their offspring, and then their offspring, within twenty generations you create clones, mice that are genetically identical, the same mouse. ‘You can’t explain it to the people here’, said Dr Schubert. ‘It’s partly that they don’t understand, but also they don’t want to understand. They need to preserve their separateness to maintain their pride; without that what would they have? But if they do not change their ways, who knows what will happen to them?’ The identical mice at the twentieth generation are sterile mutants.
For the older inhabitants, it was only by defending a dividing line between thee and me, brown and white, chalk and cheese, that they could preserve their sense of moral worth. For, after all, what else is morality than a codification of what is good for oneself, or so Nietzsche thought:
Zarathustra has seen many lands and many peoples: thus he has discovered the good and evil of many peoples. Zarathustra has found no greater power on earth than good and evil.
No people could live without evaluating: but if it wishes to maintain itself it must not evaluate as its neighbour evaluates.
Much that seemed good to one people seemed shame and disgrace to another: thus I found. I found much that was called evil in one place was in another decked with purple honours.
One neighbour never understood another: his soul was always amazed at his neighbour’s madness and wickedness.
It was the older Germans in Nueva Germania who still felt they could not live without evaluating their Paraguayan neighbours. The younger ones found it easier to overcome racial Ressentiment (Nietzsche sometimes called it passion) and mixed easily with the Paraguayans. Nietzsche believed that ‘The man who has overcome his passions has entered into possession of the most fertile ground; like the colonist who has mastered the forest and swamps … the overcoming itself is only a means and not a goal.’
‘The older generation don’t like it’, said Dr Schubert, ‘but thank God there is nothing they can do. Look at Jorge Halke – he is the future.’ Jorge was a tall, fit youth of about twenty-five, partly descended from one of Förster’s henchmen, partly of Paraguayan origin, with blue eyes and brown skin. He lived in the only house still standing from Elisabeth’s time, an incongruous, square structure with stone pillars and a wide verandah, on the edge of the Stadtplatz, the patch of field in mid-village. Jorge had a taste for catching anacondas, which he kept in a wooden crate behind the house. He said he had a good idea where we could find Eliza’s treasure. Before setting off we sat down on his verandah to eat, and I asked him which race he felt most like: German, Spanish or Indian. ‘I have forgotten’, he said, laughing and peeling another guabirá fruit.
See notes on Chapter IX: Nueva Germania, March 1991