Forster, Bernhard b. January 31, 1843; Delitzsch, Saxony d.June 3, 1889; San Bernardino, Paraguay
German teacher, antisemitic agitator, and founder of a failed colony in Paraguay.
Bernhard Forster studied history at the universities of Gottingen and Berlin. As a student he participated in the Austro- Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco- Prussian War of 1870 to 1871.
After 1871 he worked as a teacher in Berlin. During the 1870s, he became fascinated with the German composer Richard Wagner, intensely studying his life and works. In the late 1870s Forster blended his nationalistic imaginations of Wagner with radical antisemitism, cultural despair, anticapitalism, and vegetarianism into a diffuse Weltanschauung. He was a cofounder of the antisemitic Deutscher Volksverein (German People’s Association) in 1881 and a leading initiator of the 1880—1881 Antisemitenpe- tition (Antisemites’ Petition), which called for revoking the emancipation of Jews in Germany and was enacted in 1871. The petition attracted more than 250,000 signatures. After insulting Jewish passengers in a Berlin streetcar, Forster was dismissed from his job as a teacher in 1882. A short time later, he called for founding an “ideal Germany” (without Jews) in South America. He embarked on a two-year trip to Uruguay, Argentina, and Paraguay in 1883 to find a suitable location for the “new Germania.” After returning to Germany in 1885, he married Elisabeth Nietzsche (1846—1935), whom he had first met in the early 1880s. Her brother, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, detested Forster’s radical antisemitic leanings. Shortly after the wedding, Forster published Denkschrift uber die Anlage deutscher Kolonien in dem oberen Laplata-Gebiete (Manifest on the Establishment of German Colonies in the upper La Plata Region), in order to attract potential settlers. In 1886 Forster and his wife left for South America. The Paraguayan government provided Forster with land about 150 miles north of the capital Asuncion, in a wilderness area, but asked for securities and the promise that he would attract at least 140 settler families. Forster carried the full financial responsibility for the project. By the end of 1887, a number of German settlers had arrived in Neu Germania (Nueva Germania), among them several families from Saxony. A year later, in the summer of 1888, Forster was still optimistic, although the number of settlers was below the target he had promised to the Paraguayan government. By then, it had become apparent that the project was badly organized. Forster’s antisemitic utopia lacked investors and thus a realistic long-term perspective. Among the settlers were several pensioners who were ill-prepared for the primitive conditions and the climate. Only a few settlers were trained farmers. In 1889 the colony ran into serious difficulties, and Forster had to ask for a large loan. At the same time, he faced an increasingly impatient government. Several disillusioned settlers threatened to sue him. In June 1889, Forster committed suicide in San Bernardino near Asuncion. His widow Elisabeth unsuccessfully asked the German government for help. In 1891 the colony went bankrupt. In 1892, Elisabeth Forster-Nietzsche moved back to Germany. She cared for her brother Friedrich, who had suffered a mental breakdown in 1889. During the 1890s, Forster-Nietzsche emerged as a central figure of the avant-garde art scene in Weimar. She closely guarded access to Nietzsche’s papers and was thus responsible for a distorted view of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Forster-Nietzsche received radical nationalists, among them Adolf Hitler, in her Weimar home. She died in 1935, at almost ninety years old.Tobias Brinkmann
See also Antisemitism; Paraguay
References and Further Reading
Diethe, Carol. Nietzsche’s Sister and the Will to Power: A Biography of Elisabeth Forster- Nietzsche. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003.