Bernhard Forster, Nueva Germania and the Kaiser's Latin American Empire

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I don't know how many of you have stumbled across the name Bernhard Forster before. For those who are unfamiliar with him he was a semi-prominent figure in the German far right in the late nineteenth century, and like many such figures at the time he was insanely anti-Semitic to the point of proto-Nazism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Förster. He was married to Elizabeth Forster-Nietzsche, sister of Friedrich and future Hitler groupie in her twilight years. In 1886 they attempted to create a German colony in Paraguay they dubbed Nueva Germania, basically your standard proto-Nazi wet dream of a breeding ground for the purest specimens of Aryan racial stock, or so Forster envisioned. In fact the remnants of the colony still exist in Paraguay to this day. Unsurprisingly, of course, the colony failed to thrive as Forster envisioned, and he wound up committing suicide in 1889.
Basically, there are two major points of difference I'm proposing here. For one I'm curious what you think it would take for the colony to succeed, to thrive and attract ongoing numbers of German settlers so that Forster remains stable enough to not off himself. But more importantly I'm wondering about what the wider consequences would be if Nueva Germania did thrive. I also read about the Samoa Crisis of 1887-89, the long and short of which is that the United States, Germany and Britain were bickering with each other over how Samoa was going to be partitioned and the whole thing heated up enough that at one point there was distinct danger of a war breaking out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samoan_crisis. So my other question is; imagine that a war does break out, with the result being that an Anglo-German coalition goes up against the United States. The conflict is strictly a naval one. Britain, its navy being indisputably the strongest in the world at the time, shoulders most of the fighting for itself and Germany, and the result is most likely that the United States can't compete and is resoundingly defeated, most likely with heavy losses. In fact, the US is defeated so utterly it can no longer throw its weight around to uphold the Monroe Doctrine and fend off European meddling in Latin American affairs, effectively granting Britain and Germany carte blanche to do as they please in the region. Let's imagine that all of this is going down at around the same time that Nueva Germania is finally taking off. Bernhard Forster survives into the era of bellicose Wilhelmine era militaristic imperialism and can speak Wilhelm the Second's language to him in order to get himself made the governor of the colony so that it can provide a launching pad for German expansionism in the region. The Kaiser is voraciously hungry for colonies, pissed off that Germany fell so short in comparison to Britain and France during the Scramble for Africa, and even more pissed off that so many Germans are opting to immigrate to the United States. Several Latin American countries, not just Paraguay but also Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela etc, have significant amounts of German settlers already dating back to the mid nineteenth century. With Germany being granted a relatively free hand in the region as payment by the British for fighting the Americans with them, does this mean the beginning of a new age of German territorial acquisition and general gunboat diplomacy in Latin America, especially when the Kaiser embarks on his famously ambitious plans to expand the German navy? Might the Germans make other territorial acquisitions, like shaking down the Spanish to acquire the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico etc. like the Americans did in 1898? What would the longterm consequences be for such a development, especially with the United States now resentful and seeking possible revenge? Will it potentially affect the direction or outcome of the First World War down the line?
(P.S.: It's been brought to my attention that I haven't been clear enough in this post, but the idea is that if Forster's colony attracts enough settlers and the Germans get the right to do as they please in the region, he can potentially persuade his government to either annex the country or install a pro-German regime, so a scenario in which the colony holds together likely involves Paraguay losing its sovereignty in some way eventually.)
 
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Interesting proposals here; but why did they choose Paraguay?

Seems to me a land-locked and pro-interracial marriages country isn't the best starting spot for German purity or imperial expansion.
 
Interesting proposals here; but why did they choose Paraguay?

Seems to me a land-locked and pro-interracial marriages country isn't the best starting spot for German purity or imperial expansion.
From what I can gather, Forster's reasoning seems to have been that a "savage" jungle wilderness would have been the ideal place to carve out a new society from scratch. That and he was continually ranting and raving about how modern urban society had been so corrupted by those dang Jews that his Nordic paradise would have to be founded far from civilization in order to thrive. (This particular book is an excellent introduction to his and his wife's little misadventure https://www.amazon.com/Forgotten-Fatherland-Nietzsches-Sister-Colony-ebook/dp/B004J4WKQ0.) As for the interracial marriage, once the colonial project was really underway and Forster was no doubt ruling with an iron fist as governor, he'd likely go to extreme lengths to prevent it, not that lots of the German communities still in Latin American haven't remained fairly homogeneous a lot of the time. Also it's likely that in this timeline Eugen Fischer will still push for interracial marriage to be banned in Germany's colonies in 1912 based on the pseudo-scientific claptrap he compiled from his "studies" in German Southwest Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugen_Fischer#Early_work. Of course, the primary purpose of a colony like Nueva Germania would have been merely to find a place to dump Germany's excess population without losing them to the United States or elsewhere. If a period of rapid German territorial colonization of Latin America were kicked off around this time, there would have been plenty of other, more strategically useful coastal territories the Reich could annex or whose ports could otherwise be used.
 

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Interesting proposals here; but why did they choose Paraguay?

Seems to me a land-locked and pro-interracial marriages country isn't the best starting spot for German purity or imperial expansion.

From what I can gather, Forster's reasoning seems to have been that a "savage" jungle wilderness would have been the ideal place to carve out a new society from scratch.

Also Paraguay had been depopulated by the War of the Triple Alliance, so it was relatively sparsely populated.
 
Also Paraguay had been depopulated by the War of the Triple Alliance, so it was relatively sparsely populated.
Precisely. They'll really push the idea of settling the empty land, but unfortunately wherever they encounter natives who have the misfortune to be in the way of the colonists, they're probably going to get the same treatment Lothar Von Trotha gave to the Hereros, especially in a situation where a racist psychotic like Bernhard Forster would be involved and potentially getting the backing of Kaiser Wilhelm II further down the road. Come to think of it I'm also wondering when the earliest would be that Forster's project might be able to get the Reich's official backing. It might be able to obtain the material assistance from more wealthy German ultra-rightists sympathetic to Forster's ideas.
 
I mean, the biggest thing you're still going to have to deal with is the fact that Paraguay is a sovereign country, depopulated or not. What makes this any different than say, Colonia Tovar, Bariloche or Pozuzo? Germans have a pretty long history of immigration to the Americas, and they played an important role in settling the frontiers in South America, but none of these cities founded by them really translated into any influence for Wilhelmine Germany or the desire to have their place in the sun. It's possible that Forster could carve out his own fiefdom for himself, and you wind up with some proto-Villa Baviera / Colonia Dignidad sort of situation, but I'm very skeptical of the area becoming a colony of Germany in the traditional sense.
 
I mean, the biggest thing you're still going to have to deal with is the fact that Paraguay is a sovereign country, depopulated or not. What makes this any different than say, Colonia Tovar, Bariloche or Pozuzo? Germans have a pretty long history of immigration to the Americas, and they played an important role in settling the frontiers in South America, but none of these cities founded by them really translated into any influence for Wilhelmine Germany or the desire to have their place in the sun. It's possible that Forster could carve out his own fiefdom for himself, and you wind up with some proto-Villa Baviera / Colonia Dignidad sort of situation, but I'm very skeptical of the area becoming a colony of Germany in the traditional sense.
That's what I'm trying to get at by working in the idea of the Anglo-German War with the US and the US being defeated. If the Germans can obtain a free hand to expand in Latin America, the idea is that if Forster can get enough German colonists willing to come to his Paraguay outpost, he can persuade the Kaiser to either have Paraguay annexed or simply to have a German-friendly regime installed. I was thinking that if it coincided with a period of unobstructed German expansion in the region it would happen at around the same time that Germany was grabbing at other countries in the region ostensibly to protect the German populations there, in according with the fact that Wilhelm II was openly flirting in this period with Pan-Germanists and publicly invoking terms like "Lebensraum" to invoke the idea that Germans everywhere they lived in the world should in one way or another be drawn back into the Reich's bosom. As for whether or not this would mean more influence in the region for the Kaiserreich, remember in this period that several of these countries had German influence exerted over them in the form of German officers training their national armies, among other things.
 
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