Rebuilding a neuwa germania In the late 19th century, a handful of German families settled in a remote jungle of Paraguay, where

they intended to create a racially pure utopian settlement called Nueva Germania. IMAGES

View Larger Images The experiment was a colossal failure. The settlers were unprepared for the devastating diseases and other hardships of jungle life, and their descendants -some of whom intermarried with the darker-skinned locals -are among the poorest people in one of the poorest countries in South America. But now they have an unlikely champion: a Wagner-loving San Francisco composer who is mounting a determined crusade to rebuild the Aryan dream and has sought assistance from Vice President Dick Cheney, two U.S. philanthropic groups, a Southern California town council, Bay Area artists, and a U.S. filmmaker best known for the underground movie "Scorpio Rising" and the book "Hollywood Babylon." "As an artist who is fed up with much of the pretentious nonsense that has come to define Western culture, I am drawn to the idea of an Aryan vacuum in the middle of the jungle," says David Woodard, who lives on Mount Davidson and studied musical composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Woodard, who is also the musical director of the Los Angeles Chamber Group, a 14-member ensemble that specializes in playing at memorial services, insists he is not a white

supremacist, but rather a man driven by a vision of his musical hero that happened to bear fruit in a patch of land located about 120 miles north of Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. "Nueva Germania represents an aesthetic sanctuary conceived by Wagner; a place where Aryans could peaceably go to experience life and pursue the advancement of Germanic culture," he said. The Germans currently populating Nueva Germania number about 100 families, most descended from the original colonists, who arrived in 1886. Among the pioneers was Elisabeth Nietzsche-Foerster -sister of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche -- who sailed to Paraguay with 14 German families to start a socialist, vegan utopia along the Aguaraya River. She got the idea after reading an 1880 essay by Richard Wagner called "Religion and Art," in which the composer ranted against Germany's 1871 emancipation of the Jews. But the colonists were unable to get crops to grow, and many fell victim to malaria, tuberculosis, snakebites and sand fleas. After two years, Nietzsche-Foerster's husband, a notorious anti-Semitic propagandist named Bernhard Foerster, committed suicide by swallowing poison after a drinking binge. His widow returned to Germany in 1893. Today, the Nietzsche-Foerster home in Nueva Germania lies in ruins, the original Lutheran church and the German school have been closed for more than a decade, while the Germanspeaking descendants barely eke out a living as subsistence farmers. Woodard, born and raised in Santa Barbara, is a thin man with stooped shoulders who favors large, dark sunglasses. Now in his mid-30s, he also manufactures replicas of a psychedelic contraption called a Dreamachine, a motorized cylinder that spins and creates a strobe effect. Invented in 1959 by the Beat writer Brion Gysin, it is supposed to paint

pictures inside the viewer's head. Woodard says his clients have included rockers Kurt Cobain, Iggy Pop and Beck. When Woodard first visited Nueva Germania last year, he found most of its residents living in tin-roofed adobe homes with no indoor plumbing, electricity or telephones. The children walk seven miles to the nearest Spanish-language school. Still, Woodard found that some have not given up on the idea of a racially pure homeland and prefer to marry their cousins rather than non- German Paraguayans. Compelled by what he had witnessed, Woodard, on his return to San Francisco, wrote a seven-minute anthem called "Our Jungle Holy Land" and managed to get several Bay Area artists to participate. "I thought it was an intriguing project, a bizarre thing of a colony of Germanic people in the jungle," said Kimarie Torre, a San Francisco soprano who sings on the recording. "I know this colony was started as an Aryan nation, but I saw the music as an homage to their country." Woodard says he first learned of Nueva Germania after reading "Forgotten Fatherland: The Search for Elisabeth Nietzsche," a 1992 book by a London Times journalist, Ben MacIntyre. As a part-time resident of the Los Angeles County town of Juniper Hills, Woodard tried to convince fellow council members to take advantage of a unique opportunity to become a sister city to a town "conceived by a master composer. " Council members in the small town of 500 nestled in the foothills on the north side of the San Gabriel Mountains decided to consider the request in 2003, council minutes show. In December 2003, the council removed Woodard for failure to attend meetings and for "pursuing his own agenda"

regarding Nueva Germania, according to council treasurer Dave Reichel. "He told us it was a quaint town with a musical background. We knew nothing of an Aryan utopia or Nietzsche," recalled Reichel. "If we had known, I am 100 percent sure we wouldn't have messed with that." Reichel said the council was dismayed to later find a link to Nueva Germania and the mention of a sister city alliance on the community's Web site, www.juniperhills.net, which Woodard developed. The link includes a recording of "Our Jungle Holy Land," which "celebrates our sister city project with Nueva Germania," as well as a written response from the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. "The Vice President was pleased to learn of your community's interest in establishing sister city status with Nueva Germania" reads the letter. The mention of a sister city alliance on the Juniper Hills Web site has attracted at least two U.S. philanthropic groups. Dr. Larry Nichter, who heads a Huntington Beach (Orange County) group that sends plastic surgeons to poor Third World communities to help those suffering from physical deformities, sent a letter to the White House last March that read: "The Plasticos Foundation is delighted to support and join Juniper Hills' sister city project with Nueva Germania, Paraguay. We are concerned about severe phenotypic mutations accrued over 125 years of inbreeding and the profound effects these are likely to have on the daily life of Nueva Germania's inhabitants." Reached at his office, Nichter said he is still waiting for more information before sending a team to Paraguay. "We are on hold, but this incredible history fascinates me," he said. Woodard also contacted the Kansas-based humanitarian group Heart to Heart International, which donated $12,500

of medicines to Nueva Germania. The group's officials, when told, were surprised to learn that no sister city relationship exists. "David Woodard's application described their needs and the sister city project," said Dan Neal, the group's international program manager. "That's how it came about." The Juniper Hills town council is now trying to distance itself from both Woodard and Nueva Germania. Council President Vance Pomeroy said the town has created a new Web site -www.juniperhills-ca.org -- and will ask the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which assigns domain names, to shut down the original Web site. Woodard is certainly no stranger to eccentric undertakings -and potentially unpopular causes. In 2001, Woodard wrote and conducted a 12-minute piece called "Ave atque Vale" -- which he called "Onward, Valiant Soldier" in English, although the direct translation is "Hail and Farewell" -- for Timothy McVeigh on the eve of his execution near the Terre Haute, Ind., federal prison where the convicted perpetrator of the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people, 19 of them children, was incarcerated. After being denied permission to perform the piece at the prison, Woodard played it at a nearby Roman Catholic church 12 hours before the execution. "McVeigh was portrayed as this insane, dangerous person who had no basis or reason," Woodard said, "but that omits the importance of his ultimate motivation -- to stem the rise of the inappropriate actions of the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) and the FBI." Woodard has also been commissioned by Exit, a Swiss rightto-die group, to orchestrate the "Bach-like pastoral pieces" written by Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the controversial Michigan

doctor who is serving 10 to 25 years in prison on charges connected with assisted suicide. And the San Francisco musician-entrepreneur continues his South American crusade. Early next month, he will return to Nueva Germania with American filmmaker Kenneth Anger, director of the 1963 cult favorite, "Scorpio Rising," and author of the best seller "Hollywood Babylon." Prominent Swiss novelist Christian Kracht will accompany them. "I shall be assembling ideas for an historical Swiss novel," Kracht said in an e-mail message from Nepal, where he publishes a German-language magazine. Woodard said has also bought Elizabeth Nietzsche-Foerster's old property with the intention of building a "scaled-down version" of the Bayreuth Festival House, an opera house designed by Wagner in 1876. "I know it sounds absurd, but there are a lot of Wagner fans, and with satellite Internet connection and Web casting, I could use this historic land to compose and record music," he said. He also says he is planning to build a "Dreamachine factory" on the site where Josef Mengele, the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp doctor who was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Jews and other Nazi victims, once lived while hiding out after World War II. The devices, which cost between $500 and $6,000 each, would bring badly needed employment for "disillusioned Aryan youths," he says. "We have a chance to help Caucasians in the middle of the jungle. I would like to see this unlikely concept go someplace positive, and not crumble into a lost subculture, " he said. "With the reopening of the school, church and building of an opera house, the spirit of these people would have a new light. It would please me to see a light at the end of the tunnel after 125 years."

Kultur, Jammed
Paraguays holdout German colony

by Graeme Wood Published in the April 2008 issue. BUY ISSUE

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nueva germaniaIn a grubby plastic chair in front of his familys shack, a shirtless Wilhelm Fischer swats blackflies from his face between sips of yerba mat tea. Hes boasting in perfect German about the hardscrabble years he spent clearing enough land to eke out a living raising chickens and cows. This was all forest, he says proudly, pointing to the grassy paddock beyond the barbed wire. He leans down and whispers something to his daughter, Berta, in the local creole. But she and her mother, Delia Domnguez, a Guarani Indian cheesemonger, speak excellent German as well. Like Willi, Delia has barely left the steamy Paraguayan hamlet of their birth, but she longs for the hills of Saxony, the snow-covered banks of the Elbe the land of her husbands gullible ancestors.

Fischers forebears came to Paraguay more than a century ago at the cajoling of Elisabeth Nietzsche, the sister of the philosopher, and her husband, Bernhard Frster. Latenineteenth-century Europe had grown too fond of Jews for the Frsters extreme anti-

Semitic tastes, so they decided to found a new, pure Aryan society. In 1887, the couple lured fourteen like- minded families across the Atlantic and up the Aguaray River, into territory inhabited by a few Indians and a truly astonishing variety of biting insects. Though wholly ignorant of South America, Frster had decided this was where they would preserve their Kultur: Paraguay had the soil, and German farmers would provide the blood. It was a blind date on a civilizational scale, and it failed utterly. Within a couple of years, a quarter of the Nueva Germanians had fled or died of lockjaw. Elisabeth eventually returned to Germany, and her husband, now a hunted man among the colonists, swallowed strychnine in a hotel outside Asuncin in 1889. Hitler, an admirer, later ordered a bag of real German dirt scattered on Bernhards grave. Nueva Germania lost more settlers over the next hundred years some to other Paraguayan colonies, some to Europe, and some to the Russian front in the Second World War. But others stayed, learned Spanish and Guarani, married Paraguayans, and eventually figured out how to grow manioc and mat. Teutonic culture has survived mostly in wispy memories. Seor Neumann, the owner of the towns only restaurant with a glass door to seal out the heat and mosquitoes, speaks no German and doesnt know what Oktoberfest is. Seor Kck, an old farmer, tells me the town celebrates one German festival, but it turns out to be Semana Santa (Holy Week). The Fischer clan, however, lives in Tacuruty, a neighbourhood of about a dozen families who have held fiercely to their German roots. (Tacuruty is what the Guarani call the ubiquitous anthills big red dirt cairns, in country and town alike, as if to remind you that humans are only guests of the insects here.) Willi has the bristly facial hair of a Prussian aristocrat, and though he spends all day working in the sun his complexion resembles Boris Beckers. To the Frsters, he might have seemed a prime specimen of the Aryan bermensch except that he fell in love with Delia.

Delia, whose skin is caf au lait, slurps Willis mat while he speaks, then passes it back to him. The pair, who met in Nueva Germanias tiny high school, weathered disapproval from both Paraguayans and Germans, who dont want the cultures to mix, she says. Some Germans say the Paraguayans are animals, that they have no shame, and the feeling is mutual, according to Delia. Nevertheless, she and Willi married eight years ago, and she now lives in Tacuruty with their daughter and the extended Fischer family. She smiles defiantly and says shes proud she can cough out the harsh German gutturals the first Guarani in town to learn, according to her mother-in-law and that Berta, who peeks around mummys legs clutching a blond doll, will speak German, Spanish, and Guarani. Some Germans, even some of the older ones, seem resigned to the Paraguayans finally appropriating the German language as their own and integrating themselves into the community. Eighty-one-year-old mother of nine Rosa Haudenschild, whose father was born in Nueva Germania barely a year after the colonys founding, says reduced numbers have occasionally forced Germans to seek out Mennonites to marry, or Paraguayans. Sometimes there are problems in such marriages, she says. But sometimes there are problems with the Germans. Delias attempts to prove her Germanness are showing mixed results. She brags that the family eats German food, but shes never heard of schnitzel. She sometimes listens to German music Johann Strauss, the Frsters Euro-pop and they dance German dances, she says, like the waltz, and the paso doble. Between sentences, Delia gulps in air, a troubling sign in a community where

consumption vies for victims with leprosy and sandfly fever. Shes more concerned about health and poverty than about the Aryan dreams of Willis predecessors. She shows off the telephone-book-sized block of grimy white cheese shes selling. The money she gets for it will constitute a big part of the familys dollar-a-day income. All the families that had their papers in order have long since left the colony, according to the Fischers. They themselves tried decades ago to return to Germany, but the embassy required them to prove their heritage. Having no documents, the Fischers were turned away, ironically, for not being German enough. Delia is the only member of the family who still wants to move to the fatherland. Eduard, her sixty-four-year-old father-in-law, vows to stay put with her and his German son. A slightly alarming, aggressive paranoia flashes behind his thick glasses as he surveys his familys Lebensraum, marked off with barbed wire and guarded by two mean hounds. He is content, because no strangers or bandits can come on his property. We are all Fischers here.