At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig

by John Gimlette

  Förster had also become deeply impressed with Richard Wagner, who, in 1880, had published Art and Religion, which snorted at the emancipation of the Jews. Förster edged his way closer into Wagner’s circle at Bayreuth and often made the mistake of taking the composer too literally. Whenever Wagner released another half-baked idea into the hot air that surrounded him, Förster was often there to seize on it and convert it into blunders.

  ‘What,’ Wagner asked one day, ‘is to prevent our carrying out a rationally conducted migration of the Teutonic races to those quarters of the globe whose enormous fertility is sufficient to maintain the entire present population of the earth, as is claimed for the South American peninsula itself?’

  Förster snapped up the idea. The economy of Germany was, at the time, near collapse, and more importantly, he had no work and nothing better to do. When reports filtered through of San Bernardino’s prosperity, Förster set out to investigate the prospects for his own new colony in Paraguay. In London, The Times reported his departure under a tittering headline: ‘The comedy of the modern Pilgrim Fathers’, and had Förster billed as ‘the most-representative Jew-baiter in all Germany’. But they had no idea of the scale of Förster’s ambition; he envisaged more than just a settlement of gentiles confined to Paraguay – it was to be ‘a nucleus for a glorious new Fatherland that would one day cover the entire continent’.

  After eighteen months, he returned with a site in mind. His fiancée, Elizabeth Nietzsche – sister to the philosopher, Friedrich – was equally enthusiastic about the project. She was a waspish woman, three years his junior, but as distorted with racial fanaticism as Förster was. She might have been attractive, with neat and delicate features, but her hair was screwed back in a matronly bun and she had a disconcerting squint. This defect gave people the impression that she had her eyes on every opportunity at once, an impression which turned out to be uncannily prophetic.

  ‘The mission has a name,’ Förster had told Elizabeth, ‘the purification and rebirth of the human race and the preservation of human culture.’

  Her brother meanwhile thought the whole enterprise was ludicrous. He disapproved of his sister as an anti-Semite and disapproved of Förster in any form. He refused to invest any money in the scheme, telling his sister that ‘our wishes and interest do not coincide as your project is an anti-Semitic one. If Doctor 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 a movement that I reject. If it fails, I will rejoice in the death of an anti-Semitic project.’ As to Wagner, Friedrich thought him pompous and a hazard to humankind and said as much in his writing. Wagner responded by writing to Friedrich’s doctor telling him that he thought Nietzsche was making himself ill with excessive masturbation.

  Recriminations continued until 1896, when Förster and his followers set off aboard the Uruguay, bound for Buenos Aires. Things started to go wrong for the colony from the start. There were forty families with the Försters, all facing grim financial futures in Germany (and blissfully ignorant of what the future held in Paraguay). One of the settlers’ children died two days before they arrived in Asunción, having spent several days vomiting blood. Then, from Asunción, an advance party set off upriver, to prepare the site – Nueva Germania, as it was to be called. The rest followed some months later, another 150-mile journey to the colony. They lost a second settler on the way when he became drunk, slipped in the river and drowned. There was little encouragement when they arrived. The advance party had barely made an impression on their sweltering, tangled plot. All they’d done was to build the Försters a commodious log mansion, called the Försterhof. As for the rank and file, they’d have to make do with grass huts.

  Elizabeth never saw the blow coming. She was thrilled with her new home. ‘Just think how grand it would sound,’ she wrote, ‘Förster of Försterhof.’ She even spoke of her ‘Princedom’ and enjoyed the title of the ‘Little Queen of Nueva Germania’. Even though her subjects were now barely better off than the poorest Saxon peasants, she had no sympathy. She chided them to work and even ordered them to carry her piano up from the river, to her splendid Försterhof.

  Förster was hardly any better. He made the settlers dismount from their horses whenever he passed, as a sign of respect. So inflated was he with the grace of his own leadership that he even considered offering his services as the President of Paraguay.

  It was all pride before the fall. The settlers were deeply resentful; their German seeds simply rotted in the warm, torrid soil, and such savings as they had evaporated in Elizabeth’s overpriced colony shop. Within two years, a quarter of the settlers had headed home. Worse, Förster realised there was no prospect of his being able to pay for the 40,000 acres he’d bought in the name of the colony. He sent desperate appeals to Germany, but when an ex-settler, a voraciously spiteful creature called Klingbeil, published an exposé on the colony, support collapsed. Klingbeil had reported that whilst the colonists were picking lice off themselves for sustenance, the Försters were making themselves fat on luxuries, wine and – worse – meat. Funds simply dried up. As a last, desperate measure, the sole remaining benefactor – Mr Julius Cyriax of London – suggested that the colonists could raise some money by selling native handicrafts to the South Kensington Museum. Förster’s by now ragged state of mind began to unravel.

  He set off for San Bernardino and booked himself into the Lake Hotel.

  ‘Yes,’ I said to the housekeeper. ‘There is something I’d like to see. Dr Förster’s room.’

  She tutted knowingly, gathered up her hoops of keys and led the way out into the hall.

  ‘We open again in two months,’ she said. ‘Once the work is done.’

  The electrician was still raking the nineteenth century out of the ceiling. Soon it would be all buried again under drifts of fresh plaster and emulsion.

  ‘Everything came from Germany,’ she said, casting a fleshy arm over the ghostly outlines in their dust sheets. She was enjoying having a visitor, and as she shuffled along, little merry puffs of plaster danced around her slippers.

  ‘All original wiring,’ she glowed. Untidy nests of perished wires were strewn up the walls and stretched across the ceilings. Our tour munched its way though the grit, towards the stairs.

  Förster had stayed here for six weeks, trying to drink away the spectre of failure. His reasoning – always brittle – now crumbled. He developed uncontrollable shakes and was only able to bring the tremors under control with more and greater draughts of spirits. Sleep was gone and so too was any hope. ‘I am in a bad way,’ he wrote to Elizabeth. ‘When will things ever end?’

  It was almost over already. The same night he locked himself in his room.

  ‘This was the room,’ said the housekeeper, and stood aside to let me in. There were two rooms, joined by a set of double doors. The walls were white and the woodwork painted the same dark green as outside. There was a fussy bed of faux-bamboo and a cabinet and chiffonier of fruitwood. The housekeeper was still behind me, tattling off her inventories (‘There were seventy sets of everything, made for us in Germany and then shipped all the way out here!’).

  Dr Förster ended it all that night, 3 June 1889. First he took morphine to soften the pain, and then a fatal dose of strychnine. At forty-six, he was dead, and with him died his dreams of a master race. His body was found the next morning by the maid and Elizabeth was summoned. She tore down on the steamer and arrived just in time to persuade the Paraguayan doctor to certify death as having resulted from ‘a nervous attack’. There was then six weeks of Förster’s deranged drinking to be paid for. Elizabeth had no money, and so instead, she offered the hotel a plot of land at Nueva Germania. They had no choice but to accept.

  I wondered if the housekeeper knew what had happened to Elizabeth Förster. She didn’t.

  ‘What about the colony, Nueva Germania?’

  She shook her head. ‘I know that there is still a place of that name, somewhere in the north,
but I don’t know what happens there. Are you going to go there?’

  Yes, I said, I might do that.

  Did she know what had happened to Förster’s body?

  ‘Of course. They buried him up here, on the hill.’

  That afternoon, I climbed up to the San Bernardino cemetery. It was high above the lake, lurking in the shadow of thick, murmuring woods. Förster would have been disappointed to find that he was not its most distinguished tenant; that honour went to the singer Luis Alberto del Paraná. He’d toured the world with his band, Los Paraguayos, according Paraguay a rare moment of recognition if not exactly fame. In England, he’d played to an appreciative London Palladium and promptly dropped dead. He was brought home to a nation in deep mourning. Throughout his travels, he’d been inconsolably homesick and had carried with him a bag of Paraguayan soil. At least he was now peacefully mingled in with it.

  Förster was buried a short distance away, under a headstone of granite, resting, I suspected, a little less peacefully. ‘Hier ruhet in Gott Dr Bernhard Förster,’ read the inscription, ‘begrunder der colonie Neu Germania.’ It gave his dates and then – with every ounce of Elizabeth’s breathtaking insouciance – an epitaph: ‘Die Liebe horet nimmer auf’ (‘The love never ceases’).

  She’d worked hard to bury her husband with honour. She then set about resurrecting him with glorious distortion. The memoirs of his life that she unloosed six months later left Dr Förster quite unrecognisable. He’d become ‘a battling hero worthy of Valhalla, in the image of whose face the true Christ is re-united with the real German race, who has fallen on a foreign field for his belief in the German spirit’.

  She preferred not to reveal that he had actually fallen flat on his face with drink and rat poison. Surprisingly, her freshened-up version of events survived. Forty-five years later, in 1934, the Nazis gave it another fetid breath of life. Adolf Hitler – keen to commemorate any ancestral bigots – ordered a ceremony at Förster’s tombside. Once again, soil was on the move. A bag of the real German stuff was brought from the Fatherland and local kolonie schoolchildren were paraded into the cemetery. As the children sang, the soil was solemnly scattered over the grave.

  It was inevitable that, once Nazism starting trumping and hooting over in the Fatherland, the Paraguayan Germans would dance to the same jig. There were now 30,000 of them, German-speaking, German-thinking and conveniently poor. Hitler went to some trouble to court their affection: the Third Reich supported thirty-one schools in Paraguay and educated 1,161 children; it sent books and brown uniforms and bales of swastika flags; a pastor called Carlos Richert toured the country emulating the Führer with his own piping version of the Nuremberg rally. The Abwehr even sent out agents to sniff out support and stifle resistance. Typically, they were goons like Herr Studt, an officer of the Great War cruiser Emden. He thought he was inconspicuous but he travelled the country in yellow cotton breaches, soft riding boots, a shantung jacket and a pair of pebble glasses. Allied secret agents watched his every move with weary amusement before reaching the conclusion that their energies were better spent elsewhere.

  As one of the larger German communities, San Bernardino became a centre for these shrill idealists. Bobby Weiler raced between the Lake Hotel and his other hotel, The Gran in Asunción, organising Nazi bun-fights. A large portrait of Hitler was hung in the dining room of the Lake Hotel, and on the weekends, the German farmers and their ample, petticoated wives gathered on the terrace. They danced polkas to a gramophone and drank tankards of frothy chopp. Then, as the evenings turned to nights, there were beery Horst Wessel songs and Nazi salutes.

  ‘Heil Hitler!’ they sloshed, as they fell into their carts. Whips cracked and off they went, hauled back to their lonely farms in the hills above Altos.

  The Paraguayans didn’t discourage this spread of Nazism among the Germans, partly because they had, for a number of years, been toying with fascism themselves. Paraguay had the doubtful distinction of having the first Nazi party in South America, in 1929 – four years before Hitler came to power. It also proved to be the most enduring and wasn’t disbanded until 1946, the last to go. Even mainstream politics began to drift towards the right in the mid-thirties. From 1936 there were a succession of strongmen who dabbled in corporatism, professing to admire Mussolini and the Brazilian Estado Novo. In 1937, Jews were prohibited from entering the country, and in due course, trade unions found themselves rudely disbanded.

  Then, when the Germans went to war with the world in 1939, Paraguay gave serious consideration to throwing its bantamweight behind them. The debate continued until 1943, when President Roosevelt managed to persuade his Paraguayan opposite, President Morinigo, that such a move would be unwise. When Morinigo saw the way the war was going, he edged towards the Allies. Eventually, on 2 February 1945 – three months before Germany surrendered – Paraguay declared war on the Axis.

  In the end, it probably came down to cash. The United States offered generous rewards for those coming into the fold. The entire Paraguayan cabinet was invited up to the White House for red-carpet treatment. Washington even sent them a small package of military treats (some of this hardware – like the Sherman tanks – was still in service forty-five years later, in 1990). Curiously, having vacillated for so long as to which side to join, Paraguay was only the second South American country to sign up for the Allies, six days after Ecuador. It was followed – each a few days apart – by Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Turkey, Uruguay, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Finland and then – finally, at the end of March – the Argentines.

  The decision to join the Allies was hardly an ideological matter. One minister moved to reassure the Paraguayan Germans that ‘the Axis powers will know full well what Paraguay’s real sentiments are and will take them into account when they finally triumph’. But whatever the ‘real sentiments’ might have been, Morinigo was keen to show solidarity with the Allies. When, on Roosevelt’s death, a group of Paraguayans were imprudent enough to throw a celebration, they suddenly found themselves – to their surprise – hauled off to prison.

  Nazism had become dangerously unfashionable.

  46

  THE ROAD TO the San Bernardino cemetery carried on, up to Altos.

  I’d often been told, by people in Asunción, that this was where Dr Mengele – the ‘Angel of Death’, the Butcher of Auschwitz – had lived. Lucy Yegros, who’d said she’d seen him several times, told me that he had lived at the top of the hill, ‘near the aerials’. Another, who’d lived in San Bernardino in the 1950s, said the same – ‘at the top of the hill, where the drain ends’. Others added their own embellishments, which, as they gathered momentum, became increasingly colourful: Gareth said he’d been at school with all of Mengele’s bastard children; Mengele had been Stroessner’s doctor; Mengele had taught Pastor Coronel all there was to know about torture (in 1982, he’d been a popular suspect as the blowtorch killer). One man even thought Altos was still a smouldering bed of Nazis. They all urged me to go and have a look.

  Strangely, however, the Paraguayans’ own interest in Mengele was usually little more than idle curiosity about where he’d lived. No one seemed unduly concerned about what he’d done.

  ‘I don’t know what he did and I don’t really care,’ Lucy had said. ‘It was all a long time ago and a long way from here.’

  Her weariness with the detail was repeated everywhere. Robert Eaton, the old American rancher, had put his finger on it.

  ‘The Paraguayans are not interested in Mengele,’ he’d said. ‘They have too many Mengeles of their own.’

  I often wondered whether, if they’d known quite how much of a mengele Mengele was, they might have felt differently about him.

  Captain Josef Mengele was thirty-one when he volunteered to be a lagerartz or camp doctor at Auschwitz. He was handsome – almost pretty – and an impassioned Nazi. He liked freshly laundered clothes and well-scrubbed hands, and although he was a nimble ballroom dancer, he regarded deeper human attachments as friv
olous and contemptible.

  It troubled no one that he had no experience as a doctor. He’d spent the previous four years with the SS, latterly on the Eastern Front. He’d served with the Viking Division, bitterly intertwined with the Red Army in the wreckage of Rostov. The Russians had fought the Vikings with paving slabs and petrol bombs, and after they were thought beaten, they rose from the rubble and slashed the throats of the German wounded. Mengele absorbed the hatred. He won the Iron Cross for his calculated brutality and then – to his shame – was invalided out. The job at Auschwitz was a sick man’s posting.

  For Mengele, however, the work at the concentration camp was deeply satisfying. Before his service with the Vikings he’d been a medical researcher at the Institute of Heredity and Eugenics in Frankfurt. His new job allowed him to indulge his enthusiasm for this work without any of the squeamishness of peacetime. He could also indulge his other passions – for music, of which, surprisingly, there was plenty at Auschwitz, and for the extermination of Jews. He had found a form of happiness.

  In all I’d read about Mengele’s work at Auschwitz, it was his clinical detachment that disturbed me most of all. He couldn’t claim to have been deranged. For most of the time, he was calm and even gentle with the inmates (although on one occasion he lost his temper and pulped a woman’s head in with a log). He was not a particularly intelligent man but he was admirably thorough in his research and chillingly objective in his conclusions. His first task in Poland was to implement the sonderaktion (the shooting and burning of large numbers of prisoners). It was familiar territory – from his Russian experiences – but the absence of science in this slaughter irritated him. It was wasteful and cumbersome. He became interested in ways of radically realigning entire races using medical science; of sterilising, purifying and – if the race was worth it – reconstructing.