Forgotten Fatherland by Ben Macintyre

Author:Ben Macintyre [Macintyre, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 1992-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

He also feared his Basle pension might be cut off by the ‘economic and skilful’ university authorities if they discovered he was a South American landowner, and he cited the advice of his old friend from Basle, Franz Overbeck, who considered the whole project a dangerous gamble. Elisabeth was furious and promptly revealed her true colours: she decided that Overbeck, who was an atheist church historian, but a Protestant by birth, was in actuality a Jew. His race explained everything. Later she wrote to her mother: ‘I hear that Overbeck is a Jew; that speaks volumes and I believe it.’

While Elisabeth stayed in Asunción, fulminating against her brother’s stinginess and his inability to make his mind up without deferring to a Jew, Förster and an advance band of settlers had taken the journey north and began to clear the forest to make way for a town, to be christened Försterrode. Throughout 1887 work went ahead on Elisabeth’s mansion. From the beginning she had dreamed of a large house of her own. ‘Just think how grand it would sound’, she had written to Förster, ‘Förster of Försterhof.’

The effort of constructing a building on the scale Elisabeth had in mind was clearly considerable. It began to tell on Förster, who (though he was only forty-three) wrote to Cyriax, ‘I am getting old and very tired. Once the house is finished, then the continuation of our work will be assured. Then I too will be able to rest.’ The strain and the climate were affecting the resilient Elisabeth too: ‘the few years I have been married have aged me by ten years’, she told her mother. ‘If the last few years haven’t given me grey hairs then I won’t ever get them.’ Elisabeth suffered from homesickness, and Förster from some seriously bad temper. ‘I hope that unquiet Bernhard is not making life too hard for our Lissen’, Franziska Nietzsche wrote to her son. But they could not have returned to Germany, even if they had wanted to. Before leaving, it seems, Förster had publicly accused a government minister of having Jewish ancestry and had been sued in absentia. If he set foot in Germany, Franziska reported, he would probably be arrested.

In March 1888, a grand inauguration ceremony was held at the colony and the Försters finally took possession of their mansion. The occasion swelled equally Elisabeth’s head and her prose style, and she wrote an effusive letter to her mother:

In front of every farm house we passed, people stood festively dressed, presented me with flowers and cigars, and handed me their babies for my benediction. Suddenly, eight splendid horsemen appeared. They were our New Germans who had come to greet us; among them were Herr Erck and other leading colonists. They brought Bern’s favourite horse, beautifully decorated with black, white and red rosettes, which he mounted at once. That was only the first reception and we were still not in our own country. You ought to have seen the procession: first the wagon, then the riders, and then the long train of people.

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