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TWENTY-EIGHT The Domestication of Radical Ideas and Colonial Spaces The Case of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche  Karin Bauer 345 345 This chapter explores Bernhard Förster’s and Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche’s pursuit of the colonial dream in Paraguay. It outlines and contextualizes Förster’s political and colonialist ideas and asks what motivated FörsterNietzsche to participate in his enterprise. With an eye on the role of women in the male colonial project, it examines Förster-Nietzsche’s contribution to this venture and her evolving role within the colony. The analysis demonstrates how female strategies of domestication simultaneously further and undermine the notion of female complicity with the colonial enterprises of men. Förster-Nietzsche’s case offers not only broader insight into the multiple functions of what Ann McClintock termed the “traitorous cult of domesticity,” but also into the peculiar relationship between domestication, domesticity, and the feminine exercise of power. In 1885, at the age of thirty-nine, Elisabeth Nietzsche, the infamous sister of the famous philosopher, married Bernhard Förster. In the spring of the following year, when the couple left Germany to found the settlement colony Nueva Germania in Paraguay, Förster-Nietzsche was optimistic about her future and keen to break away from the narrow confines of provincial life in Germany. She later inflated her claim to fame by maintaining to have been “the only woman in Germany who herself colonized.”1 Based on published and unpublished materials housed at the GoetheSchiller Archive in Weimar, this exploration of Förster’s and Förster- 346 KA RI N BAUER Nietzsche’s pursuit of the colonial dream will proceed in three stages: First, I will outline and contextualize Förster’s political and colonialist ideas; second, I will ask what motivated Förster-Nietzsche to participate in Förster’s enterprise; and third, I will analyse Förster-Nietzsche’s contribution to this venture and her evolving role within the colony. With a focus on the role of women in the male colonial project, this chapter will examine Förster-Nietzsche’s various activities in an effort to tease out the feminine adaptations of what is usually coded as one of the ultimate male projects.In particular,it examines the ambiguous role that domesticity plays in the colonial venture and demonstrates how female strategies of domestication simultaneously further and undermine the notion of female complicity with the colonial enterprises of men. In the final analysis, FörsterNietzsche ’s case offers broader insight not only into the multiple functions of the “traitorous cult of domesticity,”2 but also into the peculiar relationship between domestication, domesticity, and the exercise of power. Clearly, Förster’s grandiose plans to colonize Paraguay were in need of domesticating influences in order to be perceived as a viable project by a wider public. Förster was a crude thinker and agitator who had had numerous charges of insult and assault laid against him. His virulent antiSemitism and notoriety in creating disturbances and inciting violence against Jews constituted his claim to fame. After several disciplinary warnings from the Prussian Ministry of Education his anti-Semitic provocations finally led to his dismissal from teaching. Too outspoken for the German Reich, Förster had become a political liability. His world view consisted of a mixture of racial theories, vegetarianism, hygienism, vitalism, anti-Semitism , anti-capitalism, anti-modernism, anti-socialism, and anti-liberalism. These views were based on a regressive view of history, apocalyptic visions of the decline of German civilization, and the vague notion of a needed return to a mythic German origin. A devoted disciple of Wagner, Förster’s writings were unoriginal appropriations of Wagnerian ideals, foremost among them the 1881 pamphlet Das Verhältnis des modernen Judenthums zur deutschen Kunst, which is based on Wagner’s 1849 tract Judaism in Music. Inspired by Wagner’s ideas of a German cultural renewal, without a job, and profoundly alienated by the modernization of German society, Förster saw, paradoxically, the only possibility for the survival of Germanness in leaving Germany. Förster opposed immigration to the United States because of its tendency to assimilate immigrants, and in 1883 he set out on his first Paraguay expedition to explore the possibility of establishing his German community there. Förster yearned for a simpler life in opposition to the pollution he experienced in Germany: “noise, bad air, and the vice of the big cities … newspaper humbug … trivial novels … the beer...

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