Destination: The Americas
Brazil
Entre Rios | Sao Paulo | Immigration
A Lost Homeland, a Reinvented Homeland: Diaspora and the ‘Culture of Memory’ in the Colony of Danube Swabians of Entre Rios by Méri Frotscher, Marcos Nestor and Beatriz Anselmo Olinto, 14 August 2015
IV. Entre Rios as an ‘Economic Miracle’
The celebrations in Entre Rios occurred against the wider backdrop of the so-called ‘Brazilian economic miracle’, which took place between 1968 and 1973. This was a politically conservative modernization project, which was carried out with greater intensity after the civil-military coup in 1964; it had a solid foundation in agriculture and aimed to increase productivity through the use of modern techniques, equipment and inputs, but without changing the agrarian structure of the country.78 During this time the leadership of the Agrária cooperative obtained funding from the federal government to buy more land and to increase the size of the properties. In 1971, representatives of governmental and non-governmental entities in Paraná praised the type of agriculture (mechanized) and the cooperative nature of work in Entre Rios as a ‘development model’ for the country.79 The production of rice, soybean and especially wheat in Entre Rios had made Guarapuava the largest grain producer in the state of Paraná,80 and the colony was described by the Secretary of the State as a ‘pioneering project’ that had transformed ‘empty fields’ into profitable areas through cooperatives and investment in wheat farming.81
In both the intellectual and the political circles of Paraná, Entre Rios was invoked as a model for agricultural development. In a text published in 1968, Bento Muñoz da Rocha, former governor of Paraná, essayist and university professor, cited the colonies of Entre Rios, Witmarsun and Castrolanda (all founded during his term as governor) as examples of colonization projects based on cooperatives.82 His text, which had an anti-Communist tone, represented the experience of the Swabians as a ‘watershed’ of agricultural development in Paraná. For Rocha, the summary division of land, as argued for by the advocates of agrarian reform in Brazil, was not the answer; what was required was investment in small farms, which could only survive through the cooperative ethos.83 In Rocha’s view, the ‘true revolution in the agrarian structure of the Campos Gerais region’ would be achieved through ‘a cooperative form of capitalist development’ and through the new techniques employed by these immigrants.84
Rocha’s forceful defence of these particular immigrants constituted a public rebuke of the nationalization campaigns of the past, which were carried out by the Brazilian government during World War II. These ‘indiscriminate and illogical’ measures were carried out in the areas of Brazil in which populations of German origin were concentrated.85 According to Rocha, the economic integration of immigrants was more important than their ‘acculturation’ because it would serve as a ‘road to national integration’, and this modern German colony could easily be tied to those of the past.86 Since the foundation of its first German settlement in 1829 in Rio Negro, the state of Paraná had continuously received a ‘human element highly tuned for development’.87 Brazil could only profit from such foreign immigration: ‘The foreigners here, progressing and integrating, trigger the milieu in which they are settled, investing their profits in their adopted country, which is the homeland of their children’.88
The ‘wheat miracle’ in Paraná, and the idea of Entre Rios as the ‘new homeland’ in Brazil was repeated in the bilingual 25th-anniversary book of the colony published by the Agrária cooperative in 1976.89 This book is arguably the first Heimatbuch of Entre Rios, a type of illustrated documentary about local history and current life. But it does not have the character of an extended obituary, as do so many of the expellee Heimat books published in Germany.90 Instead of eulogizing the Heimat of memory, the book Entre Rios celebrates the new homeland created in Brazil. The editor, Jakob Lichtenberger, was a new resident who had just settled in Entre Rios, but was nevertheless well known among some inhabitants there.91 He was a Danube Swabian and an authoritative voice in the Agrária cooperative. In the 1930s, he had been very close to Sepp Janko as an activist in the Movement for Renewal ( Erneuerungsbewegung ) in Yugoslavia, an organization with Nazi tendencies, which with the support of the German government took over the leadership of the Swabian Cultural League ( Schwäbisches Kulturbund ) in 1939.92 During the German occupation, Lichtenberger, as an officer of the Waffen-SS, led militias in the fight against Serbian partisans.93 After retiring from being a professor in Germany, he worked as a teacher in Entre Rios, where he wrote the commemorative book in 1976.
The cooperative intended this book ‘to document the lives and achievements of the Swabian settlers in their new homeland’.94 In it, Entre Rios is represented as a ‘work’ ( Werk ) created by the immigrants and their descendants. On the cover, a photo of a folk group, with adults and children wearing traditional costumes, gives the idea of the preservation of cultural traditions that originated in Europe and, thus, of cultural difference in relation to Brazil.
As the historian André Voigt has observed, the three colloquia on German-Brazilian Studies that occurred in 1963, 1968 and 1974 redefined the concept of German-Brazilians as examples of productivity, efficiency and development in southern Brazil. Rather than restating their potential threat to national unity, supporters of Brazilian nationality highlighted their socioeconomic strength, and German-Brazilians came to be seen again as an example to be followed by the rest of the country.95 Consequently, during the festivities of 1971 and 1976 in Entre Rios, it was possible to represent the Danube Swabians as modern farmers, who also knew how to ‘ensure the continuity of customs’.
In a book published in Germany in 1982, the president of the cooperative, Mathias Leh, quoted the former governor of Paraná, who was an admirer of the colony: ‘Nobody can be a good Brazilian without honouring their cultural heritage’. He presented Entre Rios as an exemplary ‘model’ for Germans: ‘the work of the colony—the only colony of the Danube Swabians overseas—remains an example’.96 Entre Rios was intended to be an example, not only because of its ‘economic success’ and ‘proper functioning of community life’, but also because it maintained its Danube-Swabian ethnic identity.97 Entre Rios would be the proof that ‘Swabian-Danubian history was still alive. The pioneering spirit and healthy peasantry ploughed the soil of the plateau of Paraná and laid the seeds’.98
Such characterizations, which melded together putatively German characteristics with the exceptional histories of the colonists, were not limited to Brazil. In an academic study written in the early 1990s the German geographer Gerd Kohlhepp also linked the economic success of the colony to its supposed ethnic and cultural homogeneity.99 The author followed a line of interpretation that had been presented at one of the symposiums of the German-Brazilian Colloquium in 1974 in a text that referred to the ‘German-Brazilian population’ in general.
NEXT: V. Danube Swabians as War Victims: Remembering Flucht und Vertreibung
Author notes:
82 On the colony of Witmarsum, see A.P. Balhana, B.P. Machado et al. , Campos Gerais: estruturas agrárias (Curitiba, 1968); P.P. Klassen, Die russlanddeutschen Mennoniten in Brasilien (Weierhof, 1995); P. Pauls Jr., Mennoniten in Brasilien: Gedenkschrift zum 50 Jahr-Jubiläum ihrer Einwanderung (Witmarsun, 1980). On the Dutch colonies in Paraná see Elfes, Campos Gerais .
93 According to Casagrande, the Erneuerungsbewegung sought to awaken a sense of ethnic belonging among the Swabians. After Sepp Janko proposed to the German government that Lichtenberger and another activist in the movement should be leaders of the Waffen-SS, they were sent to Germany for training. During the war, Lichtenberger fought in the Balkans and on the Eastern Front before fleeing to Germany for fear of being arrested and handed over to Yugoslavia by the U.S. occupation forces in Austria. Casagrande, Die Volksdeutschen , pp. 143, 156–7.
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