Although the community in Entre Rios has harnessed older, widespread discourses about Germanness, much as they had long been used in other areas of Brazil (Germans as hardworking people, for example), discourses of memory there created a particular Danube-Swabian identity. Their diasporic community was constructed not only based on an epic memory of the colonization, but also on a tragic memory of ‘flight and expulsion’ from south-eastern Europe. In this discursive construction, a ‘culture of a lost homeland’ was fundamental to the creation of a ‘new homeland’ within Brazil, in which these two combined to constitute idealized, cohesive spaces that provided consistency and meaning through what could be narrated as a steady process of coping with loss and
affirming overcoming.
As part of this process, colonizing new spaces became an idea and an act that Danube Swabians applied equally to eastern Europe and Paraná, creating continuity between two otherwise unrelated regions. Especially during the 1971 festivities for the twentieth anniversary of the colony, the Agrária cooperative showcased Entre Rios as a model of what could be achieved by overcoming great, age-old obstacles, and it emerged as a model for other Germans and Brazilians alike. Through remembering fifty years of ‘flight and expulsion’ in 1994, the efforts of the Danube Swabians to overcome simply continued, as they sought to tie the new generations into this vision in order to maintain social cohesion within the colony and to guarantee its future.
~ The End
