In the late 19th century, a handful of German families settled in a remote jungle of Paraguay, where they intended to create a racially pure utopian settlement called Nueva Germania.
The experiment was a colossal failure.
The settlers were unprepared for the devastating diseases and other hardships of jungle life, and their descendants — some of whom intermarried with the darker-skinned locals — are among the poorest people in one of the poorest countries in South America.
But now they have an unlikely champion: a Wagner-loving San Francisco composer who is mounting a determined crusade to rebuild the Aryan dream and has sought assistance from Vice President Dick Cheney, two U.S. philanthropic groups, a Southern California town council, Bay Area artists, and a U.S. filmmaker best known for the underground movie “Scorpio Rising” and the book “Hollywood Babylon.”
“As an artist who is fed up with much of the pretentious nonsense that has come to define Western culture, I am drawn to the idea of an Aryan vacuum in the middle of the jungle,” says David Woodard, who lives on Mount Davidson and studied musical composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
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