Bernhard Förster

Who was Bernhard Förster?

Bernhard Förster was a German teacher. He was married to Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, the sister of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

Förster became a leading figure in the anti-Semitic faction on the far right of German politics and wrote on the Jewish question, characterizing Jews as constituting a "parasite on the German body". In order to support his beliefs he set up the Deutscher Volksverein in 1881 with Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg.

He left Germany in 1886 to emigrate to Paraguay and the following year he set up a colony known as "Nueva Germania". However, as this initiative was a failure, he eventually committed suicide by poisoning himself with a combination of morphine and strychnine in his room at the Hotel del Lago in San Bernardino, Paraguay on June 3, 1889.