Why did Germans immigrate to Brazil 200 years ago?

The aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, failed harvests and oppressive tax burdens made life difficult for people in Germany at the beginning of the 19th century.

Then came a tempting offer from the other side of the world — 77 hectares of land for every family willing to settle in Brazil. Plus livestock, seeds and agricultural equipment, as well as financial assistance for the first two years.

It's more than many German farmers, craftsmen and day laborers ever dared to hope for at home. Soon the first of them responded to the call to say goodbye to their old home.

Wanted: Workers in former Portuguese colony

In January 1824, a ship named Argus arrived at the port of Rio de Janeiro with around 280 people on board. It was the first ship carrying Germans "in the service of the Brazilian Empire." The new arrivals settled in the states of Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul, and on July 25, 1824, established the city of Sao Leopoldo, named after the Brazilian Emperor's Austrian wife Leopoldine. In fact, she had campaigned for the recruitment of Germans to Brazil.

The South American country had moved on from being a Portuguese colony just two years prior, and the decision by Emperor Dom Pedro I to take in the immigrants was not just a goodwill gesture. He wanted them to fight, if necessary, against Brazil's enemies, but above all he needed settlers to farm in the country's south.

"The end of slavery was in sight, and the question arose as to where to get new workers," said historian Stefan Rinke from the Institute for Latin American Studies at the Free University of Berlin. "People knew that slavery could no longer be maintained in the long term and that it was becoming increasingly difficult to obtain supplies due to the British blockade of the slave trade. And that's when they turned their attention to the German territories. They knew that there were many poor people there who were also under pressure to emigrate."

Brazil wanted to 'whiten' its population

At the time, Brazil's elite was pursuing another goal with its immigration policy: They wanted to "whiten" their country.

"Progress was equated with Europeanization, both of customs and traditions, but also specifically of the population," Rinke told DW. "They wanted Europeans. And not all Europeans, but above all Central Europeans, because they were considered particularly virtuous, hardworking, ambitious and obedient — not unimportant if you wanted new subjects."

Over the course of the next century, around 250,000 Germans would find a new home more than 10,000 kilometers (some 6,200 miles) from their homeland.

"Here you get a piece of land the size of a county in Germany," a settler who emigrated to Brazil wrote enthusiastically to his family in 1827.

The settlers needed space — for their houses, their fields and their livestock. However, the jungle into which the new arrivals cut their paths was not uninhabited. The Indigenous people already living there defended their territory and fought bloody battles with the new German arrivals.

Soon, the government hired mercenary troops who mercilessly hunted down the Indigenous people. In the Urwaldboten, a newspaper published in the city of Blumenau, which was founded in 1850, it was stated: "The Bugre [a derogatory term for Indigenous people] are disrupting colonization and traffic between the highlands and the coast. This disturbance must be eliminated as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Sentimental considerations about the unjust practice of Bugre hunts, which contradict the principles of morality, are quite out of place here. The vagabond tribes must be dispersed by a large contingent of Bugre hunters and rangers and thus rendered harmless in one fell swoop."

 

Isolated in the enclave

The native population didn't stand a chance against their hunters — two-thirds of the Indigenous population were wiped out.

The German settlements, on the other hand, prospered. The immigrants upheld the customs of their old homeland and continued to speak German. Only a few spoke Portuguese and the people didn't really mix with their new neighbors. Many of the immigrants still celebrated the kaiser's birthday and donated large sums of money to the fatherland during World War I.

This isolation led to a great deal of skepticism among the Brazilian population, and warnings about the "German danger" became more and more apparent. When the National Socialists were gaining ground in Germany in the 1930s, quite a few immigrants of German descent became enthusiastic about Adolf Hitler. Indeed, Brazil had the largest Nazi party outside Germany, and children would sing Nazi anthems in schools.

German banned, German clubs and schools closed

Eventually, then-President Getulio Vargas clamped down. The Nazi Party and the German-language press were banned, German clubs and schools were closed, and the use of the German language was made a criminal offense.

"This was because Brazil had declared war on Germany in both world wars, so it was also a question of internal security," said Frederik Schulze from the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin. "When Brazilian ships were also sunk by German submarines, there were riots against German businesses run by Brazilians. In other words, the war rekindled the whole mood, so to speak."

In 1945, Nazi Germany was in ruins and German culture had fallen into disrepute. The German-Brazilians lost contact with the homeland of their ancestors. They learned Portuguese, and their children felt as if they were naturally part of Brazilian society.

Some German traditions have survived

It's rare to hear the German language spoken in an old-fashioned dialect, but the influence of the immigrants in southern Brazil is still visible today. Visitors to the region can see half-timbered houses and enjoy sauerkraut with pork knuckle or apple strudel for dessert.

The town of Blumenau, founded in 1850 in the middle of the jungle by the German pharmacist Hermann Blumenau, is famous for its Oktoberfest, one of the world's largest after Munich.

The trend has now reversed. Just as hundreds of thousands of Germans emigrated to Brazil 200 years ago, Brazilians are now moving in the opposite direction. According to the Foreign Affairs Ministry, around 160,000 Brazilians currently reside in Germany.

This article was originally written in German.