Ich bin ein brasileiro: Finding a little piece of Germany in Brazil

PETRÓPOLIS, Brazil — When European powers France and Germany square off in Rio de Janeiro’s famed Maracanã stadium on July 4, this hillside city an hour away should have no problem picking a favorite. About a third of the 300,000 residents here are descendants of the original German settlers, and many can trace their lineage directly back to the original families — the Krautkraemers, Kniebels, Korndorfers and the rest of the 2,000 or so who arrived in 1845 to build a new life in the New World.

Germans are one of the oldest immigrant communities in Brazil, and though their numbers were always smaller than those of the Portuguese, Spanish and Italians (and, later, Japanese), some 12 million Brazilians claimed German ancestry on the 2000 census. Brazil’s Germans helped turn the country into an agricultural powerhouse and almost single-handedly created the idea of a middle class in Brazil. They also played unwitting host to Dr. Josef Mengele (who, in fairness, also spent time in Paraguay and Argentina) and, more recently, produced supermodel Gisele Bündchen. Throughout it all, the German clusters, particularly in the agricultural highlands in southern Santa Catarina state, have kept both the language and the culture famously intact.

And so, on the day that Germany was to play Ghana in their second group match, photographer Eduardo Leal and I drove an hour past Rio de Janeiro’s hillside favelas, up jungle roads with their warning signs about crossing monkeys, and into the city of Petrópolis, the first building of which is a schlocky half-timbered beer hall called Casa do Alemão (German House). We skipped that, drove down into the old city and passed the cathedral designed by Major Júlio Frederico Koeler, the city founder who was born in Mainz. We parked, walked into the Crystal Palace at the center of town, and happened upon a dozen boys and girls wearing traditional Hunsrück clothing and twirling to Rhineland folk dances while their leader, Elisabeth Graebner, counted off “eins, zwei, drei, eins, zwei, drei” into a microphone. Outside, workers were putting up stands in preparation for the massive annual Bauernfest, which would attract up to 400,000 visitors throughout July for strudel and beer. Across the canal was the Bohemia brewery, just one of several famous breweries in town. Had we somehow stumbled on an unreconstructed German idyll in the mountains?

The answer, as the Germans say, is jein — a little “ja” and a little “nein.”

Petrópolis gets its name from Emperor Dom Pedro II, who had his summer palace here, and whose body lies in the cathedral. But before it even had a name, this town — the first planned city in Brazil — needed laborers. Koeler, who designed the city, had a stroke of luck in 1837 when a French ship landed in Rio on the way to Sydney, Australia. Most of the passengers were German peasants, and the ship’s passage was onerous enough that they decided to stay in Brazil. That first wave did well, despite disease and hardship, and Koeler was soon actively recruiting Germans to build his planned city. On June 29, 1845 — the day of the year now marked by the start of Bauernfest — the first ship of permanent settlers arrived in port. By the end of 1845, more than 2,000 Germans had arrived to help build the city with neighborhoods called Bingen, Ingelheim and Westfalia.

It’s clear why Germans might be attracted to this place, cooler and mistier than Rio below. ("The Portuguese and the Spanish keep by the coast," says the father of one of Graebner’s dancers. "The Germans, they like mountains.") But why were Germans so prized? "The emperor wanted to make this place whiter," says Graebner with a shrug. A recently published pamphlet on the colonization of Petrópolis is a bit more circumspect, saying only that Koeler disliked the idea of slave labor. Whatever the reason, the Germans both here and in the south of Brazil formed an early middle class in the country: Neither slave nor slaveholder, they typically worked small family lots of farmland. The bedrock elements of Rhineland culture — self-reliance and a hard work ethic — were a salve for a country that was otherwise split between an indolent European ruling class and a brutalized slave caste.

But their presence, and their cultural exceptionalism, has long made them suspect in wider Brazilian society. So when Brazil finally sided with the allies in World War II and became the only independent South American nation to send ground troops to Europe, it spelled the beginning of difficult times for the Germans of Petrópolis. Without the protections that the more densely populated German communities in Santa Catarina had, Petrópolis’s German minority had to go to ground. People translated their names into Portuguese; the Amberger family became the Du Monte family. The German school changed its curriculum.

Walter Berner, who was born in Petrópolis in 1944, spoke to me in halting German outside the church. "Even after the war we couldn’t speak our language in the street," he said. "People would get agitated." Graebner heard stories of policemen asking little children their name was and yelling at them if they answered in German. When Graebner arrived from Blumenau in 1964, the language was almost dead. Even now, the eight German dance groups (which offer everything from language classes to unofficial matchmaking services for young German Brazilians) have to operate without government or German Consulate help. "We have no support," she says. "We do this on our own."

This sense of victimhood permeates parts of the community, but it can be difficult to sympathize with. After all, Brazilian society victimizes many, and the Germans, for all their tribulations, have never been a true underclass here.

But it’s also understandable why Germans in South America would be defensive. Nazi jokes abound — a British friend of mine told me, of course, to look out for any elderly men who seemed reluctant to talk about the past. It doesn’t help that Mengele, one of the most grotesque of the Nazi menagerie, lived rather undisturbed in Brazil (although seemingly not integrated into the German community) until his accidental drowning in 1979. But in Brazil, the communities are much older, and much more complicated, than simple notions of postwar Germans on the lam.

Teuto-Brasileiros, as they are called, really are Brazilians first. Take Graebner’s mother, Herta — a devoted and devout mother, from hardy Coburg stock, there was a lot that was German about her. But when she died a few years ago — promised to heaven "by grace alone," as the Lutherans put it — it was not at all a German death. She was walking in flip-flops to cut bananas from a tree when she was bitten by a jararaca, a deadly pit viper indigenous to southern Brazil.

When Eduardo and I finally made it to the Bohemia brewery in order to eat Knackwurst, drink Weissbier and watch Germany play, there were really only two overt fans of der Nationalmannschaft in the crowd. Most of the Brazilians were rooting for Ghana, perhaps because Brazilians love an underdog, particularly if that underdog might help bloody a rival that can compete with the Seleçao.