Germans in the History of Colombia from Colonial Times to the Present

By Jane M. Rausch

Although they have never made up more than 3% of Colombia's population, individual Germans and German companies have been present in every era of the nation's history. the object of this book is to provide an overview of German involvement in Colombia from the sixteenth century conquest to the ears after World War II in order to demonstrate that their contributions to the nation's development has bee far more significant than their scant numbers suggest.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781664163027

Book preview

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Map of Colombia

Germans in the

History of Colombia

from Colonial Times

to the Present

Jane M. Rausch

Professor Emerita

Deaprtment of History

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Copyright © 2021 by Jane M. Rausch.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,

recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 03/31/2021

Xlibris

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Contents

Preface

Chapter 1   Germans in the Conquest of Colombia

Chapter 2   The Dawning of the Enlightenment and von Humboldt’s Scientific Expedition

Chapter 3   Independence and the Creation of Gran Colombia

Chapter 4   German Presence during the Era of Liberal Control (1849–1885)

Chapter 5   Economic Development and Colombian-German Relations during the Conservative Hegemony

Chapter 6   From Prosperity to Internment Political Relations during the 1930s and 1940s and Their Impact on the Resident German Community

Chapter 7   Into the Twenty-First Century: Recovery and Revitalization

Notes

Bibliography

Preface

Colombia, with its population of 50,662,678 in 2020, is the second most populous nation in South America after Brazil, yet with the exception of Spanish immigration and the introduction of black slaves during the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the country has never been an important receiver of immigrants. Once Colombia had achieved independence and despite government offers of grants of land and reduced taxes, the perceived lack of economic opportunities and successive civil wars provided few incentives for Europeans to immigrate. Unlike Argentina and Brazil, Colombia did not energetically encourage large-scale immigration; and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it received only a smattering of settlers from Spain, Germany, Italy, France, the United States, Syria, Lebanon, and China. By 1993, according to the census of that year, 106,162 foreigners resided in Colombia, representing 0.29 percent of total the country’s 37 million inhabitants, with the majority of immigrants coming from neighboring Venezuela (41 percent or close to 43,300 persons) and Ecuador (8.4 percent or close to 9,000 persons.)¹

Yet despite their consistently small numbers, Germans and German companies have been present in every era of Colombian history. The object of this book is provide an overview of German involvement in Colombia from the sixteenth century conquest to the years after World War II in order to demonstrate that the influence of their contributions to the nation’s development has been far more significant than their scant number suggests.

My determination to tackle this topic has developed within the context of some fifty years of research into Colombian history. In October 1967, I arrived in Bogotá, as a young graduate student from the University of Wisconsin—Madison, to begin research for my dissertation, Modernization and Educational Reform in Colombia, 1863–1886. At that time, my advisor arranged for me to lodge in a pension owned by Carlotta Masur, located in Teusaquillo, a barrio within walking distance of the Biblioteca Nacional. Once settled in at the pension, I found, to my surprise, that rather than being surrounded by Colombians, I was instead surrounded by Germans. Carlotta had come to Bogotá along with her husband, Gerhard Masur, to escape Nazi oppression in the 1930s. After her husband, the author of the first solidly researched biography of Simón Bolívar, deserted her in 1948, lured by an offer of a professorship in the United States, Carlotta opened her pension to boarders, who were primarily Germans visiting Bogotá. Carlotta was fluent in English and Spanish, but the language of the pension was German. Only German was spoken during almuerzo (lunch) the principal meal of the day, and I would have been completely lost, if not for one of the residents, Erika Brieke—a young woman fluent in German, Spanish, and English—had not not translated the conversations for me so I had some idea of what was being said. Erika worked at the German Embassy in Bogotá, and as we were much the same age, we soon became good friends.

Carlotta supplemented her income by creating leather craft items. Often during Bogotá’s cold, dark evenings, she would invite me into her sitting room, where I would watch her working while listening to gramaphone records of German Lieder sung by Dietrich Fisher-Dieskau. This German connection continued, for while researching the Colombian educational reform of 1870, I learned that one of its most important aspects was the arrival of a German Pedagogical Mission that the Colombian government had contracted to establish normal schools to prepare teachers.

Five years later, when I began my research on the history of the Colombian Llanos as a tropical plains frontier, I learned that during the sixteenth century, Germans played an active role in the exploration and conquest of the plains. Individual German entrepreneurs supported the Colombian patriots in their war of independence against Spain, and once freedom had been achieved, a German, Juan Bernardo Elbers, facilitated navigation along the Magdalena River. After the end of World War I, ex-German pilots began air transportation in Colombia with the formation of SCADTA (Sociedad Colombo-Alemana de Transportes Aéreos). Then, in 2014, having completed five books tracing the history of the Llanos, I turned to the topic of Colombia and World War I, which of course involved the country’s interaction with Germany.

As a result of these experiences, it occurred to me that a survey of German involvement over time might be an appropriate way to tie together my various forays into Colombian history, and the absence of previous surveys of the topic strengthened my resolve. The two works that exist, both sponsored by the German embassy in Bogotá— Presencia Alemana en Colombia edited by Claudia Tapias Ospina (Mayr & Cabal, 1993), and 200 años de la presencia alemana en Colombia, edited by Juan Esteban Constaín (Universidad del Rosario, 2012)—are collections of essays by different authors. Still lacking are monographs that deal with the topic by a single author. It is this gap that the present work seeks to fill.

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Nikolas Federmann

Source: hu.wikipedia

Chapter 1

Germans in the Conquest of Colombia

1492-1557

Germans were involved in the early conquest of Colombia, but before reviewing Spanish efforts to claim the territory for its New World Empire and the German contribution to this endeavor, it is important to consider the region’s unique geography and the nature of the pre-Colombian population.

Geography and Pre-Colombian Population

As David Bushnell has noted, No one geographic feature has molded the history of Colombia [so much] as the Andes mountains. Their three principal ranges—the Cordillera Occidental between the Pacific Ocean and the Cauca River valley; the Cordillera Central between the Cauca and Magdalena Rivers; and the broad Cordillera Oriental, which branches off toward Venezuela—encompass just half of the national domain of 1,138,400 square kilometers, but by determining the temperature, climate, and ease of human access to multiple regions, they give the Colombian landscape its basic structure.¹

Surrounding the mountain core are four lowland regions. First, lying east of the Cordillera Oriental are the Llanos Orientales, a vast tropical grassland that extends to the Arauca River and the Venezuelan border in the north and is bounded to the south and east by Guaviare and Orinoco rivers. Drained by tributaries of the Meta, Orinoco, and Casanare rivers, the Llanos Orientales include some 253,000 square kilometers of Colombian territory and stretch on into Venezuela for another 300,000 kilometers. South of the Guaviare river is the second region, Amazonia. Its 420,875 square kilometers of tropical rain forest extend to the borders of Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil. Third, stretching along the Pacific Coast is el Chocó, another tropical rain forest, covering only 47,000 square kilometers but important from an economic standpoint for its mineral deposits of gold, silver, and platinum. The fourth region is the Caribbean that econcompasses 100,000 sq. km. It extends from Panama to the Guajria Peninsula and includes the islands of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina.²

It is not known when the first humans reached what is now Colombia, but there are sites in the central Andean highlands suggesting native occupation dating from 20,000 BC. It is likely that others came earlier, presumably by way of the Isthmus of Panama, and settled in agricultural societies in the northern Caribbean lowlands. No single dominant native culture emerged, but most of the inhabitants belonged to one of three major linguistic groups—Arawak, Carib, or Chibcha—forming a patchwork of separate cultures and subcultures. These indigenous peoples cultivated yucca in the lower elevations, maize at middle altitudes, and potatoes in the highlands. They practiced ceramic pottery and other crafts, and their achievements in the working of gold from alluvial deposits were impressive. By the time the Europeans arrived, they displayed social stratification and political systems based on chieftainships.³

The Muisca, living in the basins of the Eastern Cordillera, numbered around 600,000 and were the largest concentration of Native Americans that existed between the Inca empire in Peru and the Maya of Middle America. They were a preeminently agricultural people, living chiefly on potatoes and corn. They also drank fermented corn beer, or chicha. Although the Muisca had no engineering works comparable to the cities built by the Mayas, they maintained an extensive trading network by exchanging salt for cotton and gold with the peoples living in lower altitudes. Politically, the Muisca created two confederations: one centered near what is now Bogotá, headed by a chief known as the Zipa; the other was located about 100 kilometers northeast at Tunja, whose leader bore the title of Zaque.

With respect to the legend of El Dorado, it was the Muiscas who practiced the Guilded Man ceremony that seemed to the Spanish, as they were settling islands in the Caribbean, to confirm the existence of a golden land somewhere in South America. Every year the Muisca met at Lake Guatavita twenty miles from Bogotá to venerate their goddess, Bachué, mother of the human race, and to honor a princess condemned to sleep forever in its depths for having failed in her duties as ruler and wife. The worshippers threw gold objects into the lake, but the ritual’s climax came when the Zipa, or King of Kings, naked and covered with gold dust, jumped from a raft into the water, washing off the precious substance as he swam.⁴

Three other sources contributed to the concept of El Dorado, each affirming that it was either a place or a city. The first stated that Xerira, a rich province occupied by Guane Indians, was located at the northern limit of the Muisca territory. The second suggested that Xerira, variously called the Amazon Kingdom and the country where cinnamon grows, was a land of marvelous wealth, situated somewhere east of the Andes between Peru and the River Plate. A third version came from the Guahibo, a plains Indian culture, who told Spanish explorers that a rich kingdom called Meta could be found at the headwaters of the Meta and Guaviare rivers. As late as 1688, Padre Lucas Fernández de Piedrahita, in his Historia general de las conquistas del Nuevo Reino de Granada, described the Meta as the river of Gold, which carries gold as fine as twenty-four carats.⁵

Erroneous information about the size of South America bolstered belief in the existence of El Dorado. Until the mid-sixteenth century, geographers maintained that the continent was a small land mass and very likely a group of islands. After Vasco Núñez de Balboa crossed the Isthmus of Panama in 1513 and discovered the Pacific Ocean, Spanish explorers supposed that there must be another ocean strait through the islands of South America that would enable direct travel from Europe to Asia. They believed that the Pacific lay south of the Caribbean rather than west of it, and that the Andes ran eastward following the South Sea coastline. The impression that both El Dorado and the South Sea lay just beyond the horizon caused a war of nerves among would-be conquistadors who explored the Caribbean coast after Columbus’s initial four voyages. The captains, who recklessly started out for the interior, did not hesitate to commit violence to circumvent opponents. As Juan Friede notes, The avalanche of people rushing to the imaginary gold country is comparable only to modern gold, oil and rubber booms.⁶ These legends were likewise a strong enticement for German explorers who sought to leave their imprint on the New World.

Once Columbus took control of the island of Hispaniola (divided today between the Dominican Republic and Haiti), would-be Spanish conquistadors followed his example, using Hispaniola as a base from which to explore the Caribbean. As Irving Leonard skillfully demonstrates in his Books of the Brave, they were motivated not only by a trust in their destiny to achieve magnificent deeds through Christian zeal and military valor, but also by the ideal of chivalric quest as popularized in the contemporary romance Amadis de Gaula.⁷ The medieval mind that took for granted the authenticity of exotic animals, beings, and kingdoms, eagerly credited Indian reports that such creatures and places could be found in the yet-unknown portions of South America.

Persistent tales of a fabulous