ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of German immigration to Brazil and efforts of German colonialists to strengthen "Germanness," including the practice of film screenings. It addresses several documentaries on German settlers in Brazil, produced in 1929, 1933, and 1942, to show the tension between utopian images of German settlers, the harsh settler everyday life, and the challenges of filmmaking. The chapter analyses German settler-colonial discourse through analysis of German documentary films of the 1930s about southern Brazil. The films portray life of German immigrants in Brazil as part of German settler colonialism and recall different immigrant generations and settlement projects from the nineteenth century to the 1930s. The chapter argues that southern Brazil had a special place in this global endeavor as one of the most promising areas for German settlers. German settler colonialism was mainly an imagined one; though, conversely, these German settlers played a crucial role for German nationalism.
