Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) (7 page)

There were to be no more poems or little glasses of
rompope
,
nothing but a religious, sepulchral silence until her death.

D
ANIELA DE
M
ONTECRISTO

Buenos Aires, 1918–Córdoba, Spain, 1970

D
aniela de
Montecristo was a woman of legendary beauty, surrounded by an enduring aura
of mystery. The stories that have circulated about her first years in Europe
(1938-1947) rarely concur and often flatly contradict one another. It has
been said that among her lovers were Italian and German generals (including
the infamous Wolff, SS and Police Chief in Italy); that she fell in love
with a general in the Rumanian army, Eugenio Entrescu, who was crucified by
his own soldiers in 1944; that she escaped from Budapest under siege
disguised as a Spanish nun; that she lost a suitcase full of poems while
secretly crossing the border from Austria into Switzerland in the company of
three war criminals; that she had audiences with the Pope in 1940 and 1941;
that out of unrequited love for her, a Uruguayan and then a Colombian poet
committed suicide; and, that she had a black swastika tattooed on her left
buttock.

Her literary work, leaving aside the juvenilia lost among the icy
peaks of Switzerland, never to appear again, consists of a single book, with a
rather epic title:
The Amazons
, published by Quill Argentina, with a
preface by the widow Mendiluce, who could not be accused of restraint when it
came to lavishing praise (in one paragraph, relying solely on her feminine
intuition, she compared the legendary poems lost in the Alps to the work of
Juana de Ibarbourou and Alfonsina Storni).

The Amazons
is a torrential and anarchic blend of all the
literary genres: romance, spy novel, memoir, play (there are even some passages
of avant-garde dramatic writing), poetry, history, political pamphlet. The plot
revolves around the life of the author and her grandmothers and
great-grandmothers, sometimes going back as far as the period immediately
following the foundation of Asunción and Buenos Aires.

The book contains some original passages, especially the descriptions
of the Women’s Fourth Reich—with its headquarters in Buenos Aires and its
training grounds in Patagonia—and the nostalgic, pseudo-scientific digressions
about a gland that produces the feeling of love.

TWO GERMANS AT THE
ENDS OF THE EARTH

F
RANZ
Z
WICKAU

Caracas, 1946–Caracas, 1971

F
ranz Zwickau tore through
life and literature like a whirlwind. The son of German immigrants, he was
perfectly fluent in his parents’ language as well as that of his native land.
Contemporary reports portray him as a talented, iconoclastic boy who refused to
grow up (José Segundo Heredia once described him as “Venezuela’s best schoolboy
poet”). The photos show a tall young man with blond hair, the body of an
athlete, and the gaze of a killer or a dreamer or both.

He published two books of poetry. The first,
Motorists
(1965), was a series of twenty-five sonnets, rather unorthodox in their rhythm
and form, dealing with subjects dear to the young: motorcycles, doomed love,
sexual awakening and the will to purity. The second,
The War Criminals’
Son
(1967), marked a substantial shift in Zwickau’s poetics and, it
could be said, in the Venezuelan poetry of the time. A dire, horrifying, badly
written book (Zwickau espoused a peculiar theory about the revision of poems,
somewhat surprising in a poet who had cut his teeth on sonnets), full of
insults, imprecation, blasphemy, completely false autobiographical details,
slanderous imputations, and nightmares.

A number of the poems are noteworthy:

—“A Dialogue with Hermann Goering in Hell,” in which the poet, astride
the black motorcycle of his early sonnets, arrives at an abandoned airfield, in
a place known as Hell, near Maracaibo on the Venezuelan coast, and meets the
shade of the Reichsmarschall, with whom he discusses various subjects: aviation,
vertigo, destiny, uninhabited houses, courage, justice and death.

—“Concentration Camp,” by contrast, is the humorous and at times
touching story of Zwickau’s life as a child, between the ages of five and ten,
in a middle-class neighborhood of Caracas.

—“Heimat” (350 lines), written in an odd blend of Spanish and
German—with occasional expressions in Russian, English, French and
Yiddish—describes the private parts of his body with the detachment of a
pathologist working in a morgue the night after a multiple murder.

—“The War Criminals’ Son,” the book’s long title poem, is a vigorous
and excessive piece, in which Zwickau, bemoaning the fact that he was born
twenty-five years too late, gives free rein to his verbal facility, his hatred,
his humor, and his unrelieved pessimism. In free verse of a kind rarely seen in
Venezuela, the author depicts an appalling, indescribable childhood, compares
himself to a black boy in Alabama in 1858, dances, sings, masturbates, lifts
weights, dreams of a fabulous Berlin, recites Goethe and Jünger, attacks
Montaigne and Pascal (whose work he knows well), adopting the voices of an
alpine mountaineer, a peasant woman, a German tanker in Peiper’s brigade who was
killed in the Ardennes in December 1944, and a North American journalist in
Nuremberg.

Needless to say, the collection was ignored, perhaps in a deliberate
and concerted manner, by the influential critics of the day.

For a brief period, Zwickau joined Segundo José Heredia’s literary
circle. His active participation in the Aryan Naturist Community gave rise to
his only work in prose, the short novel
Prison Camping
, in which he
mercilessly lampoons the community’s founder (who is clearly the model for
Camacho, the Rosenberg of the Plains) and his disciples, the Pure Mestizos.

His relations with the literary world were always problematic. Only
two anthologies of Venezuelan poetry include his work:
New Poetic
Voices
(1966), edited by Alfredo Cuervo, and Fanny Arespacochea’s
controversial
Young Poets of Venezuela
1960-1970
.

Before his twenty-fifth birthday, Zwickau went over the edge of the
Camino de Los Teques in Caracas on his motorbike. The poems he had written in
German only came to light posthumously: entitled
Meine Kleine Gedichte
,
the collection contains fifty brief texts in a more or less bucolic vein.

W
ILLY
S
CHÜRHOLZ

Colonia Renacer, Chile, 1956–Kampala, Uganda, 2029

C
olonia Renacer (literally
“Rebirth Colony”) is twenty-five miles from Temuco. At first glance it seems to
be a large estate like many others in the region. A closer look, however,
reveals a number of significant differences. To begin with, Colonia Renacer has
its own school, medical clinic, and auto repair shop. It has established a
self-sufficient economic system that allows the colony to turn its back on what
Chileans, perhaps over-optimistically, like to call “Chilean reality,” or simply
“reality.” Colonia Renacer is a profitable business. Its presence is unsettling:
the colony’s members hold their festivities in secret; no neighbors, be they
rich or poor, are invited. The colonists bury their dead in their own cemetery.
A final differentiating trait, perhaps the most trivial but also the first to
strike those who have caught a glimpse of the colony’s interior and the few who
have crossed its perimeter, is the ethnic origin of its inhabitants: they are
all, without exception, German.

They work communally, from sunrise to sunset. They do not hire
laborers or lease portions of their land. Superficially they resemble the many
Protestant sects that emigrated from Germany to the Americas, fleeing
intolerance and military service. But they are not a religious sect, and their
arrival in Chile coincided with the end of the Second World War.

Every so often the national newspapers report their activities, or
describe the mystery in which they are enveloped. There has been talk of pagan
orgies, sex slaves and secret executions. Eye-witnesses of dubious reliability
have sworn that in the main courtyard, instead of the Chilean colors, a red flag
is flown, with a white circle in which a black swastika is inscribed. It has
also been said that Eichman, Bormann and Mengele were hidden there. In fact the
only war criminal to have spent time in the colony (a number of years in fact,
entirely given over to horticulture) was Walther Rauss, who, it was later
claimed, had taken a part in certain torture sessions during the early years of
Pinochet’s regime. The truth is that Rauss died of a heart attack while watching
a soccer match on television: East and West Germany playing in the Federal
Republic during the 1974 World Cup.

It was said that inbreeding in the colony produced idiot children and
freaks. Neighbors used to speak of albino families driving tractors at night,
and magazine articles of the time contain what are probably manipulated photos
in which the dismayed Chilean public was able to examine a number of rather pale
and serious individuals tirelessly working the fields.

After the coup in 1973, Colonia Renacer disappeared from the news.

Willy Schürholz, the youngest of five brothers, did not learn to speak
Spanish properly until he was ten years old. Until then his world was the vast
domain enclosed by the colony’s barbed-wire fences. Unbending family discipline,
farm work, and a series of singular teachers inspired equally by
national-socialist millenarianism and by faith in science forged his character:
withdrawn, stubborn and strangely self-confident.

It so happened that his elders decided to send him to Santiago to
study agricultural science, and there he soon discovered his true poetic
vocation. He had what it takes to fail spectacularly: even his earliest works
have a discernible style of their own, an aesthetic direction that he would
follow with hardly a deviation until the day he died. Schürholz was an
experimental poet.

His first poems combined disconnected sentences and topographic maps
of Colonia Renacer. They were untitled. They were unintelligible. Their aim was
not to be understood, and certainly not to secure the reader’s complicity. One
critic has suggested that they indicate where to dig for the buried treasure of
a lost childhood. Another maliciously surmised that they show the locations of
secret graves. Schürholz’s friends from the avant-garde poetry scene, who were
generally opposed to the military regime, gave him the affectionate nickname The
Treasure Map, until they discovered that he espoused ideas diametrically opposed
to their own. The discovery took some time. No one could have accused Schürholz
of being talkative.

In Santiago he lived in extreme poverty and solitude. He had no
friends or lovers as far as we know; he avoided human contact. The little money
that he earned by translating from German went to pay for his boarding-house
room and a few hot meals each month. His diet consisted mainly of wholewheat
bread.

His second series of poetic experiments, which he exhibited in one up
the literature department’s classrooms at the Catholic University, was a series
of huge maps which took some time to decipher, on which verses giving further
instructions for their placement and use had been written in a careful,
adolescent hand. A mass of gibberish. According to a professor of Italian
literature who was well versed in the subject, they were maps of the
concentration camps at Terezin, Mauthausen, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald
and Dachau. The installation remained in place for four days (instead of the
planned week) and disappeared without having reached the attention of a wide
public. Among those who saw and were able to interpret it, opinions differed:
some said it was a critique of the military regime; others, influenced by
Schürholz’s erstwhile avant-garde friends, regarded it as a serious and criminal
proposal to reconstruct the dismantled camps in Chile. The scandal, though
minor, indeed almost confidential, was enough to endow Schürholz with the dark
aura of the
poète maudit
, which would shadow him all the rest of his
days.

The
Review of Thought and History
published his less explicit
texts and maps. In certain circles he was considered the only disciple of the
enigmatic, vanished Ramírez Hoffman, although the young man from Colonia Renacer
lacked the master’s excess: his art was systematic, monothematic and
concrete.

In 1980, with the support of the
Review of Thought and
History
, he published his first book. Füchler, the editor of the
review, wanted to write a preface. Schürholz refused. The book is called
Geometry
, and it sets out countless variations on the theme of a
barbed-wire fence crossing an almost empty space, sparsely scattered with
apparently unrelated verses. The fences seen from the air trace precise and
delicate lines. The verses speak—or whisper—of an abstract pain, the sun and
headaches.

The subsequent books were called
Geometry II
,
Geometry
III
and so on. They return to the same theme: maps of concentration
camps superimposed on a map of Colonia Renacer, or a particular city (Stutthof
or Valparaíso, Maidanek or Concepción), or situated in an empty, rural space.
Over the years, the textual component gradually became more consistent and
clear. The disjointed sentences gave way to fragments of conversations about
time or landscape, passages from plays in which, apparently, nothing is
happening, except the slow, fluid passing of the years.

In 1985, Schürholz, whose fame had previously been restricted to
Chile’s literary and artistic circles, vast as they are, was catapulted to the
very summit of notoriety by a group of local and North American impresarios.
Commanding a team of excavators, he dug the map of an ideal concentration camp
into the Atacama desert: an intricate network which, from the ground, appeared
to be an ominous series of straight lines, but viewed from a helicopter or an
airplane resolved into a graceful set of curves. The poet himself dispatched the
literary component by inscribing the five vowels with a hoe and a mattock at
locations scattered arbitrarily over the terrain’s rugged surface. This
performance was soon hailed in Chile as the cultural sensation of the
summer.

The experiment was repeated in the Arizona desert and a wheat field in
Colorado, with significant variations. Schürholz’s eager promoters wanted to
find him a light plane so he could draw a concentration camp in the sky, but he
refused: his ideal camps were meant to be observed from the sky, but they could
only be drawn on the earth. Thus he missed another opportunity to emulate and
outdo Ramírez Hoffman.

It soon became apparent that Schürholz was neither competitive nor
concerned with his career. Interviewed by a New York television station, he came
across as a fool. Haltingly, he declared that he knew nothing about the visual
arts, and hoped to learn to write one day. His humility was charming for a while
but soon became ridiculous.

In 1990, to the surprise of his followers, he published a book of
children’s stories, using the futile pseudonym Gaspar Hauser. Within a few days
all the critics knew that Gaspar Hauser was Willy Schürholz, and the children’s
stories were scrutinized with disdain and pitilessly dissected. In his stories,
Hauser-Schürholz idealized a childhood that was suspiciously aphasic, amnesic,
obedient and silent. Invisibility seemed to be his aim. In spite of the critics,
the book sold well. Schürholz’s main character, “the boy without a name,”
displaced Papelucho as the emblematic protagonist of children’s and teen fiction
in Chile.

Shortly afterwards, amid protests from certain sectors of the left,
Schürholz was offered the position of cultural attaché to the Chilean Embassy in
Angola, which he accepted. In Africa he found what he had been looking for: the
fitting repository for his soul. He never returned to Chile. He spent the rest
of his life working as a photographer and as a guide for German tourists.