—“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.
WILLY SCHÜRHOLZ
Colonia Renacer, Chile, 1956–Kampala, Uganda, 2029
Colonia 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, M
aidanek 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.
SPECULATIVE AND
SCIENCE FICTION
J.M.S. HILL
Topeka, 1905–New York, 1936
One of Quantrill’s Raiders crossing the state of Kansas at the head of 500 cavalrymen; flags inscribed with a sort of primitive, premonitory swastika; rebels who never surrender; a plan to reach Great Bear Lake via Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Saskatchewa, Alberta, and the Northwest Territories; a Confederate philosopher whose fanciful dream was to establish an Ideal Republic in the vicinity of the Arctic circle; an expedition unraveling along the way, beset by human and natural obstacles; two exhausted horsemen finally reaching Great Bear Lake, dismounting. . . . Such, in summary, is the plot of J.M.S. Hill’s first novel, published in 1924 in the Fantastic Stories series.
Between then and his premature death twelve years later, Hill was to publish more than thirty novels and more than fifty stories.
His characters are usually based on figures from the Civil War and sometimes even bear their names (General Ewell, Early, the lost explorer in The Early Saga, young Jeb Stuart in The World of Snakes, the journalist Lee); the action unfolds in a distorted present where nothing is as it seems, or in a distant future full of abandoned, ruined cities, and ominously silent landscapes, similar in many respects to those of the Midwest. His plots abound in providential heroes and mad scientists; hidden clans and tribes which at the ordained time must emerge and do battle with other hidden tribes; secret societies of men in black who meet at isolated ranches on the prairie; private detectives who must search for people lost on other planets; children stolen and raised by inferior races so that, having reached adulthood, they may take control of the tribe and lead it to immolation; unseen animals with insatiable appetites; mutant plants; invisible planets that suddenly become visible; teenage girls offered as human sacrifices; cities of ice with a single inhabitant; cowboys visited by angels; mass migrations destroying everything in their path; underground labyrinths swarming with warrior-monks; plots to assassinate the president of the United States; spaceships fleeing an earth in flames to colonize Jupiter; societies of telepathic killers; children growing up all alone in dark, cold yards.
Hill’s writing is not pretentious. His characters speak as people no doubt spoke in Topeka in 1918. His infinite enthusiasm makes up for occasional stylistic sloppiness.
J.M.S. Hill was the youngest of four sons born to an Episcopalian minister and his wife. His mother was loving, given to daydreaming, and before her marriage had worked in the box office of a cinema in her home town. After leaving home, Hill lived mostly alone. He is known to have had only one, unhappy, love affair. He rarely discussed his personal life in public, stating that he was, above all, a professional writer. In private he boasted about having designed part of the Nazi uniform and kit, although it is most unlikely that his inventions were known so far afield.
His novels are full of heroes and titans. The settings are desolate, vast and cold. He wrote Wild West novels and detective books, but he did his best work in science fiction. A number of his books combine all three genres. At the age of twenty-five, he moved into a little apartment in New York City, where he was to die six years later. Among his belongings was an unfinished novel on a pseudo-historical subject, The Fall of Troy, which would not be published until 1954.
ZACH SODENSTERN
Los Angeles, 1962–Los Angeles, 2021
A highly successful science fiction writer, Zach Sodenstern was the creator of the Gunther O’Connell saga, of the Fourth Reich saga, and of the saga of Gunther O’Connell and the Fourth Reich, in which the previous two sagas fuse into one (Gunther O’Connell, the West Coast gangster turned politician, having successfully infiltrated the underworld of the Fourth Reich in the Midwest).
The first and second sagas comprise more than ten novels, while the third is made up of three, one of them unfinished. Some of the stories are particularly worthy of note. A Little House in Napa (the beginning of the Gunther O’Connell saga) is set in a world of extreme violence perpetrated by children and teenagers, described in a restrained manner, without spelling out moral lessons or suggesting any solutions to the problems. The novel appears to be a mere succession of unpleasant situations and acts of aggression, interrupted only by the words THE END. At first glance it does not seem to be a work of science fiction. Only the dreams or visions of the adolescent Gunther O’Connell give it a certain prophetic, fantastic coloring. No space voyages, robots or scientific advances figure in its pages. On the contrary, the society it describes seems to have regressed to an inferior degree of civilization.
Candace (1990) is the second installment of the Gunther O’Connell saga. The adolescent protagonist has become a twenty-five-year-old determined to change his life and the lives of others. The novel recounts the ins and outs of his job as a construction worker, and his love for a slightly older woman called Candace, who is married to a corrupt policeman. The opening pages introduce the reader to O’Connell’s dog, a mutant, stray German Shepherd with telepathic powers and Nazi tendencies; in the last fifty pages it becomes clear that a major earthquake has occurred in California and that the United States government has been toppled by a coup.
Revolution and The Crystal Cathedral are the third and fourth installments of the saga. Revolution consists basically of dialogues between O’Connell and h
is dog Flip plus various secondary episodes of extreme violence set in a ruined Los Angeles. The Crystal Cathedral is a story about God, fundamentalist preachers and the ultimate meaning of life. Sodenstern portrays O’Connell as a calm but withdrawn man, who carries the skull of his great lost love Candace (who was killed by her husband in the second novel of the cycle) in a little bag permanently attached to his belt, nostalgically remembers various old TV series (in suspiciously accurate detail), and is friend to no one but his dog, who has taken on an increasingly important role: Flip’s adventures and reflections constitute sub-novels within the novel.
The Cephalopods and Warriors of the South cap off the O’Connell saga. The Cephalopods records O’Connell’s trip to San Francisco with Flip and their adventures in that city (where gays and lesbians rule supreme). Warriors of the South relates the clash between earthquake survivors in California and millions of hungry Mexicans marching northward en masse, devouring everything in their path. The situation is reminiscent, at times, of the conflict between Romans and barbarians on the fringes of the Empire.
Checking the Maps opens the Fourth Reich saga. It is full of appendices, maps, incomprehensible indices of proper names, and solicits an interaction in which no sensible reader would persist. The events take places mainly in Denver and Midwestern cities. There is no main character. The less chaotic stretches read like collections of stories haphazardly tacked together. Our Friend B and The Ruins of Pueblo continue in the same vein. The characters are designated by letters or numbers, and the texts are not so much scrambled puzzles as fragments of scrambled puzzles. Although presented and sold as a novel, The Fourth Reich in Denver is in fact a reader’s guide to the three preceding titles. The Simbas—the last installment before the confluence of the Fourth Reich and O’Connell sagas—a surreptitious manifesto directed against African Americans, Jews and Hispanics, gave rise to diverse and contradictory interpretations.