George Sylvester Quadrangle
George Sylvester Viereck (born December 31, 1884 in Munich , † March 18, 1962 in Holyoke , Massachusetts ) was a German-American poet, writer and publicist.
Life
Viereck's father, Louis Viereck , a Social Democrat , a friend of Magnus Hirschfeld and an unrecognized descendant of the Hohenzollern family , emigrated to the United States in 1896 with his wife and 12-year-old son .
After an initial career as a poet, in which he was supported by the literary critic Ludwig Lewisohn and William Ellery Leonard , George Sylvester Viereck turned into a Germanophile propagandist between 1907 and 1912 . In 1908 he published the bestseller Confessions of a Barbarian.
During the First World War he published the journals The International and The Fatherland together with Frederick Franklin Schrader in order to counteract the British War Propaganda Bureau and later Wilson's Committee on Public Information . Around 1920 he wrote pamphlets for Adolf Hitler and Erich Ludendorff and praised Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein . In early 1923 he conducted an interview with Hitler. After no newspaper could be found that considered the interview worthy of publication, he published it in his own journal, the American Monthly. He wrote: “If he lives, Hitler for better or for worse, is sure to make history” (German for example: “If he stays alive, Hitler, for better or for worse, will write history”). Even after Hitler came to power, he made positive comments about National Socialism and advocated it journalistically.
In 1924, Viereck initiated a campaign in his journal for the progressive-minded presidential candidate Robert M. La Follette senior .
In the 1930s he represented ideas of National Socialism in his journals The International and The Fatherland . In 1933 he helped the German Tourist Office to create a pro-National Socialist brochure. In 1940 he got involved with automaker Henry Ford and some military, senators and members of parliament for the America First Committee, which was opposed to intervention . He was a senior member of Friedrich Auhagen's American Fellowship Forum . Under the Foreign Agents Registration Act , he was imprisoned for a total of four years and six months from 1942 to 1947 for his journalistic activities.
His prison experiences, published as Men into Beasts in 1952 , describe the loss of human dignity, brutality, homosexuality and rape among men whom he witnessed in American prisons. It is considered the first work in the gay pulp fiction genre .
Viereck's son was the conservative historian and Pulitzer Prize winner Peter Viereck .
Works
- Poems (1904)
- The House of the Vampire (1907)
- Nineveh and Other Poems (1907)
- Confessions of a Barbarian (1910)
- The Candle and the Flame (1912)
- Songs of Armageddon & Other Poems (1916)
- My First Two Thousand Years: The Autobiography of the Wandering Jew, together with Paul Eldridge (1928) - in German: My First Two Thousand Years: Autobiography of the Eternal Jew. List publishing house. Leipzig. German Translated by Gustav Meyrink (1928)
- Glimpses of the Great (1930)
- Salome: The Wandering Jewess (1930)
- The Invincible Adam (1932)
- Strangest Friendship: Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House (1932)
- The Kaiser on Trial (1937)
- The Temptation of Jonathan (1938)
- Men Into Beasts. New York: Fawcett Publications (1952)
- The Nude in the Mirror (1953)
Web links
- Literature by and about George Sylvester Viereck in the catalog of the German National Library
- http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/bai/johnson2.htm (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ George S. Viereck: Hitler the German Explosive. In: American Monthly , October 1923, pp. 235-238.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Viereck, George Sylvester |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German-American poet, writer and publicist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 31, 1884 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Munich |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 18, 1962 |
| Place of death | Holyoke , Massachusetts |