George Sylvester Viereck

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George Sylvester Viereck (December 31, 1884 in Munich, died March 18, 1962) was a German-American poet, writer, and propagandist.

1 Biography
2 Peter Viereck
3 Bibliography
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Biography

Viereck's father, Louis, born out of wedlock to German actress Edwina Viereck, was reputed to be a son of Kaiser Wilhelm I, although another relative of the Hohenzollern family assumed legal paternity. Louis in the 1870s joined the Marxist socialist movement, and in 1896 emigrated to the United States, followed by his wife and 12-year-old George Sylvester in 1897.

George Sylvester Viereck in 1904, with the help of literary critic Ludwig Lewisohn published his first collection of poems, followed in 1907 by Nineveh and Other Poems which won Viereck national fame. A number of these are written in the style of the Uranian male love poetry of the time.^[1] He graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1906.

In the 1920s, Nikola Tesla became a close friend of Viereck. According to Tesla, Viereck was the greatest contemporary American poet. Tesla occasionally attended dinner parties held by Viereck and his wife, and wrote a poem which he dedicated to his friend Viereck. It was called "Fragments of Olympian Gossip" in which Tesla ridiculed the scientific establishment of the day.

Viereck turned into a Germanophile between 1907 and 1912. In 1908 be published the best-selling Confessions of a Barbarian. He lectured at the University of Berlin on American poetry in 1911. Notably, he conducted an interview with Adolf Hitler in 1923 which offered hints of what was to come. He founded two publications, The International and The Fatherland, which argued the German cause during World War I. Viereck became a well-known Nazi apologist, was indicted for a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act in 1941 and was imprisoned from 1942 to 1947.

Viereck's memoir of life in prison, Men into Beasts, was published as a paperback original by Fawcett Publications' Gold Medal Book line of paperback originals in 1952. The book is a general memoir of discomfort, loss of dignity, and brutality in prison life, but the front matter and backcover text focuses on the situational homosexuality and male rape described in the book (witnessed, not experienced, by Viereck). The book, while a memoir, is thus the first original title of 1950s gay pulp fiction, an emerging genre in that decade.

Viereck also published one of the first known gay vampire novels The House of the Vampire (1907). Not only is this one of the first known gay vampire stories, but it is also one of the first psychic vampire stories -- where a vampire feeds off of more than just blood.

[edit] Peter Viereck

George Sylvester is the father of Peter Viereck. A 2005 The New Yorker article by Tom Reiss, The First Conservative discusses how the ideologies of George Viereck were both rejected by, and shaped the political views of, his son Peter.

[edit] Bibliography

(1904) Gedichte
(1907) The House of the Vampire (text on Wikisource)
(1907) Nineveh and Other Poems [1]
(1910) Confessions of a Barbarian
(1912) The Candle and the Flame [2]
(1916) Songs of Armageddon & Other Poems
(1928) My First Two Thousand Years: The Autobiography of the Wandering Jew, with Paul Eldridge
(1930) Glimpses of the Great
(1930) Salome: The Wandering Jewess
(1932) The Invincible Adam
(1932) Strangest Friendship: Woodrow Wilson and Colonel House
(1937) The Kaiser on Trial
(1938) The Temptation of Jonathan
(1953) The Nude in the Mirror

[edit] References

^ D.H.Mader, "The Greek Mirror: Uranians and their use of Greece" in Verstraete and Provencal, ed. Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity; p.384 (2005)