Roberto Bolano - Nazi Literature in the Americas

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.

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, 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.