Roberto Bolano - Nazi Literature in the Americas

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.

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.

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.