Salome the Wandering Jewess: My First Two Thousand Years of Love
("It is a remarkably interesting idea to present the pagea...)
"It is a remarkably interesting idea to present the pageant of the world as it unfolded before the yes of the same man during two thousand years. Also, to keep him a young man instead of a doddering gray-beard. It is like reading a series of entrancing short stories with the added interest of logical sequence. Your erudition is amazing, and it is presented in a manner that lures one on and on, as well as inducing the pleasant belief that one is learning something really worth while." -- Gertrude Atherton
(Abraham "Bram" Stoker (1847 –1912) was an Irish author, b...)
Abraham "Bram" Stoker (1847 –1912) was an Irish author, best known today for his 1897 Gothic novel Dracula. The novel tells the story of Dracula's attempt to move from Transylvania to England so that he may find new blood and spread the undead curse, and of the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing. George Sylvester Viereck (1884 –1962) was a German-American poet and writer. The House of the Vampire...is one of the first psychic vampire stories where a vampire feeds off more than just blood. Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu (1814 –1873) was an Irish writer of Gothic tales and mystery novels. He was a leading ghost-story writer of the nineteenth century and was central to the development of the genre in the Victorian era. Carmilla is a Gothic novella by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and one of the early works of vampire fiction, predating Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) by 26 years. First published as a serial in The Dark Blue (1871–72), the story is narrated by a young woman preyed upon by a female vampire named Carmilla, later revealed to be Mircalla, Countess Karnstein (Carmilla is an anagram of Mircalla). The story is often anthologized and has been adapted many times in film and other media. John William Polidori (1795 –1821) was an English writer and physician. His most successful work was the short story "The Vampyre" (1819), the first published modern vampire story. The work is often viewed as the progenitor of the romantic vampire genre of fantasy fiction and the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre. Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier (1811 –1872) was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, and art and literary critic. "La Morte amoureuse" (in English: "The Dead in Love or Carmille") is a short story written by Théophile Gautier and published in La Chronique de Paris in 1836. It tells the story of a priest named Romuald who falls in love with Clarimonde, a beautiful woman who turns out to be a vampire. In this book: Dracula Bram Stoker The House of the Vampire George Sylvester Viereck The Vampyre John William Polidori Carmilla Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu The Dead in Love or Clarimonde Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier Translator: Lafcadio Hearn
(George Sylvester Viereck’s Works contained 3 works writte...)
George Sylvester Viereck’s Works contained 3 works written by George Sylvester Viereck (December 31, 1884, Munich, Germany – died March 18, 1962, Holyoke, Massachusetts) was a German-American poet, writer, and propagandist.
These are the 3 works of George Sylvester Viereck in this book:
1. The House of the Vampire (1907)
2. Confessions of a Barbarian (1910)
3. The Candle and the Flam (1912)
George Sylvester Viereck was a German-American poet, writer and and propagandist.
Background
George Sylvester Viereck was born on December 31, 1884, in Munich, Germany. He was the son of Louis Viereck, a Social Democratic politician, and of Laura Viereck, who were first cousins. His ancestry on both sides was solidly German, a significant detail in understanding his life as a self-proclaimed "stormy petrel. "
His paternal grandmother was Edwina Viereck, a leading German actress, and according to family legend, his paternal grandfather was Kaiser Wilhelm I (although he was never legally acknowledged as such). In 1896, Louis Viereck immigrated to the United States, and his wife and son followed one year later.
Education
Young Viereck graduated in 1906, with a B. A. , from the College of the City of New York, where he was class poet.
Career
He began a lifetime of work on newspapers and magazines, serving as a staff member of Current Literature (1906 - 1915). Simultaneously, he was also a staff member (1907) of his father's German-language magazine Der deutsche Vorkempfer ("The German Pioneer") and, after his father returned to Germany, editor (1911) of the monthly Rundschau Zweier Welten ("Review of Two Worlds"). When that failed, Viereck became editor of The Fatherland (1914), whose masthead motto, "Fair Play for Germany and Austria, " suggests the political sympathies Viereck revealed in his early editorial positions.
His poetry was well received, praised by critics Ludwig Lewisohn and James Huneker. In his characteristically arrogant way Viereck proclaimed himself "one of the leaders of the lyric insurgents inheriting the techniques of Poe and the social conscience of Whitman. " His early poems were closest to the works of fin de siecle decadents such as Ernest Dowson, although some of his best work was in the tradition of those earnest Victorians who, like Alfred Lord Tennyson, tried to deal clearly and publicly with current ideas in conventional metrical verse.
But poetry could not contain Viereck's need to engage in political journalism and social controversy. More and more of his energy was directed into these areas, and he especially enjoyed traveling in Europe to report his observations about Continental, particularly German, culture. Confessions of a Barbarian, published serially in Reedy's weekly the Mirror and collected into a book in 1910, was a witty, shrewd, snobbish report of his jaunts through Germany, comparing its rich and complex civilization with that of provincial America.
On August 15, 1915, the New York World published information leaked to it by the Treasury Department concerning secret German propaganda efforts in the United States. The story featured a picture of Viereck and correspondence between him and Dr. Heinrich Albert, the former German minister of the interior, who was in America to spend money to aid the German war effort. The evidence in the expose was circumstantial and subject to varying interpretations, but apparently Viereck had received subsidies from Albert.
The government interrogated Viereck in 1918, but did not prosecute him. The public did: a newspaper editor called him a "venom-bloated toad of treason"; a Texas zany periodically sent him checks for a million dollars signed "Wilhelm Hohenzollern"; and in 1918, he was asked to leave the Poetry Society of America. After the war he continued his career as a controversial journalist for example, he opposed the League of Nations because it included neither Germany nor Russia. He also shuttled between Europe and New York City. Released from the prison in May 1947, he tried to make money by writing fiction, since the popular journals seemed closed to him.
He wrote two novels and an excellent memoir, Men into Beasts (1952), which dealt humorously, frankly, and sensitively with his prison years. His later poetry was as technically and politically out of tune with the times as he was in general disfavor; he even had to pay for publishing The Bankrupt (1955), an elegy lamenting America's use of the atomic bomb and the bankruptcy of Christianity and Western civilization.
Achievements
Viereck's collection Nineveh and Other Poems (1907) won Viereck national fame. A number were written in the style of the Uranian male love poetry of the time. The Saturday Evening Post called Viereck "the most widely-discussed young literary man in the United States today".
Viereck founded two publications, The International and The Fatherland, which argued the German cause during World War I. Viereck became a well-known Nazi apologist. He conducted an interview with Adolf Hitler in 1923 that offered hints of what was to come.
After the outbreak of World War I, Viereck functioned increasingly as an apologist for German policies. He claimed his sense of right and his dual loyalties to Germany and America compelled him to defend the land of his birth against the attacks of a hostile and misinformed American press.
Perhaps he was driven, too, by a desire to be a spokesman whose voice carried the authority he felt his intelligence and historical acumen should have guaranteed him. Although his wish to keep America out of war and his skepticism toward British propaganda claims were understandable, his comparatively uncritical attitude toward German actions seems less objective.
He willingly defended the Hitler regime and was either drawn or propelled himself into a network of relationships that led to his arrest on October 8, 1941, on a charge of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act. After a series of trials, convictions, appeals, and reversals he was finally sentenced on July 31, 1943, to one to five years in prison.
Viereck's behavior that led to his arrest and indictment, his relationship to a foreign power with which his country was technically not at war, and the government's prosecution of his case are complicated matters. Viereck was clearly sympathetic to both Nazi Germany and Hitler, especially in the 1930's, but never totally nor uncritically.
He was opposed to Nazi anti-Semitism but accepted the official burning of his witty, erotic My First Two Thousand Years: The Autobiography of the Wandering Jew (1928), coauthored by Paul Eldridge, by the Nazis in 1933. He also justified the German invasion of Poland as a "drastic countermeasure" triggered by anti-German atrocities.
Personality
In the 1920s, Viereck became close friends with Nikola Tesla. According to Tesla, Viereck was the greatest contemporary American poet. Tesla occasionally attended dinner parties held by Viereck and his wife. He dedicated his poem "Fragments of Olympian Gossip" to Viereck, a work in which Tesla ridiculed the scientific establishment of the day.
His interviews with famous figures of the war and the 1920's, some of which were written while he was on assignment for the Hearst papers (1922 - 1927), are excellent journalistic profiles, partly because of Viereck's intrusive but amusing personality (readers must have wondered sometimes who was interviewing whom) and partly because he was fascinated by, and informed about, the people he interviewed and the ideas that shaped history.
He had close relationships with some of them for instance, his "cousin" the former Kaiser Wilhelm II, George Bernard Shaw, and Sigmund Freud (Viereck became one of Freud's chief popularizers in America during the 1920's). His 1923 interview with Adolf Hitler showed that he possessed a sharp eye for history in the making. During the early 1930's Viereck met Nazi leaders a number of times. To his son Peter, the strongly antifascist author of Metapolitics and other works, he referred to this period as his "Nazi interlude. "
While some of the charges against him seem now extreme for example, the indictment that he conspired "to undermine the morale of the armed forces" he was part of Germany's prewar propaganda apparatus and engaged in covert activities of dubious ethical propriety in order to influence American opinion positively toward Nazi Germany. He was a dupe, but not a traitor. In prison Viereck kept a journal and wrote poetry; the warden at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta could not understand his predilection for sonnets.
He spent his final years in South Hadley, Massachusets, with his son Peter, but remained separated from his wife, from whom he had become estranged during his prison term. He died at Holyoke, Massachusets As a person, Viereck was egotistical, committed, and intense, qualities he carried over to his writing. He graced every form he touched with imaginative flashes, though he achieved greatness in no one of his works, which were generally clever, well crafted, and intellectually stimulating, while lacking aesthetic or philosophic resonance.
When not misled into political folly, he was a shrewd, if not deep, thinker. Viereck's pro-Nazi activities wrecked his reputation and undercut his family life. It is unfortunate that they have dominated accounts of his work, for he was a substantial man of letters. He seems sadly destined to enter history wrapped in the shroud of his disgrace.
Connections
Viereck married Margaret Edith Hein on September 30, 1915; they had two sons.
Father:
Louis Viereck
Was a Social Democratic politician.
Mother:
Laura Viereck
Grandmother:
Edwina Viereck
Was a leading German actress.
Grandfather:
Kaiser Wilhelm I
Wife:
Margaret Edith Hein
Son:
Peter Robert Edwin Viereck
August 5, 1916 – May 13, 2006
Was an American poet, political thinker, and professor of history at Mount Holyoke College.
Friend:
Nikola Tesla
10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943
Was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist who is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.
