Nazi Literature in the Americas

The day military dictator Augusto Pinochet died, I captured some of his supporters on the digicam as they held vigil outside uptown Santiago's Escuela Militar:



Marc Cooper, former translator for Salvador Allende, also blogged Pinochet's death and pointed to my video to corroborate the veracity of another nazi photo circulating at the time, which some of his readers had found hard to believe:

Chileno provides us with a video of these same Young Nazis holding their own sort of sad Nuremberg street rally for Pinochet. Like most card-carrying fascists, they look both stupid and dangerous.

Stupid for sure. With over 34,000 views by now, the video has spawned endless comments on the skin color of many of those seen employing white supremacist symbolism. And of course those knuckleheads are dangerous, too. But while nakedly illustrative of everything Pinochet stood for, there's a risk that highlighting such extremist elements of the pro-Pinochet crowd could belie the far more sinister among them: the "smart and dangerous."

Mariana Callejas, for example, was not only one of Chile's literary elite hosting a dazzling writer's salon, but also a DINA member and ex-wife of Michael Townley, a high-profile assassin for that terrifying intelligence agency.

Last month Callejas was convicted for her involvement in one of Townley's international hit jobs, and I just found a great article about her dual life, a strange symbiosis of fine arts and fascism:

As the literati danced and debated upstairs, Chilean intelligence officers were downstairs torturing dissidents and manufacturing the toxic nerve agent sarin in a secret laboratory.

Chilean writer Roberto Bolano wrote about her, and I'll also point you to Bolano's book Nazi Literature in the Americas, as reviewed by the New York Times. Actually the review briefly mentions another of his works:

But what can it mean, he asks us and himself, in his dark, extraordinary, stinging novella “By Night in Chile,” that the intellectual elite can write poetry, paint and discuss the finer points of avant-garde theater as the junta tortures people in basements? The word has no national loyalty, no fundamental political bent; it’s a genie that can be summoned by any would-be master.

And the same question is explored further in Nazi Literature in the Americas, in which Bolano creates a "wicked, invented encyclopedia of imaginary fascist writers and literary tastemakers".

I haven't read the book yet, only the review, but from what I can tell the word "satire" would probably be too blunt to describe what he does with this imaginary world of sensitive, frighteningly human Nazi poets.

Having recently finished his book "The Savage Detectives," which is delightfully rife with both real and invented literary arcana, I'm convinced that whatever he does with those Nazis' poetic perversions, it'll be good.

I should point out, though, that in The Savage Detectives, the main characters are, as noted in the above-referenced review, "sometimes ridiculous," but "always heroic." As a reader I would laugh at his hapless heroes because I loved them. As does Bolano himself: in an online interviewBolano's translator Natasha Wimmer talks about the writer's "palpable fondness for his characters."

I wonder if such fondness extends to his invented Nazi poets. Not as apologism, of course, but rather as a way of humanizing them down to the disconcertingly familiar, in whose hands - or anybody's - their black art is anything but redemptive. I'll just have to read it and find out.

Probably the polar opposite of Ayn Rand and her comic-strip screeds against socialism, Roberto Bolano is sincerely self-aware, his characters multi-dimensional and his works recognized among the greatest Latin American literature after, if not above, that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Click on any of the links below to buy his books:

The Savage Detectives: A Novel

Los Detectives Salvajes/the Savage Detectives

By Night in Chile

Nocturno de Chile (Narrativas Hispanicas, 293) (Narrativas Hispanicas, 293)

Nazi Literature in the Americas

La literatura nazi en America/ Nazi Literature in The Americas (Biblioteca Breve)

Enjoy!