George Sylvester Viereck

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

Life
George Viereck was born in Germany, to a German father and American-born mother. His father Louis, born out of wedlock to German actress Edwina Viereck, was reputed to be a son of Kaiser Wilhelm I. Another relative of the Hohenzollern family assumed legal paternity of the boy. In the 1870s Louis Viereck joined the Marxist socialist movement. In 1896 Viereck emigrated to the United States; his U.S.-born wife Laura and their twelve year old son followed in 1897.

While still in college in 1904, Viereck, with the help of literary critic Ludwig Lewisohn, published his first collection of poems. He graduated from the College of the City of New York in 1906. The next year his 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.

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. Between 1907 and 1912, Viereck turned into a Germanophile. In 1908 he published the best-selling Confessions of a Barbarian. Viereck lectured at the University of Berlin on American poetry in 1911.

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. In 1941, he was indicted in the U.S. for a violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act when he set up his publishing house, Flanders Hall, in Scotch Plains, New Jersey. He was convicted in 1942 for this failure to register with the U. S. Department of State as a Nazi agent. He 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 in 1952. The book is a general memoir of discomfort, loss of dignity, and brutality in prison life. 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 a vampire novel, The House of the Vampire (1907), which is one of the first psychic vampire stories where a vampire feeds off more than just blood.

Family
His son, Peter Viereck, was a historian, political writer and poet. A 2005 The New Yorker article discusses how the younger Viereck both rejected and was shaped by the ideologies of his father.

Publications

 * (1904) Gedichte
 * (1907) The House of the Vampire
 * (1907) Nineveh and Other Poems
 * (1910) Confessions of a Barbarian
 * (1912) The Candle and the Flame
 * (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
 * (1952) Men into Beasts
 * (1953) The Nude in the Mirror