Confessions of a barbarian

George Sylvester Viereck was born in Munich, the son of an unrecognized son of Kaiser Wilhelm I. In 1897 his parents brought him to the United States. In 1904 he published his first collection of poems, Gedichte. In 1906 he graduated from the College of the City of New York. In 1907 he published Nineveh and Other Poems, which won him national fame. He also published one of the first known homosexual vampire novels, The House of the Vampire, in 1907. He became a Germanophile between 1907 and 1912, and in 1908 he published the best-selling Confessions of a Barbarian. He founded two publications, The International and The Fatherland, which argued the German cause during World War I, and he went on to become a Nazi apologist. In 1941 he was indicted for failing to disclose all his activities when he was required to register as a Foreign Agent in 1939. His guilty verdict may have been influenced by the nature of the undisclosed activities: he had set up a publishing house, Flanders Hall, to publish anti-British, anti-American, pro-German books. He was imprisoned from 1942 to 1947. During his imprisonment, his wife changed her opinion of the Nazis and divorced him, liquidating the assets he had left in her care and donating the proceeds to Catholic and Jewish charities. He wrote a memoir of life in prison, called Men into Beasts (1952), which contained brief descriptions of situational homosexuality and male rape (witnessed, not experienced, by Viereck), and became the first original title of 1950s gay pulp fiction. Although he wanted to resume his writing career, his other post-prison works were not successful. In 1955 he suffered a string of mild strokes and ceased writing. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage in 1962.