Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions Paperbook) Read Online Free PDF Page B

decided to settle in his friend’s beautiful South American
homeland. The collection was entitled
Cross of Flowers
. None of the
poems was more than thirty lines long. The first was entitled “Cross of Veils,”
the second “Cross of Flowers” and so on (the second to last was “Cross of Iron”
and the last “Cross of Ruins”). Their content, as the titles quite clearly
suggest, was autobiographical, but had been subjected to hermetic verbal
procedures which rendered the poems obscure and cryptic for a reader attempting
to retrace the arc of Zubieta’s life or penetrate the mystery that would always
surround his exile, his choices and his apparently futile death.
    Little is known about the remainder of Zubieta’s work. According to
some, nothing more remained, or only a few disappointing squibs. For a while
there was speculation about a diary totaling more than 500 pages, which
Zubieta’s mother had burned.
    In 1959, a far-Right group in Bogotá published a book entitled
Iron Cross: A Colombian in the Struggle Against Bolshevism
(clearly
Zubieta was responsible neither for the title nor the subtitle), having obtained
the authorization of Lemercier, but not of Zubieta’s family, who took the
Frenchman and the publishers to court. The novel, or novella (80 pages long,
including five photographs of Zubieta in uniform, one of which shows him smiling
coldly in a Paris restaurant, exhibiting the only Iron Cross awarded to a
Colombian during the Second World War) is a hymn to friendship among soldiers;
it balks at none of the clichés that recur in the voluminous literature on that
theme, and was described at the time by a critic as a cross between Sven Hassel
and José María Pemán.

J ESÚS F ERNÁNDEZ -G ÓMEZ
    Cartagena de Indias, 1910–Berlin, 1945
    U ntil The Fourth Reich in
Argentina published two of his books, more than thirty years after his death,
the life and work of Jesús Fernández-Gómez remained entirely obscure. One of
those books was
The Fighting Years of an American Falangist in Europe
,
a 180-page quasi-autobiographical novel, written in thirty days, while the
author was recovering from his war wounds in the Riga military hospital; it
recounts his adventures in Spain during the Civil War and in Russia as a
volunteer in the Division 250, the famous Spanish Blue Division. The other book
is a long poetic text entitled
Cosmogony of the New Order
.
    This second volume is composed of three thousand verses, each with a
note to indicate where and when it was written: Copenhagen 1933—Zaragoza 1938. A
poem of epic aspirations, it tells two stories, constantly juxtaposing them and
jumping from one to the other: the story of a Germanic warrior who must slay a
dragon, and the story of a South American student who must prove his worth in a
hostile milieu. One night the Germanic warrior dreams that he has killed the
dragon and that henceforth, in the kingdom it had long tyrannized, a new order
shall prevail. The South American student dreams that he must kill someone, and
in his dream obeys the order, obtains a gun, and enters the victim’s bedroom, in
which he finds only “a cascade of mirrors, which blind him forever.” The
Germanic warrior, reassured by his dream, goes unsuspectingly to the battle in
which he is to die. The South American student will spend the rest of his life
wandering, blind, through the streets of a cold city, paradoxically comforted by
the splendor that caused his blindness.
    The first pages of
The Fighting Years of an American Falangist in
Europe
relate the author’s childhood and adolescence in the city of his
birth, Cartagena: the “poor but honest and happy family” in which he grew up,
the first books he read, the first poems he wrote. Fernández-Gómez goes on to
recount how he met Ignacio Zubieta in a Bogotá brothel; how the two young men
became friends; the ambitions they shared; and their desire to see the world and
break free of family ties. The second part of the book