Review: Barry Yourgrau, A Neo-Nazi in Iceland
A mostly invented regular boy, on a dark path
Here is a portrait of a subject alas all too salient today: a young neo-Nazi, this one surfacing in the decades right after World War II, brought to us by the Icelandic marvel of many trades, Sjón, the pseudonym, meaning “sight” or “vision,” of Sigurjón Birgir Sigurðsson. Sjón, now sixty-three, began as a surrealist poetry prodigy, then, inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, turned to novels like The Whispering Muse that draw on myth, Icelandic and other, with thrilling finesse. He also composes Academy-Award winning lyrics in collaboration with Björk and writes scripts for such movies as The Northman, a sword-flashing Viking revenge extravaganza.
Red Milk originally appeared in Icelandic in 2019 as Corn-Gold Hair, Gray Eyes—a title more attuned to the racialist stuff in its pages. It’s a slim book, blending actual, cited history and history-inspired invention. Narrative scenes, actual documents, fictional letters, and other “found” items stitch together the brief life of Gunnar Kampen of Reykjavik, born in the late 1930s, and based apparently on a real unnamed person. Sjón’s chronicle proceeds with calculated neutrality, sans authorial judgement—like home movie footage—through the protagonist’s jarring evolution into a committed and earnest racist and antisemite, a young founder of an Icelandic National Socialist-style party—someone who can write a sweet cheerful note to his disabled brother, for instance, even as he orders extra copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Sjón wants to argue that such folk as Gunnar aren’t monsters hatched in darkest alien realms but are, well, normal in ways, human, formed in our shared worlds.
Red Milk opens end first, with its protagonist on an English train, revealed with cinematic flair to have just died in his compartment seat. Going back then in time, we’ll see Gunnar as a young boy memorably encountering a mysterious and exotic guest in a lamp-lit side room during a dinner party—the full ominousness of the scene only blooming much later when we come to realize the guest’s identity. Gunnar’s onward narrative features his blithe confidential avowals of progressively more abhorrent views (in a letter he refers casually to the “onslaught of blacks and Jews”) accompanied by Sjón’s subtler, mystery-thriller-style plucking of details from the shadows: a scene of Gunnar’s oddly hospitable reception in the office of a respectable senior businessman comes into focus with the concluding disclosure of the latter’s former right-wing extremism.
A distinct bonus of Red Milk’s course is the literary and political figures who gleam noxiously along Gunnar’s Icelandic path rightward. Teenage Gunnar commends to someone The Adventurous Heart, a less-known, quasi-mystical compendium of vignettes and reflections by the extraordinary Ernst Jünger—the far-right Prussian soldier/author/aesthete/entomologist who came to scorn the Nazis despite his memoir celebrating the horrors of war, Storm of Steel, being rapturously admired by Hitler and Goebbels. (Bruce Chatwin devoted a panoramic essay to this chilling figure, who has been reclaimed, with laurels, for twentieth-century German literature).
From Red Milk I further learned of the poisonously fascinating Hitler-obsessed Aryan racialist and Nazi spy Savitri Devi, a French-born Greek occultist polemist, who passed herself off as Indian (real name Maximiani Julia Portas) after synthesizing Nazism and Hindu myth during a sojourn on the subcontinent and who actually visited Iceland soon after the war. Steve Bannon and Richard Spencer are attuned to her voluminous work, which includes her account of travels in war-ruined Germany, Gold in the Furnace (dedicated to the “Martyrs of Nuremberg”), lamenting the fall of the Third Reich but insistent it would rise again, purified. Gunnar writes to her that his hands shook as he turned the pages.
And lo there’s George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the crackpot, virulent American Nazi Party, who steadily encourages Gunnar’s efforts. Rockwell was in fact stationed with the US Navy in Iceland, 1952-54. Gunnar even mentions “Thóra,” the American’s wife, in a letter to a comrade. Thóra was Margrét Thóra Hallgrímsson, daughter of an aristocratic Icelandic family, whom Rockwell left his first wife for and brought back to America. Her family eventually recoiled from his politics; she left Rockwell; desperate for her return he followed her back to Iceland, even offering to give up the movement for her sake, but to no avail. (She subsequently married a future billionaire who became a central culprit in Iceland’s 2008 financial collapse.)
In an essential afterword, Sjón’s explains his own connections to the hidden-away current of fascism in Iceland. One of his grandfathers, he discovered to his shock as a teenager in a family that leaned politically left and center, was an active Nazi sympathizer convicted of treason. This state of affairs impelled him to begin Red Milk as an attempt to reckon with Nazism’s appeal among his own countrymen, people “who could so easily have become something else,” he says. That appeal he’d previously treated only with flippant satire in his earlier The Whispering Muse.
George Lincoln Rockwell’s father, I learned independently, was a famous vaudeville performer (!), an egomaniac who treated George, his eldest boy, so horribly one can imagine the deforming effect straight from psychology 101. Sjón supplies no such explanatory backstory for Gunnar. This seemingly untroubled son of a man who despised Hitler—though a convicted Nazi does turn up elsewhere in the family—is set on the wrong path, it seems, by the bicycling club he joins as a kid, one that’s run, we come to realize, by a (later desperately repentant) Nazi enthusiast. Because Gunnar, Sjón contends in his afterword, is someone with a childhood “fundamentally similar” to the author’s, to others’, had he been “nudged” in a different direction at the beginning of his journey “by individuals and events,” he could have readily turned out differently. A neo-Nazi, Sjón argues, “is no more special than that.”
In this age of the rise of the algorithms with their ubiquitous electronic “nudges,” that is a very dispiriting thesis.
In 1962 George Lincoln Rockwell stealthily convened a global gathering of neo-Nazis in England’s Cotswolds. It was to that grand meeting that twenty-four-year old Gunnar was so eagerly en route in Red Milk, when fate put an end to his dark ambitions.
Barry Yourgrau’s books of brief fiction include Wearing Dad’s Head, A Man Jumps Out of an Airplane, The Sadness of Sex (in whose film version he appeared) and Haunted Traveler, as well as a memoir, Mess. He is the only American author who has published short fiction on Japanese cellphones (keitai shosetsu).
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