Men Into Beasts by George Sylvester Viereck

His heroes were Jesus Christ, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Oscar Wilde. Sylvester began writing poetry when he was eleven. George Sylvester Viereck was born in Munich on 31 December 1884. Louis became an American citizen in 1901, but he returned to Germany in 1911. At her urging, Louis emigrated to the United States in 1896, and Laura followed with Sylvester some months later. In 1881, Laura married her first cousin Louis. After William's death in 1865, his wife returned to Germany with their children. William was an unsuccessful revolutionary who had fled the German States like other Forty-Eighters and operated a German theatre in San Francisco. Sylvester's mother, Laura Viereck, was born in San Francisco to William Viereck, a younger brother of Edwina Viereck.

He left the Party upon his release from prison. In 1884 he was elected to the Reichstag, but in 1886 was imprisoned for attending Socialist Party meetings. In 1881 he became editor of a socialist periodical in Munich.

In 1870, Louis joined the Socialist Party, and was banished from Berlin eight years later under Otto von Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Laws. It was rumored that Louis was the son of Kaiser William I, but Louis was acknowledged as a son instead by Louis von Prillwitz, a son of Prince Augustus of Prussia. Sylvester's father, Louis Viereck, was born in Berlin in 1851, to the unmarried actress Edwina Viereck. He would later work on behalf of Nazi Germany.

George Sylvester Viereck (Decem– March 18, 1962) was a German-American poet, writer, and pro-German propagandist.

Men Into Beasts by George Sylvester Viereck