The Imagined Library Books that were never written

Nazi Literature in the Americas  ·  Poem

I Was Happy with Hitler

also known as Con Hitler fui feliz

Luz Mendiluce Thompson

Can I actually read this? Not really. You are told what it contains, but never shown it. Described

A poem, misunderstood by the Right and the Left alike, by the only talented writer in an Argentine clan that had had its baby photographed in Hitler's arms.

Archimboldi’s novels are withheld because 2666 is about the life, not the pages. Luz’s poem is withheld because the title is already the whole nightmare.

Bolaño learned the encyclopaedia from Borges and the cruelty from himself. Nazi Literature in the Americas files writers who never existed and who are, in every other respect, too possible: salon poetesses, aviation murderers, science-fictioners of the Fourth Reich. Luz is the one he almost likes. She is fat, drunk, unlucky in women, and better than her mother, which in this book is a tragic situation. The poem about the photograph — baby Luz in the future Führer’s arms — is “misunderstood by the Right and the Left alike,” which is Bolaño’s way of saying that a good line can still be a curse.

Lem reviewed Gruppenführer Louis XVI and stopped before the nightmare became a book you would have to live in. Bolaño files the poem and stops before you would have to read it. Both are acts of taste. A library of imagined knowledge is also a library of titles whose existence, fully written, would have been a mistake. This is the exhibit from the Americas.

On the readability rating. Biography, publication history, a reception. Not a stanza. The encyclopaedia is the form, and the mercy.

In-world history

Luz Mendiluce is born in Berlin in 1928, four and a half kilos. In 1929 Edelmira has her introduced to Hitler, who says she is a wonderful child; photographs are taken; Luz keeps one for the rest of a short, alcoholic life. The poem dates from the wreck of an early marriage. In 1953 it is revised for *Tangos of Buenos Aires*, beside "Stalin", "Self Portrait", and a promise to die at fifty that her friends consider optimistic. She publishes *Like a Hurricane* in Mexico, is dropped by the feminists when they learn her politics, and dies in Buenos Aires in 1976. Bolaño gives her the talent he withholds from most of the encyclopaedia. He still does not give her the verses.

Why it matters

Bolaño's encyclopaedia of imaginary fascists is already a catalogue. This is the item that would have been a joke if it were not also a life: a woman who had more gift than her mother, and spent it on a title that cannot be rescued.

Appearances

  • Nazi Literature in the Americas (1996) — Roberto Bolaño La literatura nazi en América; Luz's famous poem, later revised for the collection Tangos of Buenos Aires (1953, in the fiction)

Connected volumes

Catalogue record

Category
Poem
World
Nazi Literature in the Americas
Imagined by
Roberto Bolaño
Language
Spanish
First appearance
La literatura nazi en América (Seix Barral, 1996)
Readability
Described
Books Within Books Lost Manuscripts

Sources

  • Roberto Bolaño, La literatura nazi en América (Seix Barral, 1996). English translation by Chris Andrews, Nazi Literature in the Americas (New Directions, 2008), "Luz Mendiluce Thompson".

Added by house · last checked 2026-09-09