Revelations of Grimm Lohr
A Tale of Spectacular Adventures in the Twentieth Century and a True and Honest Memoir by Grimm Lohr
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There be something in the pages that follow to offend virtually everyone, or at least I expect so. As my dear father used to say--and more about him in a short while--if a man’s last testament does not offend someone, his life has been a failure and he has not lived with any integrity. Not that my aim is to offend--I am not, strictly speaking, a misanthrope, nor do my veins course with schadenfreude. As it is, my life has been a series of solitary steps on the periphery, and the outsider is always the one prone to observe the offenses the insider doesn’t see. To sell an illusion, one must coddle the buyer, and I’ve no desire to coddle anyone, much less sell an illusion. I merely wish to tell my humble story. I don’t really believe in illusions anyway, even though that’s the way most of us get by in this world--we are apparently capable of accomplishing so much more when we refuse to look truth in the eye, even if the truth supposedly does come out in the wash. The leitmotifs of Western civilization—evangelical expansionism, a striving for the infinite, the spirit of economics encoded in the language of the bourgeoisie--wind their way restlessly through this narrative, as must be the case if one chooses as his subject the Will-to-Power orgy known as the Twentieth Century (or the Aeon of Horus, for some) as I have out of autobiographical necessity in these chronicles. That century entered the world at the dawn of the modern age, still in its swaddling clothes, so full of confident and arrogant promises and advertisements full of naïve dreams of progress and hope—of unsinkable ships and wars that would end all further wars and the virtues of “civilization”—but which disintegrated at the end into so many bitter factions of extremism. (And let’s remember that when you overpopulate rats in a laboratory, they always end up eating each other.) We are merely a species increasing our numbers exponentially with no natural check, and nothing more, no matter what we tell ourselves. (That the world would be a better place without human beings—all life, actually--I take to be a truism so manifestly self-evident to any sentient being as to require no further clarification.) Nature has her ways to correct things, and we imperil ourselves when we disregard her will, which has conspicuously been our practice. My name is Elias Deane Grimm Lohr. Deane and Grimm are old family names--Grimm, as in the Brothers Grimm, to whom, according to family tradition, we are somehow related. I have gone by the name of Grimm Lohr since I was a child. As I shall relate at a later point in this narrative, I was born in Berlin in November of 1940. At this point, that is all you really need to know about me.
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About the Book
Born in Berlin in November 1940, Elias Deane Grimm Lohr, who has gone by Grimm Lohr since he was a child, narrates the fascinating events of his life and his family against the backdrop of the twentieth century, offering as honest a replication of the facts as he can. Grimm begins by recounting his German-British grandfather’s service as a physician in Germany during the First World War, and then the life of his own father, the assistant to the official translator of the German government during the Third Reich who disappeared with the German Sixth Army at Stalingrad. After spending time in the South Pacific where his American grandfather served as a diplomat during the Second World War, Grimm and his family move to Normal, Illinois, where he matures, studies theater at Northwestern University, and eventually moves to Los Angeles to seek employment in the film and televison industries. As he pursues a career as a screenwriter and actor during the 1970s and 1980s, he encounters, among others, a boisterous producer, a counterculture director, a cannibalistic stalker, and the love of his life—a famous actress who holds a dark secret. Finally tiring of the Hollywood scene, he decides to try to patent and manufacture a device based in part on the work of his grandfather, a device also coveted by one of the world’s richest men, and the ensuing conflict leads Grimm to a remote and mysterious archipelago in the middle of the Indian Ocean called Morro Burra. The Revelations of Grimm Lohr is a satirical and outrageous novel that explores the events of the twentieth century as told through three generations of a German-American family.
About the Author
William Potter holds a PhD in English from the CUNY Graduate Center and is the author of Melville’s Clarel and the Intersympathy of Creeds (Kent State University Press, 2004), a comparative religious study of Herman Melville’s five-hundred-page poem.