Dachau

Otto Rahn (1904-1938), described as a gifted young author and historian, was one of this century's truly fascinating figures. Prior to his mysterious death, at age 35, he wrote two books about the Cathars of southern France: *Kreuzzug gegen den Gral* ("Crusade Against the Grail") and *Luzifers Hofgesinf* ("Lucifer's Court"). Legends continue to surround both his life and tragic death. While his books influenced such authors as Trevor Ravenscroft and Jean-Michel Angebert, they were never translated into English. In the 1982 best selling book *Holy Blood, Holy Grail*, Otto Rahn's name appears in a small but intriguing footnote. Otto Rahn believed that he had found the location of the Holy Grail Mountain, the Montsalvat of legend, in the Cathar mountain fortress of Montsegur in the French Pyrenees. He was, says Prof. Joscelyn Godwin, "largely responsible for the mythological complex that associated the Cathars and Montsegur with the Holy Grail and its Castle."
 Norma Lorre Goodrich in her own highly acclaimed work *The Holy Grail* pays tribute to Otto Rahn's "Crusade Against the Grail" describing it as "a wonderful book, a monument to this German idealist author, who died mysteriously during a descent in the Alps."

b. February 18, 1904; Michelstadt, Germany.
d. March 13, 1939; Tyrolean Mts.

Poet, mystic, and Nazi researcher. Rahn was obsessed with two ideas--the Holy Grail and the Cathars, medieval French heretics; while in college, he had intended to write a dissertation on the hypothetical Kyot, the supposed troubador who gave Wolfram von Eschenbach the story of Parzival.

In 1929, he made a special trip to the Languedoc region of Southern France, a hotbed of Catharist activities in the thirteenth century. He began excavating at Montsegur, the last Cathar stronghold to fall to the Inquisition. Legend had it that the Cathars had a great treasure which was never found, but hidden deep in the mountainside. Rahn was convinced that this treasure was the Holy Grail, and he intended to find it.

Cercava il Graal, trovò il nazismo. Mario Baudino ha ricostruito nel Mito che uccide la storia di Otto Rahn, l'intellettuale tedesco largamente responsabile non solo del moderno successo turistico della Linguadoca, il ”Paese Cataro“, ma soprattutto della mitologia secondo cui i catari, gli antichi eretici del Midi francese, possedevano il Sacro Graal. La vita, breve, di questo misterioso e contraddittorio personaggio, morto suicida nel 1939 poco prima che scoppiasse la Seconda Guerra mondiale, ha lasciato dietro di sé un cumulo di leggende, trasformandolo in un eroe dell'occultismo. La verità storica, raccontata con piglio romanzesco in una ”inchiesta sul passato“ dove nulla è inventato, frutto di attente ricerche in Francia e in Germania, è invece diversa, anche più affascinante. Rahn incarna la figura dell'intellettuale novecentesco che stringe col potere totalitario un patto col diavolo, da cui viene stritolato. E nello stesso tempo è il maggior architetto di una favola destinata a sopravvivergli, ancor oggi molto popolare il tutto il mondo, che associa la mistica coppa cercata dai cavalieri di Artù all'eresia del XII e XIII secolo, ai templari, e infine ai nazisti.