Albert von Haller

The publisher of The Court of Lucifer

Otto Rahn y la Búsqueda Nazi por el Secreto de los Cátaros

La Berlin de entreguerras era una ciudad conocida en toda Europa por su sub-cultura bohemia y sus jovenes intelectuales. Entre los personajes que ardientemente celebraban los abundantes «ismos» que estaban fracturando las viejas certezas ideologicas, las cuales habian compactado el siglo XIX, pocos individuos eran mas coloridos que un joven de ojos verdes y cabellos oscuros llamado Otto Rahn. Su figura delgada, envuelta en un caracteristico abrigo negro y sombrero tiroles, arrojaba una larga sombra desde esos anos sombrios, una «gran silueta» alrededor de la cual se han acumulado los mitos mas extravagantes. El fue considerado igualmente como mason, rosacruz, luciferino, y un agente de la Sociedad Thule. Como lo plantea el autor Phillip Kerr, los contemporaneos de Rahn no se habrian sorprendido de ver «la Dama Escarlata y la Gran Bestia salir volando desde la puerta del frente» de su apartamento en Tiergartenstrasse. Uno de sus companeros de la Orden Negra de Heinrich Himmler comento en un memorandum interno que el «medio sospechaba que Rahn tenia relaciones con el pueblo pequeno».

Raiders of the Lost Grail

Berlin between the wars was a city known throughout Europe for its bohemian subculture of young intellectuals. Amongst the personalities who hotly debated the many modernist “isms” that were fracturing the old ideological certainties which had glued together the 19th century, few individuals were more colourful than a dark-haired, green-eyed young man named Otto Wilhelm Rahn. His gaunt figure, swathed in characteristic black coat and fedora, casts a long shadow out of those twilight years, a ‘great silhouette’ around which the most extravagant myths accrued. He was variously said to be a Mason, a Rosicrucian, a Luciferian, an agent of the Thule Gesellschaft, an initiated Cathar and even the leader of an obscure, international secret society. As author Philip Kerr puts it, Rahn’s contemporaries might not have been surprised to see “the Scarlet Woman and the Great Beast come flying out of the front door” of his apartment on Tiergartenstrasse. One of his Nazi peers in Heinrich Himmler’s Black Order remarked in an internal memo that he “half suspected Rahn of being in league with the little people”. To this day, it is widely believed that this enigmatic young man knew the whereabouts of one of the most sacred relics in all Christendom – the Most High Holy Grail. But the truth is stranger still…