He was visiting Freiburg , Germany in 1938 when the Kristallnacht riots occurred , and the experience led him into writing and poetry . Other seminal experiences came from his own family background , travel , and during his Army service . He was influenced by his father , Rudolph Schevill , who created and chaired the department of romance languages at UC Berkeley , and created the West Coast committee in defense of the Spanish republic at the request of his friends Pablo Casals and Fernando de los Rios . His mother Margaret Schevill , was an artist , a scholar of Navaho culture and mythology , and a follower of Carl Jung . As a German speaker , he worked for military intelligence and was assigned to a prisoner of war camp where , despite the denazification program , he saw that Nazis dominated other prisoners , as he described in his novel Cathedral of Ants ( 1976 )
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
James Schevill