Nordhausen, Vietnam, & Pynchon

[Steelhead]

Andrew Walser notes:
>        Does Pynchon, I wonder, do much better with the Holocaust?  In
>GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, he seems content to keep the subject off to the side --
>a wise decision, perhaps, since I cannot imagine our author exercising for
>long the kind of restraint that characterizes the work of Primo Levi or
>Aharon Appelfeld.

This has been bugging me for the past six months or so, as I have burrowed
deeper and deeper into the role US corporations, politicians, newspapers,
and financiers played in the rise of the Third Reich and the salvation of
some of its more vicious supporting cast at war's end. For example,
Pynchon's many pages on Nordhausen (following both Pokler and Slothrop)
hardly convey the scope of the atrocity going on there:  forced starvation,
bodies piling up, stench, beatings, shootings, etc. It's hard to imagine
Pokler's pleasant lunches in the Nordhausen commissary depicted in GR.

A similar question can be asked about Vietnam. Where is it in Pynchon? Why
didn't America's greatest writer--and one of the leading voices of the
counterculture--use his enormous talents to speak out against the war?
Is it all a complex enthymeme, as Chuck Hollander suggests, lurking there
under the surface of the text, and gaining more force and power through
its absence? Perhaps, but that's not entirely satisfying to me. Any ideas?

Steely