Nordhausen, Vietnam & Pynchon

[Greg Montalbano]

Steelhead states:
> Pynchon's many pages on Nordhausen (following both Polker and Slothrop)
> hardly convey the scope of the atrocity going on there.

I can think of a couple of possible reasons  -- first, at the time GR came out,
there wasn't all this blather about the holocaust being an imaginary event;
seemed like most everyone was more than familiar with the atrocities.  This
was one aspect of WWII, like the spectacular battles, that TRP could assume
prior knowledge on the part of his readers, leaving him room to get on with
some of the lesser known facets.
Also, a proper handling of the holocaust would require a different kind of
omniscient narration than was used in the novel, causing an admittedly
challenging book to cross over the line into total schizophrenia.