GRGR(5) Katje and the Nazis

[Doug Millison]

>Michael Perez:
>> I don't see the "crystal palace" reference as being to the
>> Kristallnacht ("The Night of Broken Glass," 11/9/38, when Nazi mobs
>> smashed Jewish owned shop windows and synagogues in retaliation for the
>> assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jewish man).  It
>> is a reference to that icon of Victorian ingenuity, The Crystal Palace,
>> that was mostly destroyed by a 1936.

I see, and agree that this is the most widely promulgated interpretation
for the "fall of a crystal palace". But, how can you know that your
interpretation is the correct interpretation, to the exclusion of other
reasonable interpretations?  In a WWII context, interpreting this breaking
glass as an allusion to Kristallnacht ("The Night of Broken Glass,"
11/9/38) --  about which I posted some substantial background material
earlier n GRGR -- hardly qualifies as a daring critical move.

>>.. As for the "judgment from which there is no
>> appeal," I always took this to mean death, I see no overt Holocaust
>> reference here.

In itself it may be difficult to pin this metaphor down more precisely than
"death", although I think I could make a fair case that here TRP alludes
rather directly to the Biblical Final Judgment rather than to your more
abstract "death".  And it is, after all, what awaited the Jews and other
undesirables at the end of their Nazi-sponsored train rides.

>> The same with the "dark hotel," this could be almost
>> anything.

True, it could be "anything". In GR's context of direct and unmistakable
references to the Holocaust however, some interpretations might be
reasonably favored over others.  "Dark hotel" as an ironic -- savage, even
-- depiction of a concentration camp is not out of the realm of possibility
in the universe of TRP's dark vision and black humor. It might be
interesting to know with certainty what terminology the Nazis used to
describe their concentration camp facilities, if the inmates might have, in
some contexts, been referred to as "guests" and if the buildings in which
they slept might have been referred to using a term or terms that might
also apply to hotels, inns, hostels, etc. Or if the Nazis may have used
such terminology when they were lying to the Jews about the destinations of
the trains they were being forced to board.

>>The "Ss" is coincidental, IMHO, and does not refer to the
>> Schutsstaffeln, it is merely descriptive.

Well, if TRP wanted to insist on avoiding a reference to the SS, he would
have used an apostrophe -- S's -- don't you think?
"Finally, use the apostrophe when adding a grammatical ending to a number,
letter, sign, or abbreviation:  1920's; his 3's look like 8's; p's and q's;
he got four A's; too many of's and and's; she X'd each box; K.O.'d in the
first round."
--from _The Complete Stylist_, by Sheridan Baker, p. 165, published 1972

In the absence of clarification by the author himself (and I know some
P-listers wouldn't even accept that as worth anything!), your opinions
remain your opinions, no more or less valid than mine. I do suggest that in
a novel in which the author explictly makes the Holocaust such an important
element (which TRP does when he undeniably links Nazi slave labor to the A4
in Pokler's story), it's not completely beyond the pale to read some of
these other elements as I have done, in the novel's opening sequence and
again in the Frans van der Groov story. We'll have a chance to discuss this
more as we go along, as more of these Holocaust references appear.

I still don't understand what you gain by minimizing TRP's use of the
Holocaust in GR.  While you may arrive at a more general discussion of
"genocide" you lose much of the power the novel possesses as a specific
political statement, a statement that is set within a specific political
context (WWII) and which is published within yet another specific political
context (the war in Vietnam waged by the U.S. and its many allies). I don't
know of many authors of TRP's stature who, at the time TRP was writing and
publishing GR, were writing novels of GR's stature that made the case -- as
TRP does in GR -- that WWII was about "buying and selling" and not about
patriotism or self-defense, and that the particular actions of specific
individuals, corporations, and governments were in fact responsible for
initiating and prolonging WWII, and in doing so profited from such crimes
as the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews and other undesirables. Unlike the many
other American novelists who wrote about WWII in the 50s and 60s, TRP made
public specific facts about WWII, and the involvement of American companies
and individuals in WWII, that were not widely known in '73 -- facts that a
generation of historians who follow TRP have taken great pains to document
and explain so that, in 1999, much of what was relatively obscure and
arcane in 1973 finds much wider distribution and broader acceptance.

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