GRGR(5) Katje and the Nazis

[Bernier, Jeannie]

Doug ecrit:

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.


To which I must ask, respectfully, do you believe that this is ALL the novel
is about?
 
Jean