GRGR(5) Katje: in life

[rj]

Katje is a double-agent. Katje and the Nazis. Katje and the Resistance.
Either way, she brings death to both sides. Blicero knows it:

"So the Captain must allow for the real chance that she's a British spy,
or a member of the Dutch underground." (96.39) The Spitfire bombs fall
"among flats thought to be billeting rocket troops". Which are targets
Katje has alerted the British to.

Wim knows it:

"They were after SchuBstelle 3. She gave them everything else, but kept
finding reasons not to pinpoint the Captain's rocket site .... [S]he
could've been placed no closer to the decision-making: it was her own
expressionless servant's face that leaned in over their schnapps and
cigars ... " (105.8)

Regardless of whose side she's really on (I say neither, but "we are
never told") she operates effectively and efficiently for *both*. Right
here's the Holocaust, if you've eyes and ears to recognise it. Like Doug
sez. Neither vague nor problematic. The War Department:

"So, Jews are negotiable. Every bit as negotiable as cigarettes, cunt,
or Hershey Bars." (105.39)

Wim:

"Wim and the others have invested time and lives -- three Jewish
families sent east -- though wait now, she's more than balanced it,
hasn't she, in the months out at Scheveningen?" (105.15)

Blicero:

"Certainly her record with Mussert's people is flawless, she's credited
with smelling out three crypto-Jewish families ... " (97.9)

Isn't this what the Holocaust was: the systematic tracking down,
mustering, removal and subsequent annihilation of crypto-Jewish
families, brought about through the vigilance of just such "operatives",
or citizens, as Katje?

And, Katje *knows* what her information is being used for, by both the
British bombers and the Nazis. This is why she never reveals the
location of Blicero's rocket site or the "charmed house in the forest"
(97.35) to Wim and the Resistance; she knows the house and the site will
be bombed, death will result. Moreover, it is not because she cares
about her own life, nor Gottfried's, no, she *loves* Blicero. With all
her insight and mathematical smarts, her access to the Luftwaffe as a
Nazi party worker (97.11) / Resistance operative (105.15), the fact that
she is at the table with Wim and co and "could've been placed no closer
to the decision-making" -- she *must* know that the three Jewish
families that she "smelled out" have been condemned to the concentration
camp ovens. She must. This is why her denial or suppression of it in all
of her intellectual and interpretative flights in this section (playing
at Hansel, Gretel und Der Kinderofen!) -- and the total lack of
conscience this denial, and Katje's stonewall character in general,
indicate -- is so appalling, so despicable.

How does Katje escape? How does she get her elaborate message to Pirate
(71-2), that graphite cylinder in the rocket bomb (20)? Not Blicero, not
Wim, not Gottfried. But Gottfried, self-syled "passive observer" has
seen and heard:

" ... she's with the Underground, she's in love with a Stuka pilot she
met in Scheveningen. . . . But she must love Captain Blicero, too."
(102.27)

She's not just a double agent, she's triple or even quadruple. A true
'both/and' kind of girl. In fact, she's just an opportunist and totally
ambivalent, even regarding her own life. She expects Wim's bullet.
(104.35) She emphatically renounces the idea that someone in London owed
her a debt for services rendered. (108.7) The one chink in her armour
was her love for Blicero, the one slip-up she made was not giving away
his location. Other than that she shows no loyalties, no moral dimension
whatsoever.

Pynchon, on one level, is writing a traditional historical novel. In
fact, GR is a carefully-researched and accurate-to-the-minute historical
account of the War, or aspects thereof. The Holocaust is one of these
aspects. To see in Katje a guiltless and guileless victim is to be
duped, just as Blicero and Gottfried and Pirate and Pudding are. We,
like they, are fooled by appearances, appearances which Pynchon
consciously and painstakingly constructs and maintains: her beauty --
makeup, hair, clothes -- her good taste, her intellect, her mystique.
She is the movie star, the femme fatale; starring in a sanitised
Hollywood rendition of the war, all heroics and happy endings. Here is
Gottfried's version of Katje as phantasmal seductress, as Dietrich, as
Garbo:

"He dreams often these days of a very pale woman who wants him, who
never speaks -- but the absolute confidence in her eyes . . . his awful
certainty that she, a celebrity everyone recognizes on sight, knows him
and has no reason to speak to him beyond the beckoning that's in her
face ... " (103.30)

It is not Katje in life the reader is shown either, but Katje on film.
To be beguiled like Gottfried, to fall for this cinematic simulacrum, to
romanticise Katje in this way, is to deny her actual complicity in the
Holocaust, to deny the fact that individuals (citizens, operatives,
ordinary humans) like her willingly abetted the genocide of the Jews in
Nazi Europe, and, like she does and they did, it is an attempt to deny
-- sublimate -- the Holocaust itself, imho.

best