GRGR(5) Katje and the Nazis

[Doug Millison]

Whatever else she may do or be, Katje is in business, she's a trader, like
her Dutch ancestors:  "But to Katje, a debt is for wiping out. Her old,
intractable vice -- she wants to cross seas, to connect countries between
whom there is no possible rate of exchange." (108.7)

Connecting which countries?  Nazi Germany and England? The Allies and the
Axis powers? What about the notion expressed here that there is "no
possible rate of exchange" between them?

Earlier in this episode, TRP has interrupted the poetry to inject some
politics:  "The true war is a celebration of markets. Organic markets,
carefully styled "black" by the professionals, spring up everywhere. Scrip,
Sterling, Reichsmarks continue to move, severe as classical ballet, inside
their antiseptic marble chambers. But out here, down here among the people,
the truer currencies come into being." (105)  GR will go on to reveal how
deep the exchanges go between these apparent enemies.

TRP doesn't tell us a lot about Katje's motivations here, but he paints a
scary picture of  her groovy ancestor, Frans; this juxtaposition of Frans
and Katje invites a comparison.

Given GR's many allusions and direct references to the Holocaust, it seems
safe to read Frans and his dodo killing as an allegory for the Nazi
Holocaust; doing so lets us hear echoes of the twisted reasoning that lay
behind the demonic vision of the Jews that has prevailed in certain
Christian circles since the time of Jesus' execution by the Romans:  "Was
Mauritius some first poison trickle through the sheltering dikes of Earth?
Christians must stem it here, or perish in a second Flood, loosed this time
not by God but by the Enemy. The act of ramming home the charges into their
musketry became for these men a devotional act, one whose symbolism they
understood." (110)  "Golden swine" and "pigs of gold" (108) play with two
deep-seated stereotypes of the Jews. In a neat reversal, it's the "Dutch
pigs" who take "care of the eggs and younger birds," a sentence that
reminds me -- stretching a bit here, perhaps, but what the heck --  of the
Nazi collaborators who betrayed the young Anne Frank in her hidden
Amsterdam nest. "This furious host were losers, impersonating a race chosen
by God" (110) -- after inverting the tradition of Jews as the "chosen race"
and showing how the genocidal killers viewed themselves in that role, TRP
poses the question that arises from the kind of twisted beliefs that
support such an enterprise:  "But if they were chosen to come to Mauritius,
why had they also been chosen to fail, and leave? Is that a choosing, or is
it a passing-over?  Are they Elect, or are they Preterite, and doomed as
dodoes?" (110) The questions seems as hopelessly muddled as the logic
beneath them -- "passing-over"  makes a direct reference to Passover, which
in the Old Testament is a clear and unmistakable sign that God has chosen
the Jews, being passed over is the sign that they are chosen.

Above all double-agent Katje serves the cause of Nazi genocide ("she's
credited with smelling out at least three crypto-Jewish families" p. 97).
But she does this with the apparent complicity of the Dutch underground
resistance ("Wim and the others have invested time and lives -- three
Jewish families sent east" p. 105), and, by extension, with the complicity
of the masters she serves in England. So, Katje like Frans is just a pawn
in the larger game, although it is not completely clear that she is merely
one of  the "non-professionals":  "The murdering and the violence are
self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals." (105) Her
connections seem to go high:  Pirate's "begun to suspect, darkly, any
number of Someones Over Here." (108)

How far to take the comparison with Frans? Can we say that Katje serves a
cause as sweeping and as mind-bending as that which motivates Frans' vision
of the Conversion of the Dodoes? If so, what would that cause be? TRP's
savage parody of Christianity would seem to answer. What do Hitler and his
Nazi conquerers amount to if not a savage parody of Christianity in the
service of occult fears (Jews/dodoes as poison infiltrating an otherwise
perfect Creation), imperialism, and capital.  Who does Katje serve?  Follow
the money:  what feeds the Nazi ovens also serves the War's "real business
[...] buying and selling" (105).

What hooks Frans and Katje into their grim enterprise isn't so simple.  In
addition to  religious imperatives, Frans is in the grip of dizzying
economic and psychological forces:  "all the island his tulipomania".  He
comes near a moment of clarity, a chance to understand the link between
himself and his victims, when he chooses not to "destroy the infant, egg of
light into egg of darkness" (109), but soon he's back with his drunken
Dutch buddies, out on a lark like old Vroom and his pals in their bordello;
well, perhaps not quite -- the bordello implies that they've been able to
channel their impulses in a way that Frans and his fellows haven't been
able to do, "caught in the spectrum between, trapped among  frequencies of
their own voices and words." (110)

Does Katje ever get close to such a moment of clarity, or otherwise feel
anything as certainly as Frans feels:  "But as for faith . . . he can
believe only in the one steel reality of the firearm he carries." (111)
Or, in her acts of betrayal, is Katje more like the Frenesi, who feels that
in "connecting", acting as the medium of information exchange between Brock
Vond and Weed Atman she somehow transcends the whole dirty business and can
leave the gun in Rex's hands?

Katje in the viewfinder and Frenesi behind the camera -- that's another
story. Better to end this ramble here.



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