Re: Eisfelds book "Mondsüchtig" (was German book mentions GR)

[Hubert Mania]

In his book „Mondsüchtig“ Eisfeld describes how von Braun and his
researchers were inevitably and deeply entangled in the Nazi system and
accepted the concentration camp terror ("Vernichtung durch Arbeit" i.e.
extermination through labour) of the Mittelbau-Dora, where the V2 was
produced, after the Peenemünde facilities got destroyed by allied bombs.

If you were a celebrity of the scientific community in Hitler`s Germany it
wasn`t possible *not* to get involved with the crimes of the national
socialists, but Wernher von Braun and his biographers continued to suggest
that rocket research in Peenemünde was one thing and being a Nazi was
another. "We have opened the path to the stars" was the post-war motto of
the German old boys rocket club, when they were hired by the U.S. government
to produce missiles and later built the Saturn V which fired Neil Armstrong
et al. to the moon.

But this is of course only half the truth. The author accuses von Braun of
having suppressed the deadly consequences of his work. It was his inability
to feel sorrow for the victims of the V2 in London and Antwerp and
especially for the war slaves in Peenemünde and Dora who died from the
incredibly tough working conditions. This suppression along with the
inability to feel guilt and sorrow was of course a national  phenomenon, a
nationwide mental illness in postwar Germany.

Having no real life person at hand who is able to admit his guilt, Eisfeld
cites Thomas Pynchon and his GR-character Franz Pökler. He descibes the
rocket engineer as the only character in GR who is willing and able to learn
and to act in a human way while being personally confronted with the horror
of the Dora concentration camp. Eisfeld cites two passages from GR, where
Pökler takes his ring from his finger and gives it to a Dora slave woman, so
she might buy herself a meal, a blanket, a sleeping place or a ride home and
hopes she might survive.This is the only passage in the book, where GR is
mentioned, two pages at the very end of a research work about the guilt of
the V2 engineers.

By the way, the title of the book was translated correctly by Doug Millisons
friend, but I think Rainer Eisfeld actually understood „moon addict“ in a
more ambivalent sense, as a somnambulistic sleepwalker who is too blind to
realize his guilt and suppresses it by dreaming to fly to the moon.

Cheers
Hubert Mania