WWII in GR

[jbor]

jill:

snip
> I get the feeling that at this time the Nazis, many of
> whom in power knew of the camps, had grown so calloused and inattentive to
> human needs, ones like Franz, Blicero etc. that they had become good at
> ignoring their state of culpability, that not reacting to the horror of the
> camps became just a way to get through the day, easier not to care, we are
> going to loose anyway, grind down emotions and focus on science damn it.
> Look the other way if it bothers you kind of sickness.
snip

Yes, whether they were ignorant or unaware or, what, indoctrinated (?),
intimidated (?), self-deceiving (?) would seem to be the crux of the moral
dilemma Pynchon is posing with his characterisations of "Nazis" in *GR*.
(Blicero is the cynosure I guess, but there's Katje, Enzian, Gottfried,
Pokler, Achtfaden, Narrisch, Mondaugen, Thanatz, Margherita perhaps,
others?) But I think what is also being stressed is just how *human* these
characters are -- they have parents and upbringings and religions and
children and lovers and dreams and fears like the rest of us. We are privy
to their lives, their memories in the novel, and not those of others. A
conscious choice was made by the author. And, not even one of them is
totally unsympathetic (imo). Blicero seems to have resigned himself to the
end of the Reich in that early sequence (92 ff), where Katje and he play
their "Der Kinderofen" (94) game with Gottfried. But it is the folk tale of
Hansel, Gretel and the wicked witch which the two of them allude to -- and
it is their conscious or subconscious denial of the Holocaust going on about
them which Pynchon is pointing up with the ironic *absence* of the obvious
allusions at this point -- a denial of culpability, an ignorance borne of
self-centredness, solipsism.

Pokler's story poses the (imo) unanswerable question about the "guilt" of
those "Nazi" scientists like von Braun whose idealistic aspirations were
bent into service of the military-industrial complex -- the cartel in *GR*
is a burgeoning technocracy which extends way beyond ethnic and national
boundaries of course.

Leni's whispered words to Franz (415) from sometime in the early thirties
are a cosmological prophecy, a warning which he did not hear, or did not
listen to; at any rate it is certainly one which he did not heed:

   ... ("The new planet Pluto," she had whispered long ago, lying in the
   smelly dark, her long Asta Nielsen upper lip gibbous that night as the
   moon that ruled her, "Pluto is in my sign now, held tight in its claws.
   It moves slowly, so slowly, and so far away . . . but it will burst out.
   It is the grim phoenix which creates its own holocaust . . . *deliberate
   resurrection*. Staged. Under control. No grace, no interventions by God.
   Some are calling it the planet of National Socialism, Brunhubner and
   that crowd, all trying to suck up to Hitler now. They don't know they
   are telling the *literal truth* . . . Are you awake? Franz. . . .")

What could she sense, what is her power of oracle here? She is in the
"claws" of the phoenix, astrological Pluto (thanks Uncle Douglas): she
recognises her own fate. But is the last half of her monologue, even with
its disdain of fauning acolytes such as Brunhubner, also an acknowledgement
of a type of utopianism underpinning National Socialism itself? It isn't the
word "holocaust" which jumps out here, as mmg pointed out, it is that
italicised phrase which completes the sentence fragment: "deliberate
resurrection". I think there's quite a different, and deliberate, allusion
being conveyed in that phrase.

best


----------
>From: jill <grladams at teleport.com>
>To: "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: WWII in GR
>Date: Thu, Aug 10, 2000, 12:43 AM
>