WWII in GR

[Dave Monroe]

... or go out and get the requisite knowledge, insofar as anyone's able to figure
out just what that might be.  Gravity's Rainbow is probably what got me into
so-called "serious," capital-L Lit'rachure in the first place, in no small part
because I was lucky enough to have a little previous knowledge to go on.  Am now
starting to realize just how much subsequent knowledge I pursued in its wake.
But, yeah, IG Farben, awful lot of that awful lot in GR, even  in collusion with
presumably "enemy" American concerns, as I recall (one of those strange-but-true
moments which abound in Pynchon), the leading edge of that mutinational corporate
late capitalism thing GR seems so concerned with ...

... and, while this book was a bit too late to have been a source for Pynchon,
I've nonetheless been waiting quite some time to get my hands on my own copy.  See
Peter Hayes, Industry and Ideology: IG Farben in the Nazi Era, being republished
by Cambridge University Press this fall (think it first came out ca. 1988).  I
suspect this might be being reprinted largely in response to the burgeoning
Pynchon industry.  In teh meantime, any other references?  one title seems to come
up in the critical apparatus often enough, though I don't recall ever getting
around to it ...

Paul Mackin wrote:

> for an association with "The Holocaust" in more than a general
> sense of Nazi inhumanity and atrociousness in its pursuit of the war the
> choice would probably be IG Farben because of its use of Auschwitz inmates
> for slave labor and drug experiments and most specifically for production
> of the gas used in the gas chambers. The connections are mostly implied is
> the only thing. We have to bring our previous knowledge to the situation.
>
>                         P.
>
> >
> > Paul Mackin wrote:
> >
> > > When people talk about whether GR makes appreciable reference to "The
> > > Holocaust" what precisely or even loosely is meant by the term. Because
> > > "The Holocaust" can have narrow or more extended meanings. Probably not
> > > everyone in the discussion is using the word in the same way. So, for
> > > purposes of this ongoing controversy, is "The Holocaust" to be narrowly
> > > defined as the Nazi project to exterminate European Jews, or does it
> > > extend to the elimination of other undesired groups as well such a
> > > communists and socialist and homosexuals and gypsies, or does it extend
> > > still further to Nazi crimes against humanity in general, including the
> > > working-to-death of prisoners of all varieties in pursuit of winning the
> > > war?
> > >
> > >                 P.
> >