how to calumniate a foreigner (was: gib nazis keine chance! (was: FIY N...

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

Hello, members of the Pynchon-L.,

my name is Kurt-Werner Poertner, and as a German with this good old German 
name I followed the discussion in this list with rising interest. I'm 
subscribed since - let's say four weeks, but I have got the impression that 
it's necessary to intervene in some way.

First, apologize for the mistakes I make in English language. My English is 
traditional school English which I learnt nine years on a "gymnasium", and 
which is not the best way to learn English or any language at all.

First I have to make a remark to Kai Lorentzen: for me your way of argueing 
is not clear. I can only ask "where's the beef?". Ich unterstelle Ihnen 
nicht, dass Sie den Holocaust rechtfertigen, aber ich frage mich: worauf 
wollen Sie hinaus? defending the esoteric scene with Adorno or what? Das ist 
wirres Zeug. Bullshit.

Talking about Nazi ideology I know what you are speaking about. My father, 
who died in 1995, was member of the so called Waffen-SS (which is not the 
same as the SS) and he was something that I called a "pacifist nazi". In his 
life-time he was a living paradox, personally he was a friendly and sympathic 
guy, but in his political opinions we had a lot of hard discussions. A 
typical dialague between us took place like such: "It was not in order to 
kill six million jews". - "It was only one million, I suppose." - "It was not 
right to kill one jew". - "You are right, you are right, it was a mistake to 
kill the jews..." A mistake. Shame or guilt? He didn't know these words. He 
was proud to be participated in world history as a young man, as a half child.

You talked about Hitlerjugend and Boy Scouts and so on. My father was such a 
German child soldier in WW two. He was born in August 1926, when Hitler came 
on power, he was six years old. His whole childhoold and youth he was 
influenced by the Nazi Ideology. In 1943 he became part of the Waffen-SS. He 
was a "volunteer". All boys under 1, 80 m came to the Wehrmacht, which were 
the "regulary" German troops; my father was 1,83 m, so he came to the 
"special forces" of the Waffen-SS und became a member of the master-race. He 
was skilled in Prague und in the near of Bremen, and the first battle he was 
involved in was the Normandy invasion. He was not a good soldier, he was more 
a "Schweijk" than a good fighter and used his weapon two times: he shot an 
old dog in France because the french owner of the dog wanted it, the second 
time he came under fire by an American plane and he shot back. That's it. 
More soldiers like him, and the Germans would have lost the war much earlier.

At May, 8th, 1945, he was captured by American troops in the near of Vienna, 
Austria. As a POW, he was forced to dig mass graves in the Austrian 
concentration camp Mauthausen. His commentary to the impressions he got 
there: "The Americans feeded the poor people (he meant the survivors of that 
KZ) with fat food, and a lot of them died from that." The impressions 
of a child soldier, again. Shame and guilt? What's that?

After the war he organized so called "Kameradschaftstreffen" (comrades 
meetings) and became a member of the HIAG, "Hilfsgemeinschaft ehemaliger 
Angehöriger der Waffen-SS", the lobby organization of the "old comrades". The 
magazine of the HIAG was called "Der Freiwillige". "The Volunteer" (you 
remember: over 1,80 m). They called themselves "soldiers as everyone else" 
(Soldaten wie andere auch). As a teenager I was very angry about these 
things, and our "discussions" were about these meetings und his membership in 
the HIAG, not about his "heroic" times as a soldier. On the other hand, he 
didn't oppress me, and he took me for serious although I was only 15 or 16 
years old. To make it not too long as a first statement: the German terrorism 
in the seventies and the eighties can not be explained without that things. 
The RAF, Baader-Meinhof, the "Red Army Fraction" has the same initials
as the "Royal Air Force", and there was an intention behind this name.

Kai Lorentzen spoke about Theweileit "male fantasies" (Männerfantasien). This 
book was published by Stroemfeld/Roter Stern in Frankfurt. In the early 
seventies, there worked a woman called Brigitte Kuhlmann in this publishing 
house. In 1976, she was shoot in Entebbe by special forces of the Israelian 
troops. She went in the underground, became member of the "Revoutionary 
Cells" (Revolutionäre Zellen) in Frankfurt, was skilled in a Palestine 
refugee camp in Jordan, and hijacked an El-Al-plane to Entebbe where she 
selected the jewish passengers. But that's another story.

Greetings, Kurt-Werner Pörtner, Rüdesheim am Rhein ("Drosselgasse").