SOS & Rilke

[jbor]

----------
>From: "Terrance Flaherty" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
>

> Well, the segregation or the "setting up utopias",  as I
> have already agreed, makes perfect sense, but I don't agree
> with your
>
> "Probably because it functioned efficiently."

OK, it was expressed as a conditional. I'm not sure that there is an overt
reason given in the text. What are you suggesting?

> It's a good summary and the probability is not unlikely but
> your summary here does not explain why the prisoners set up
> a phantom SS in the first place, why they experience
> liberation as banishment, why they are homesick for Dora?

The word "liberation" is put into quotation marks in the text. I think that
this is probably due to the fact that Paragraph 175 had been in place for
70-odd years, and was to remain in place for another quarter of a century:

> Paragraph 175 was the section of the German penal code that in 1871 forbade
> homosexual contact between men. The original law read, "An unnatural sex
> act between persons of male sex or by humans with animals is punishable by
> imprisonment; the loss of civil rights might also be imposed." It predated
> the Nazis and outlasted them, and was not stricken from the books until 1969.

(Thanks to Jeremy for posting the Salon article about and interview with the
filmmakers of the new movie:
http://www.salon.com/ent/col/srag/2000/09/07/paragraph_175/index.html
The info. there certainly seems to corroborate and confirm the accuracy of
Pynchon's historical setting and account.)

So, Pynchon foregrounds the irony of the term "liberation" -- and it *was*
the term used for the freeing of the Occupied Territories at the end of the
War -- in relation to these guys. (And, yes, there is probably an
anachronistic resonance with the "gay liberation" movement of the 70s.)

After their release the 175s set up a community. They had been interred
together as a group in Dora and for the first time in their lives probably
(or possibly -- I'm extrapolating again) experienced a sense of fellowship
and camaraderie with one another. Thus, it became a "home" (in a
metaphysical sense). Somewhere where they felt they belonged. Unlike the
wider German and international society in which they were decreed to be
outsiders *by law* anyway, in which they had never been "free", and wherein
they still weren't going to be "free" even after their release from
captivity. This is perhaps why they are "homesick" -- terrible terrible
irony of it -- for Dora.

As to why they set up a phantom SS command structure, well, efficiency?
familiarity? the comforts of routine? But as to why they idolise Weissmann
and use what they imagine as his authority as the model for their ideal
state, I think that that is self-evident in the text, and I have addressed
it in some detail.