Pokler is captivated by Alpdrucken and female sexual submission

[Richard Fiero]

Jane Sweet O' Flaherty wrote:
  . . .
>Pokler is captivated by Alpdrucken and female sexual
>submission, so it's difficult to read him as victim, but not
>as Hard to feel for him as for Marvy, especially if you
>happen to be a Modern profane feminist girls like me with
>all parts in working order.
. . .
Hell, I'll take Marvy any day in preference to Pokler the 
spineless, dickless, passive-aggressive sonofabitch. Pokler can 
only get a hardon through his eyes.
" . . . yes, bitch--yes, little bitch . . . Thus Pokler's whole 
front surface, eyes to knees: flooded with tonight's image of 
the delicious victim . . ."
Sounds like sado-narcissism to me with Pokler assuming which 
position? Is he identifying with the torturer or the 
taut-nippled victim? Apparently Ilse is conceived in Leni shortly thereafter.
"A policeman aimed a blow at him, but Pokler dodged, and it hit 
an old man instead, some bearded old unreconstructed geezer of 
a Trotskyite . . ."

Leni reads Pokler right:
"They're using you to kill people . . ."
Pokler responds "We'll all use it someday [the rocket], to 
leave the earth. To transcend."
She laughed. "Transcend," from Pokler? [The quotemarks in the 
text leave this especially ambiguous.]
"Shit", said Leni. "They're all in on it together."

" . . . he'd become Weissmann's best ally. The major's eyes 
alway changed when he looked at Pokler: his slightly prissy 
face to relax into what Pokler had noticed, in random mirrors 
and display windows, on his own face when he was with Leni. The 
blank look of one who is taking another for granted."
Pokler is a sack of shit without Leni. He does not exist except 
via his imaginary exalted position.
Leni leaves.
"He cried every day, some hour of the day, for a month, till a 
sinus got infected."
Later,
"'What about the hot spots?' Weissmann asked. It was a 
reasonable question, but also an intimacy." Again, "You'll be 
injecting it." [Ha ha ha.]

It's all fairly obvious about the visits from Ilse who he'd 
given over to the state system.

Finally in this section " . . . he took off his gold wedding 
ring and put it on the woman's thin finger . . ." The marriage 
had died long ago. He killed it along with his offspring.

Indeed,
>Pokler is captivated by Alpdrucken and female sexual submission

Right. His own.