1945

[jbor]

----------
>From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
>

> The Pflaumbaum episode in _GR_ is one I've looked at quite closely. The
> first part is narrated from Leni Pokler's pov. There the factory owner is
> resentfully described as a "Jewish wolf" and a "sneaking hypocrite", because
> he set fire to his paint factory "for the insurance" and thus Frans lost his
> job and eventually became involved with the Wandervogel idiocy and Leni's
> happily bourgeois family life got all screwed up because of it.

I might have telegraphed my point a little here. This brief episode with
Leni blaming Pflaumbaum for all her woes presents another angle on what was
happening in the 20s and 30s, another *perspective* on the rise of Nazism
and that hellish spiral to WWII. Alluded to here is the rise of widespread
resentment towards the Jewish within the German population at large: in the
midst of the Depression, which had hit Germany hardest of all and how the --
often Jewish -- entrepreneurs and financiers and shopkeepers and merchants
were perceived to be profiting at the expense of the -- largely Gentile --
general public, the workers and primary producers and manufacturers etc.
Perspectivism.

best



~~~
    "By 1945, the factory system - which, more than
     any piece of machinery, was the real and major
     result of the Industrial Revolution - had been
     extended to include the Manhattan Project, the
     German long-range rocket program and the death
     camps, such as Auschwitz.It has taken no major
     gift of prophecy to see how these three curves
      of development might plausibly converge, and
                before too long. ... "
                                 (T. Pynchon, 1984)
                                                    ~~~