Von Braun in Purgatory

[Dave Monroe]

First off, thanks for this bit ...

--- Richard Romeo <richardromeo at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Here is the full-text from Noble Savage, #2. pp.5-6.
> 1960:

Though I would note that here ...

> The logic here seems to sputter on its launching
> pad.  Just who was in purgatory when Mr. von Braun
> was devising his V-2 rockets?  Werner von Braun 
> or the people of London?  

... another question to ask is, and who was in Hell? 
In Dora, et al.?  That one step further ...

> Mr. 

That's "Professor Doktor Freiherr" to you ...

http://archiver.rootsweb.com/th/read/GEN-MEDIEVAL/1997-01/0853702761

And note the line at the bottom there, by the way ...

> von Braun suavely identifies the slaughtered victim
> with the executioner; this makes for bad symbolic
> drama and provides, from the mouth of an expert,
> another insult to the dead, who are perhaps
> accustomed to insult.  The living might take notice,
> however, of who is speaking for "the American
> frontier spirit...where people laugh and enjoy God's
> world more than anywhere else."

But Amen, here.  Shares the black irony of that
initial  Mr. von Braun epigraph to Gravity's Rainbow. 
Again, historical contexts (intra-, inter-,
extratextual, of textual content, their intertextual
relationships, and their contexts of publication) are
no more "absent" than, say, such (no less historically
contingent) contexts as plot, setting, chronology,
character, theme, style, genre, medium, authorship,
language, et al.  Which reminds me ...

> Rich

That indeed it is.  Thanks again ...

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