V.V. (12) Kurt's dream

[jbor]

      He was in a beer hall. Young, old, students, workmen, grandfathers
    adolescent girls, drank, sang, cried, fondled blindly after same and
    different-sexed alike. (244.9)

The debauchery in Kurt's dream, his memories of Fasching in Munich,
resonates with what is going on in Foppl's villa (also referred to as
Fasching by Foppl at 234.3 up). Of course, it was the early onset of the
Depression which had brought on this fatalistic decadence and orgy of
selfish consumption back in Germany:

      The season in Munich, under the Weimar Republic and the inflation, had
    followed since the war a constantly rising curve, taking human depravity
    as ordinate. (243.22)

("Why hoard, why ration?" asks the dream-narrator, while the Depression
stalks the streets like "some angel of Death".) The collapse of the Weimar
economy, crippled by war reparations and the conditions of the Treaty of
Versailles, seems to have spurred on this increasing amorality amongst the
German people ("young, old, students, workmen, grandfathers, adolescent
girls" alike) in Munich. In the same way, and despite Weissman's cryptic
hint to Mondaugen that Germany "might be getting" the Sudwest Protectorate
"back" from the League of Nations (243.5), Foppl's guests party endlessly
and in seeming obliviousness to the imminent threat of violent rebellion
from the massing natives. These are both, as David Morris suggested,
precursors of those death-oriented Casino and Anubis parties in _GR_ ("a
writhing perhaps of damned in some underworld" as the dream-narrator puts it
at 244.24).

Q. What is the relationship between the two Fasching? What is the
significance of their juxtaposition in the text? Is a connection being made
between this disintegration of morality in times of desperation and outright
despair, and the rise of political totalitarianism?

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