pynchon's germany between politics & culture

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

* and culture? the connection is not so clear here. yep, there's fucking wilhelm busch (does 
* this name pour, well, oil into your paranoia?!), whom we find in gr not only - max
* & moritz  - in the final "clearing" (757f) yet also on pp. 501 and 568: narrow 
* schadenfreude, german culture at its worst ...  this seems to correspond with
* the political motif pointed out below. in other cases the relations are 
* more complex. the beethoven/rossini debate (gr:440) for instance is - tea or coffee? - 
* obviously part of a larger constellation in pynchon's work which
* cannot be reduced to germany's political pathology. and then there's
* german culture which gives, along with the poison, also the remedy.
* take expressionistic film, radio cologne (> col 49) or rilke.
* this last one is especially interesting since pynchon suggests that the novel's dominating 
* duino elegies-reading, that of blicero, might be corrupted by deadly rocket-gnosticism,
* what implicitly hints at a different rilke-reading which then may heal modernity's
* spiritual poverty. "und wir, die an STEIGENDES glück/ denken, empfänden die rührung,/ die 
* uns beinah bestürzt,/ wenn ein glückliches FÄLLT."
 
* anybody awake to catch the mic? we're gonna go fishin' ~ KAIMERICA (the management)µ       


> in gr the political us/german cross-review contains also the american nuclear weapon 
> program which is present inside the novel in gestalt of several hiroshima refs (including 
> the kreplach parable); the book's final rocket is, significantly enough, a nuclear one (of
> soviet origin, no?), thus a child of both, peenemünde & los alamos ... peace! kai
 
  
lorentzen-nicklaus schrieb:
>> in that movie by the dubini brothers someone, probably christine wexler,
>> reported that trp, while writing "gravity's rainbow", liked to wear (original)
>> nazi clothing in public now and then which helped him to write
>> the book cause it enabled him to get real with the scandalous thesis 
>> that the vietnam war turned the usa into something similar like the third    
>> reich. "we were the new nazis and tom was writing down the story". if one asks what 
>> political germany means to pynchon - think of the herero genocide of 1904, of von braun, 
>> hilarious or karl bopp - the answer could be this: the german mirror shows america the 
>> dangers of modern totalitarism. racism inside the country, führerkult, aggressive 
>> nationalism, imperialistic warfare and genocide. here the usa, since ww2 definitely the
>> world's leading nation, are always endangered to lose their, well, balance. in pynchon's 
>> work this danger is metonymically expressed especially in two real world events: the 
>> naturalization of von braun and his team (later echoed in the character of karl bopp) and 
>> the genocide of 1904 which is, in my opinion, so important in v and gr because it allows
>> pynchon to connect germany's imperialistic history to the enslavement of africans [> m&d] 
>> america has made herself guilty of ~ kai