sketch: IG Farben, GR, and verisimilitude

[jolly]

"After Auschwitz, poetry is impossible." Adorno.   
 
          While some of us marvel at a Pynchon's  dazzling prose, narrative complexity, fragmented spectacles, fecundity, etc.. there is, I assert ( and this applies to much of "postmodernist" fiction ) a question about historical accuracy and verisimilitude raised by his novels, and most importantly by Gravity's Rainbow.  GR is viewed as a "canonical text of postmodenism," and there is a sort of cottage Pynchon industry for lit. types who  speculate endlessly over various textual quibbles or implications.   
         Yet however marvelous the GR spectacle presented by Pynchon is, is it equal to say detailed historical accounts of WWII, such as William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or Toland's The Last 45 Days?  (having to do mainly with Zhukov's Red Army's  advance across eastern Germany and the Battle of Berlin in 1945.)  I imagine that the literature professor says we should be cognizant of  the actual historical facts, and fiction that is related (parasitical upon) those historical events, but my assertion is that students and ordinary citizens know far more about the fictional (or cinematic) accounts of wars and other major historical events, and little about the events themselves, and that this is a major pedagogical error of colleges that grant literary studies the same importance as history and economics.   
         Do John or Jane McDoe, freshmen at Bovineberg College USA , look to a Pynchon to get their information about, say, the role IG Farben played in the creation of the Third Reich, or do they read the numerous non-fictional accounts? We no longer read about the real and sinister  IG Farben (and its connection to American companies), we read abstruse fictional meditations on power and paranoia; similarly, students do not learn much about the real horrors of WWI, instead they read A Farewell to Arms.  The historical record itself  takes precedence over any subsequent fictional representations.
 
 
The Farben cartel dated from 1925, when organizing genius Hermann Schmitz (with Wall Street financial assistance) created the super-giant chemical enterprise out of six already giant German chemical companies � Badische Anilin, Bayer, Agfa, Hoechst, Weiler-ter-Meer, and Griesheim-Elektron. These companies were merged to become Inter-nationale Gesellschaft Farbenindustrie A.G. � or I.G. Farben for short. Twenty years later the same Hermann Schmitz was put on trial at Nuremburg for war crimes committed by the I. G. cartel. Other I. G. Farben directors were placed on trial but the American affiliates of I. G. Farben and the American directors of I. G. itself were quietly forgotten; the truth was buried in the archives.

It is these U.S. connections in Wall Street that concern us. Without the capital supplied by Wall Street, there would have been no I. G. Farben in the first place and almost certainly no Adolf Hitler and World War II.

"[Tchitcherine's] connection with the legendary Wimpe, the head salesman for Ostarzneikunde GmbH, a subsidiary of the IG. Because it is common knowledge that IG representatives abroad are actually German spies, reporting back to an office in Berlin known as 'NW7,'" GR, 344
 
 
 
http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/chapter_02.htm

		
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