sketch: IG Farben, GR, and verisimilitude

[joeallonby]

But you haven't read the book yet.


on 10/19/04 1:58 PM, jolly at jollyrogerx99 at yahoo.com wrote:

"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




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