Hopeless Holocaust

[Blake Stacey]

Quoting Mark Wright AIA <mwaia at yahoo.com>:

> Howdy all,
> I think (FWIW) that Pynchon intended to foster complex non-standard
> moral judgements in his readers. Few subjects trigger more
> straightforward, and more broadly shared, moral conclusions as the
> Holocaust. Auschwitz is absolute, and trumps — always. IMO it was a
> sound artistic choice for P to treat the Holocaust by reference,
> inflection, infusion, and indirection. The Holocaust is there in the
> story and the text, but it is treated in a way that illuminates the
> moral complexities of our civilization for an informed adult reader.
>

I like this observation.  Avoiding a direct reference lets Pynchon sidestep
Godwin's Law.

> Fewer and fewer of us share the basic data about the military and about
> WWII that was common in the 1960's and early '70s, which is one reason
> why Weisenburger is so helpful. We are not "informed" in quite the same
> way that P could count upon in 1973. Cervantes, muttering up there in
> the chilly pantheon, also curses our ignorance.
>

Remember Frieda Maloney in **The Boys from Brazil**?  "You want your pound of
flesh, and you don't care how you get it.  Thirty years -- the world has
forgotten!  Yet you persist, and persist -- why don't you get off my back!"

To which Lieberman (Laurence Olivier) replies, "You are not a guard 
now, madam. You are a prisoner.  I may leave here empty-handed, but you 
are not going
anywhere."

> other issue:
> I can't find the reference, alas, but I believe that the V-2 engine
> fired for about 30 seconds. (I used to know these things...)
>

I was flying Lufthansa the other day, and the captain came on the PA to 
give his
"we will be crusing at 35,000 feet" spiel.  He did it in both English and
German; I could swear that he said "Brenschluss" for "cruising altitude".  My
German  is nowhere near as good as my French, so I may have mis-heard 
entirely,
but it kept me amused for a good long while.

Blake