The continuum, The postal system, the betrayal of the fatherland, the System's beginnings?

[Mark Kohut]

Thomas Pynchon wrote: "The net effect was
eventually to build up in my uncritical brain a peculiar shadowy vision of
the history preceding THE TWO world wars. Political decision-making and
official documents did not figure in this nearly as much as lurking, spying,
false identities, psychological games." [emphasis mine. MD]

Monte Davis wrote: "Pynchon's age and childhood reading place him perfectly to see it as a
continuum. To us, Vienna as a world capital, Uskoks, fancy-dress hussars,
Tsars and Habsburgs may have a musty comic-opera flavor... but from a
Pynchonian height (depth?), to coin a phrase, "the past isn't dead. It isn't
even past.""

>From that fascinating Wikipedia article on Colonel Redl we learn that he was a traitor who may have been responsible for
over 500,000 deaths.  He was 'conscriped" with blackmail over revealing his homosexuality. [Pretty relevant for Pynchon's
Cyprian and Theign encounters, it seems] But he embraced spying fully.

After stepping down from his official Intelligence post, his successor instituted checking mail as part of the Intelligence 
work.  Redl was 'exposed' when he was caught using the mail for counter-intelligence. He killed himself
with a shotgun and Franz Josef felt bad for his soul. Then we have this: 

"In the end it may have come down to the nature of the Austrian state itself, an anachronistic idea, rather than a fatherland. In the political post-mortem one Hungarian newspaper noted that "the Redl affair cannot be seen as a private matter. Redl is not an individual but a system. Whilst soldiers elsewhere are taught to love their homelands, lack of patriotism is held to be the greatest military virtue in this unfortunate monarchy. With us military education culminates in all national feeling being driven out of our soldiers... In the Redl affair this spirit has had its revenge. The Austrian and the Hungarian soldiers possess no fatherland; they only have a war lord."
 
Remember Pynchon's words on the Deep Germany?....The dark forest before it was the Empire?.....perhaps 'the fatherland', rightly understood?
Again, the peoples of that land before ..............................that starts being betrayed?

Redl is a "system"....the start of "Them" in GR?......the beginning of the "continuum' that goes through GR?


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