Rainbow-files: WvB in "Mother Night"

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

 It's a cold and sunny day, I hope everybody is fine! So here we go:  "Kraft, the Russian Master Spy, was reading a copy of LIFE that had a portrait of Wern[h]er von Braun on the cover (...) There in Jones' basement, Kraft showedme the picture of von Braun on the cover of LIFE, asked me if I knew him./ 'Von Braun?'I said. 'The Thomas Jefferson of the Space Age? Sure. The Baron danced withmy wife once at a birthday party in Hamburg for General Walter Dornberger'./'Good dancer?' said Kraft./ 'Sort of Mickey Mouse dancing --- ' I said, 'the way all the big Nazis danced, if they had to dance'./ 'You think he'd rerecognize younow?' said Kraft./ 'I know he would', I said. 'I ran into him on Fifty-second street abouta month ago, and he called me by name. He was very shocked to see me in such reduced circumstances. He said he knew a lot of people in the public relation business,and he offered to talk to them about giving me a job'. /'You'd be good at public relations', said Kraft./ 'I certainly don't have any powerful convictions to get in the way of a client's message', I said."   --- Kurt Vonnegut: Mother Night [1961], chapter 37 ---  Fucking great Book! I finished it last night. The main character, Howard W. Campbell,did --- those into Vonnegut I don't have to tell (Hi James!) --- later have a short
re-appearance in the famous "Slaughterhouse-Five" [1969]. In my Triad Grafton 
edition from 1987 it's pp. 88-90. While von Braun is certainly a mirroring reflector-figure
for Campbell, I think that there's another non-fictional person that might be pretty 
relevant here. The passage in "Mother Night" (end of chapter 31) which gave me the 
hint is the following: "'You didn't ask who the third one was', he said./ 'Would it be
anybody I'd ever heard of?' I said./ 'Yes', he said. He's dead now, I'm sorry to say.
You used to attack him regularly in your broadcasts'./ 'Oh?' I said./ 'The man you 
called Franklin Delano Rosenfeld', said Wirtanen. 'He used to listen to you gleefully
every night'." And this made me think of Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl ... 
 
If you don't know the guy, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Hanfstaengl There's much more in the internet about that peculiar Hanfstaengl/Roosevelt/Hitler 
thing. Not all of it makes a trustworthy impression, though. So what do you think? Kai PS: Did you know that Hanfstaengl ("Hanfstängel") is --- Cough! Cough! --- German for hemp-stem? PPS: "One by one, as other voices joined in, the names began --- some shouted, someaccompanied by spit, the old reliable names good for hours of contention, stomach distress,and insomnia --- Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger,that collection of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not constellated above in any nightwide remotenesses of light, but below, diminished to the last unfaceable Americansecret, to be pressed, each time deeper, again and again beneath the meanest of randomsoles, one blackly fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over,because of all that lived, VIRULENT [my emphasis.kfl], waiting, just beneath."  --- Thomas Pynchon: Vineland. pp. 371f. ---    
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